Much Thanks

I'm fortunate this year that life has slowed down enough for me to give serious thought to what I'm thankful for:

- A house that's filled with laughter.

- At 38, I still have the same job I dreamed about since I was seven.

- An amazing wife who knows all too well that this dream job isn't always convenient, yet supports me nonetheless.

- Therapists and educators who are collaborating, cooperating, and doing everything they can to help my son lead as typical a life as possible.

- The excited cheers that greet me when I get home after a long day.

- The chance to live part of my life in a place as sublimely beautiful as the Pacific Northwest.

- Parents and a sister whose love and influence are always with me, even when they're not.

- Living in an incredible time when everything seems possible and old friends are only a click away.

- The opportunity and privilege to serve this great country of ours.

Story Telling Made Simple

The five words that can strike fear in any father’s heart at bedtime: “Daddy, tell me a story.” At the end of a long and stressful day, coming up with an original story that will captivate your child seems unbelievably challenging.  But you don’t have to be a playwright to create an entertaining story.  Here a few simple tips:

Start with the end in mind.  The great thing about making up a story is that you get to choose the moral to impart, so think of this first.  Once you come up with a simple lesson like “Be yourself” or “Don’t give up”, the plot will write itself.  Fill the story with memorable characters (silly names, funny voices) and put them in a situation that will eventually teach them the moral you chose.

Be derivative.  Your child will not check your sources or call the intellectual property police.  In fact, they will gain comfort from familiar story lines.  Draw morals and plots from stories you know, like “The Little Engine That Could”,  “The Ant and the Grasshopper”, or in my daughter’s case, “Return of the Jedi”. 

Remember the rule of threes.   Children and adults alike are drawn to ideas and stories that come in groups of threes.  Have your main character attempt something three times, or meet three different characters that help solve their problem. 

Foster creativity.  Encourage your child to participate by letting them fill in details like the names of the characters or where the story takes place.  As they get older, gradually have them provide more and more of the storyline.

Introduce new concepts.  Use story time as an opportunity to teach your children about geography, history, science, or languages.  Set your tale in a foreign country or a different century.  Make your story about an airplane that’s lost its lift.  Have a character speak a few simple words in French or Japanese.

With last night’s story, I found myself using all of these tips.  I started with the simple moral: “It’s good to try new foods”.  Spying my daughter’s pillow pet, I created a tale about a purple unicorn who lived in France.  “Purple” (my daughter chose the name) only liked to eat dandelions, despite her three friends, in turn, offering her carrots, potatoes, and truffles.   But soon she ate all the dandelions in her pasture, and all the dandelions in the surrounding pastures.  She looked and looked for more dandelions, but there were none.  So she tried the carrots, and at first she didn’t like them because they weren’t anything like her favorite dandelions.  But soon she thought they were quite tasty, and then she quickly tried potatoes and truffles, and loved them too.   Her three friends were so happy that they could share their favorite foods with her.

Nothing complicated, but it kept her attention and kept her involved as she suggested plot points and asked questions like “what’s a truffle?” 

Remember, the day will all too quickly arrive when your child feels too old for being tucked in and told bedtime stories.  But in this small window of time, you will create a lifetime of cherished memories.  Even into adulthood, your children will draw comfort from the memory of this shared bedtime ritual.

Coping with the Chaos

            In a previous post, I wrote about my neglect in reading parenting books.  Since then, I have atoned, but my reading list has become rather focused as I plow through titles such as Children with High Functioning Autism: A Parent's Guide, The Autism Sourcebook and Following Ezra: What One Father Learned About Gumby, Otters, Autism and Love From His Extraordinary Son.

Eight months ago, our son turned three.  The warning signs were disparate and insidious.  Many behaviors were perfectly typical for a boy that age:  repetitive activity, lining up toys, slower than his sister in learning to talk, fascinated more with objects than people, not acknowledging when we called his name. These characteristics were combined with glimpses of incredible brilliance: memorizing the alphabet, quickly solving puzzles, doing basic math, and reading words he had never seen before. 

