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.    

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* 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.

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

A Letter to a Veteran

I’m the son of a son of a Sailor.  My grandfather served in the Pacific during the Second World War aboard the USS Florence Nightingale (AP-70).  Like many of his generation, he rarely talked about his service.  He told me about a failed attempt to smuggle aboard a bottle of gin under his pea coat after a port call  (it fell and broke as he saluted the watch officer on the quarterdeck).  Once, he mentioned a kamikaze attack during the invasion of Okinawa, and how years later he read a passage in a James Michener novel that was uncanny in its similarity.

He never mentioned the letter he received a few months after his discharge from the navy.  It was only after he passed away that my father found it tucked away in a box of papers.

                                                                                                         November 9, 1945
My dear Mr. Volpe,

            I have addressed this letter to reach you after all the formalities of your separation from active service are completed.  I have done so because, without formality but as clearly as I know how to say it, I want the Navy’s pride in you, which it is my privilege to express, to reach into your civil life and remain with your always.

            You have served in the greatest Navy in the world.

            It crushed two enemy fleets at once, receiving their surrenders only four months apart.

            It brought our land-based airpower within bombing range of the enemy, and set our ground armies on the beachheads of final victory.

            It performed the multitude of tasks necessary to support these military operations.

            No other Navy at any time has done so much.  For your part in these achievements you deserve to be proud as long as you live.  The Nation which you served at a time of crisis will remember you with gratitude.

            The best wishes of the Navy go with you into civilian life.  Good luck!

                                                                        Sincerely yours,

                                                                        James Forrestal

I never tire of reading the letter, a copy of which I have framed and sitting on my book shelf next to Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Two Ocean War. (You can see an image of the original letter here)

Secretary Forrestal managed to convey a sense of avuncular warmth and pride rarely seen in a form letter.  Given the nearly infinite tasks the Department of Navy had to conduct in the immediate postwar period, it is remarkable that he made this gesture of appreciation a high priority despite the enormity of the undertaking (over four million Sailors served during the war).

I feel equal parts pride and humility every time I read it:  pride in knowing that I serve in the same Navy and help carry on such a lofty tradition, humility in realizing that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Please take a cue from Secretary Forrestal and go out of your way to thank a veteran this weekend.

Honor, Courage, and.... what's that third one?

Lieutenant (junior grade) Eric Kettani got some disheartening news from the Navy.  His saga is described in detail in a recent Navy Times article.  Long story short: He attended the U.S Naval Academy where he played football, served two of his required five years in the fleet, and now wants out so he can pursue his dream of playing in the NFL.  Call him the anti-Tillman.

The Navy said, “Nice try, now get back aboard your ship.”

The argument in favor of letting