His atypical behavior came into stark relief, however, when we put him in school.  He isolated himself from peers by hiding under desks and chairs. His seemingly willful disobedience was something far worse: he was oblivious to what his parents and teachers wanted him to do.  Crowds and loud noises quickly over stimulated him.  We realized that his repetitive behaviors and obsession with numbers and letters were a way to seek refuge from chaos.  And so our research began.  Books, articles, and discussions with friends gave credence to our suspicions.  The more we learned, the more we recognized other signs that we had shrugged off as “quirkiness”.

But we have also noticed behaviors that are simply who he is: his tremendous empathy when one of his siblings cries, his affectionate bear hugs, and his skill in navigating the Ipad.   As frustrating as he can be sometimes, his atypical personality and thought processes will be significant assets to him, and I would not want my son to be anyone else.  Our job as parents is to help him alleviate his current frustrations and anxiety by learning to communicate effectively and to cope with the chaos comes with being part of society.

I am grateful for many things:  our son got an early diagnosis, he is making great progress through various therapies, and he has a mother who has demonstrated unflagging optimism, patience and resolve in the face of this challenge.  My wife, by expertly achieving the precious balance of accepting our son for who he is and yet tackling his autism head-on, has taught me a great deal about parenting, love, and leadership.

The Movie with a Thousand Questions

It started innocently enough.  I introduced my five-year-old daughter to Star Wars Legos on the Wii.  I figured that it would be a fun activity we could share, and for a video game, it actually does a good job of promoting teamwork and problem solving.  She loved it, and by the third level, she wanted to watch the movies.   I initially hesitated; the violence of the movies is far more intense than seeing Lego characters disassemble when hit with a light saber.  I relented, however, once I remembered that when I was her age, I saw “Empire Strikes Back” in the theater, and suffered no ill effects.

Now we have a problem.  It’s not that “laser”, “shoot” and “kill” have been introduced to her vocabulary, although my wife is less than thrilled about that.  The problem is that I’ve created a monster: she has become obsessed with Star Wars. I can’t go five minutes without being asked a Star Wars question:  “Daddy, what color light saber does Ben Kenobi use?    If Yoda taught everyone else to be a Jedi, who taught him?  Why did Princess Leia call Han Solo a nerf herder?  What’s a nerf herder?”  She wants to watch the movies over and over again.  She wants to watch all the bonus behind-the-scenes documentaries.  Today at the zoo I heard her humming “The Imperial March” to herself.

I am finding numerous benefits to this pre-occupation with Star Wars, however.  You have to know my daughter to truly appreciate the situation.  She is not a tomboy by any stretch of the imagination.  She loves the color pink, wearing nail polish, and anything that has to do with Disney Princesses.   So I like that her fascination with Princess Leia and Queen Amidala, strong female characters that stand up for themselves and make their own decisions, provide a counterbalance to Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.  Tonight she wanted to know why there weren’t more female Jedi Knights in the movies.*

Besides adding a new dimension to our father-daughter bond, Star Wars provides an avenue for rather important conversations.  When she asks how the Emperor could be bad when he seemed so nice in the first two episodes, I’m able to work in a discussion about avoiding strangers, no matter how friendly they might seem at first.  Darth Vader saving Luke Skywalker at the end of “Return of the Jedi” led to a talk about how bad people can realize their mistakes and try to be good again.  Not everyday you can have a conversation with your five-year-old about redemption, but if she can grasp that concept, then forgiving her little brothers will be that much easier as she gets older.

The obsession goes beyond the characters and the story.  Half of her questions are about how the movies are made from a technical standpoint.  “In that scene, is R2-D2 played by a little person or a robot? How do they make Jabba the Hut move?”  You can imagine how excited she got when I told her that Yoda’s puppeteer also did Grover from Sesame Street.  Last week a question about Queen Amidala led me once again to Wikipedia for the answer, and the article showed how her costumes were based on a picture of a 19^th century Mongolian princess.   She asked about the picture, and I attempted to explain “inspiration” and “influence”.  She interjected, “Like how George Lucas saw that Japanese movie?”  I was floored.  She was referring to a brief clip of Kurosawa’s “Hidden Fortress” she saw during a documentary on the creation of Star Wars. 

 I know that all too soon she will outgrow this fascination with Star Wars.  My hope is that it will grow into a larger interest in mythology, religion, politics, storytelling, and the human condition.  If she enjoys discussing and dissecting the complicated web of characters, relationships and backstories that George Lucas has created, perhaps doing the same with the works of Homer, Shakespeare and Dickens will be just as interesting for her.    

---

* If you have a similarly obsessed child whose questions go far beyond your circa 1983 knowledge of the Star Wars universe, I have found this website helpful: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

The Home Team

When I was six years old, my father worked with a man from Texas.  His son had outgrown his Dallas Cowboys jacket, and it was given to me in a pile of other hand-me-downs. Since we were a Navy family, we moved every few years.   I never lived in Dallas, or any other football town, so choosing a team to root for was an abstract exercise for me. *   I loved the jacket with its blue corduroy and white lettering, and so it only made sense that I would love the team as well.

How it must have frustrated my father, born and raised in Philadelphia, that his only son would not merely refuse to cheer for his beloved Eagles, but would actually root for their division rivals instead.   He had grown up following Philadelphia sports with his own father.  As an adult, living on the opposite coast, it probably would have meant a great deal to him for me to sit next to him on Sundays and cheer for his hometown team. Though he would tease me about liking the “Cowgirls” and shake his head whenever I pretended to be Danny White or Tony Dorsett, he never pushed the issue.

I am grateful that he gave me that space.  Rooting for the Cowboys was one of the few iconoclastic acts I performed as a child.  In almost every other measure, I was a dutiful son and a conformist.  I obeyed the rules and got good grades.  Each time we moved to a new town, I would have to figure out how to fit in with a new group of kids at an unfamiliar school. Although my parents brought their Philadelphia culture, background and experience with them wherever we moved, they knew that my sister and I had no hometown that might form part of our own identities.  Instead, we were becoming a product of the experiences we were gathering in varied parts of the country.

Today my five-year-old daughter informed that she would be cheering for the Giants tonight, not the Cowboys.  This is not her first act of rebellion:  two months ago I took her to see the Duke-Miami football game and she rooted for Miami “since that’s where we live now.”   Of all people, I cannot fault her for this (especially since in both cases she picked the winning team). Instead, I feign overly dramatic sadness and tell her she is breaking my heart.  She laughs, recognizing that I am kidding.   While I would love for her to sit next to me and cheer for my beloved Cowboys and Blue Devils, I am much happier that she is finding her own ways to express herself and explore her own identity.

And there is still plenty of time for her father to someday end to his itinerant lifestyle and find a town we can all call home.   Hopefully it will also have a football team we can all root for, as long as it’s not the Washington Redskins.

---

*  We did live in Los Angeles while the Rams and Raiders played there, but I would never consider LA a "football town."

Time Away

I have been on TDY (temporary duty) this week, attending a training course in Tampa.  It’s the equivalent of a business trip in the civilian world.  Although I would much rather be on a weeklong trip staying in a hotel room than a months-long deployment in more austere conditions, the shorter absences are not without their challenges.

While a deployment or training detachment is mandatory and non-negotiable, the short but frequent trips typical of staff duty (or the business world) are often a nebulous requirement: the dates may be negotiable, or perhaps no superior has actually told you to make the trip.  Instead, in the course of your duties, you have recognized that an opportunity has presented itself in the form of a conference that holds the promise of long sought after professional knowledge or connections.  Perhaps a simmering issue has come to a boil and the best course of action is to visit the higher or adjacent headquarters (or company office) to sort out the particulars.  Such discretion makes the time away from family difficult to swallow, for it puts at odds our competing desires for career accomplishment and quality family time.

As I wrote in an earlier post, however, the demands of work and parenthood are not always mutually exclusive.   Succeeding at the job may require long hours and frequent absences, but there are benefits besides the prospect of bringing home a bigger paycheck.  It is important for our children to see us devoted to our jobs, to know that our careers give our lives fulfillment and purpose.   They may not fully grasp it while they are young, but it will set an inherent standard they will seek to emulate when they are older.  By our very actions and example, we can help instill a work ethic based not on monetary reward but the sublime satisfaction of making the sacrifices necessary to perfect one’s craft.

Such philosophical outlooks can be cold comfort in the near term.  The key to surviving any absence from family (be it one week or 52 weeks) is all about attitude.  My father’s adage of “don’t whistle while you pack your sea bag,” is good advice for maintaining a healthy marriage, but that doesn’t mean you need to speak negatively of your trip, either.   If I have a positive attitude about my trip, that helps set the tone for the entire family.  That begins with taking the time to explain why the trip is so important.  We told my daughter I was going to Afghanistan last year because there were people there that needed my help.  In her own way, she understood that she was also helping simply by sharing me with them.  When my own father was out to sea for months at a time, my mother made it clear that he was doing a job few other people could do, and that important things wouldn’t get done quite as well if he weren’t there.

Another key to surviving the time away is to make productive use of whatever free time is available.  Communicating with the home front is easier than ever these days thanks to smart phones and Wi-Fi that enable texting, email, and video chat in almost any location.  Beyond that, in spare moments I try to accomplish tasks on the road that would otherwise take time way from the family if I did them at home: professional reading, long-term planning, writing, or more grueling workouts, to name a few.  Longer absences such as deployments demand larger projects, such as a correspondence course, learning a language, or losing a certain amount of weight.  Nothing makes time go by faster than having a deadline for accomplishing a goal.

Finally, it helps to not underestimate the difficulty of the transition back to home life when you return.  Even after only a few days away, habit patterns change.   The children have not been waking me up at night or interrupting my thought processes with snack requests.  When the initial joy at being back home fades and I find myself getting annoyed at the smallest things, I try to take a step back and recognize what I am feeling.  It helps to remind myself that I’ve had it relatively easy while I was away, and now that I’m home, the real work begins. 

The Case for Learning a New Language

I was in Washington, D.C. last week participating in a conference at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, a section of the National Defense University that focuses on the western hemisphere.   The conference was a great opportunity to meet with individuals from throughout Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean.  Spanish was the predominant language, not just in the passageway during breaks but during most of the lectures as well.   As I dusted off my high school Spanish and struggled to keep up with conversations, it got me thinking about Americans and foreign languages.

In the same vein, this week my daughter told us that there is a boy in her kindergarten class that only speaks Spanish.  She wanted to find a way to befriend him, and asked me to teach her how to say, “How old are you?” in Spanish as a way to break the ice.   In seeing her make the connection in her mind that learning a key phrase might unlock the door to a new friendship, I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite so proud of her.   

Foreign languages have always fascinated me, yet I have never been able to progress beyond a modest proficiency in the handful of languages I have studied to varying degrees.  I took five years of Spanish in high school and college, but I never made that ultimate leap to fluency and my skills have since deteriorated after a lack of use.  I have dabbled with Portuguese after a vacation in Brazil and grappled with introductory Mandarin in preparation for a visit to Beijing.  My lack of fluency in any single foreign language may have as much to do with my own intellectual limits as much as anything else, but I think that for most English speakers, especially Americans, there are considerable challenges to mastering a new language.

  First, English speakers must decide which language to learn.  For non-English speakers considering learning a second language, the logical choice is fairly obvious: English is the lingua franca throughout the world.   But what do you choose when you already speak the lingua franca?   Should you pick Arabic since we seem to deploy most often to the Middle East?  Or Mandarin, since in the future we will either be working for or fighting with the Chinese, depending on which commentators you believe?  French is always a smart choice, given that it is a typical second or third language amongst the well educated.   Ultimately, it is difficult to predict which language you will have the most opportunity to practice and will be the most useful to you at some future time.   

Second, because of the ubiquity of English throughout the world, practicing on a regular basis is not easy.  Many foreigners I have met would rather practice their English then bother listening to me struggle in their native tongue.  The immersion required for true fluency proves elusive, especially for those of us in career tracks with no requirement to master a language or spend long stretches of time living in a foreign country.

Third, due to geography and the nature of our society, the United States can be an extremely insular country when it comes to language.  Throughout our history, English has been strictly enforced, both officially and unofficially, as a societal norm for true integration.  Our public education system played a large role as well, ensuring that immigrant families learned English within a generation. Changes in demographics due to the influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants over the last few decades have eroded some of this insularity as many cities in this country are increasingly becoming bi-lingual, but for most regions of the country, English is not just the predominant language, it is the only one.

Despite these challenges, the rewards for learning a new language far outweigh the costs.  You will open your mind and your home to a different culture, because it is impossible to study a foreign language without being exposed to new food, music, films and literature.  You can make the process a fun activity for the whole family by learning a few simple words and phrases each day and practicing them around the dinner table, or labeling everyday items around the house with the corresponding foreign word.   Much like crossword puzzles, Sudoku, or other mental games, spending 20-30 minutes each day to study will exercise your mind, which may help reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s and other diseases.  In the short term, your studies will have the added benefit of improving your understanding and appreciation of English grammar and vocabulary, as they will show you previously unnoticed nuances of your native tongue.   Finally, proficiency in a second language can open doors for career opportunities and even provide extra pay if you are assigned to a language-coded billet.

You might think that it’s too late to tackle a second language.  Although there is truth to the notion that children pick up new languages relatively faster than adults, this doesn’t mean it’s impossible to learn a foreign tongue past a certain age.  Modern technology and recent advances in language education have made the process easier than ever.  Software programs that aid in immersion, coupled with on-line tutoring by native speakers and the increased and instant availability of foreign language podcasts, periodicals, books, films and television programs can put you on the road to language learning in a short period of time.

No matter if the final end state is fluency, proficiency or simply a greater appreciation, making a modest effort to speak a foreign language will go a long way toward helping you build key relationships with partner nation allies and fostering goodwill whenever you deploy or travel overseas.  Happy learning!

No, the other Doctor Spock...

When I found out my new job would involve the Caribbean, my first step was to pull up Amazon to find books on the region's history and politics.  Two years ago I was supposed to go to Japan to work as a political-military planner, and I read at least half a dozen books on East Asia security issues.  All for a ten-day exercise. This week I even bought a reference book for Windows Office 2010 after realizing that my Microsoft skills are not quite up to the level I need to work efficiently as a staff officer.  

I mention all of this because the other day it dawned on me that since I became a father, I have not read a single parenting book.  Of course, I read "What to Expect When You're Expecting" before my daughter was born.  And I will occasionally thumb through my wife's parenting magazines.  But beyond that, I have sadly made little effort to educate myself as a father.

This bothers me.  Raising my children is the most important thing I will ever do in my life.   So why haven't I conducted at least the same level of preparation that I would for a six month deployment? I came up with a handful of semi-plausible but ultimately insufficient justifications:

My wife is the parenting expert in our team.  She worked as a nanny and ran a day-care center before we were married.  She has read as many books on parenting as I have read about airplanes.  Other mothers often seek her out for advice and recommendations.  But this shouldn’t excuse my ignorance.  Sure, it often makes sense for a couple to divide up household responsibilities based on knowledge and expertise:  I change the oil in the car, and she tells me why my shirt doesn't match my pants.  But when it comes to raising our children, it’s a team effort.


Parenting is primarily instinctive.  Children are unique, developing at their own pace with their own personality.  No book could possibly capture all the nuances of our family's situation.  There is some definite truth here, but leadership is also primarily instinctive, and yet I read countless books and articles on that topic in the hopes of gleaning new insights.    I should approach parenting the same way.

Parenting books often provide contradictory advice.   Of course they do.  So do the books I have bought on financial management, auto maintenance, and religion.  Oliver Wendell Holmes said he valued “the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”  Only after considering all the relevant facts, reading from a variety of experts and thinking critically can we reach our own solid and straightforward conclusions.  This applies to every subject one might ever hope to master. 

A friend of mine once told me, “Parenting is easy.  You turned out fine. So just do what your parents did and your kids will be fine too.”  I completely agree with the last two sentences of that statement.  The fault lies in the first, which assumes the ease that I might replicate my parents’ efforts.  Parenting is tough, and I need all the help I can get.   I just downloaded “Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters” by Margaret Meeker on the advice of a good friend.   A good first step, I think.

If you have a good parenting book or article to recommend, please post in the comments section.

Turning Corners

As a father, I am often relieved when a corner is turned in the development of my children.   When the baby finally sleeps through the night, my son becomes potty trained, or the kitchen no longer requires baby-proofing, these are milestones that call for minor celebration.  Each event represents progress, and an easing (albeit slight) of the demands and anxiety that parenthood brings.

My wife holds the opposite view.  She resists every such hint of her babies growing older.  If she could, she would freeze our children in their current stages of development so that we always have a five-year old princess, a three-year old daredevil, and a six-month old giggle machine.

We turn corners throughout life.  For me, finishing college is a particularly salient example, because graduation meant that I would no longer have to toil over research papers and midterm exams.  I very much enjoyed my college experience, but I was anxious to start my naval career and go to flight school.  Surely life at 20,000 feet while making $3,000 a month would be far preferable to nights spent in the library while struggling to get by on $300 a month.  And it many ways, it was.  (Living in a beach-front condo on Perdido Key didn’t hurt either…)

Yet I spent flight school waiting to turn another corner: earning my wings and joining the operational fleet.  Learning navigation and basic airmanship was all well and good, but the whole point of flight school was training to be a combat aviator, and I couldn’t wait to take the fight to the enemy.  (Didn’t matter who that enemy was.  In the late 90’s most likely it would be Serbia or Iraq, although Iran and North Korea were possibilities as well.)   More prosaically, I couldn’t wait until I could fly without being graded, judged, and critiqued.  Yet once I completed flight school, another corner waited to be turned:  I had to complete initial training in my fleet aircraft, the EA-6B Prowler, which meant another year of graded flights before I would be assigned to an operational squadron and go on deployment.

Predictably, once I finally made it to my fleet squadron, the Zappers of Electronic Attack Squadron 130, I had many more corners to turn: first flight from the carrier, first combat mission over Iraq, mission commander qualification and tactics instructor training.  In many ways, my progress made life easier. Each corner turned brought more trust and freedom of action.  Every flight still had its debrief, but the critiques became more collegial and less pedantic.  Soon I was the one providing the instruction and my responsibilities grew commensurate with my qualifications.   It was not long before I was wistfully remembering those halcyon days in Pensacola when all I had to do was navigate from point A to point B, or those four years in Durham when all I had to do was read books and write what I thought about them.

And so it is with fatherhood.  The infant that becomes a toddler no longer needs to be held all day, but instead has to be chased on foot as he follows his natural curiosity.  The daughter that learns to speak and tell me what she needs is now very vocal and persistent in telling me what she wants.  Each milestone brings more complexity and more responsibility to my roles as a father.

The one immutable fact of life is the passage of time.  As Heraclitus said, you cannot put your feet in the same river twice.  In the same way, each day and each year, you raise a different child, the ongoing product of your genes, your guidance, and your love.  You can no more stop the progress of their aging than you can put it in fast forward until the day of their own college graduation.

Somewhere in between my relish and my wife’s dread of each corner turned lies the answer: taking each day and each child on their own terms, and working to savor each moment, both the joyous and the frustrating, as they occur.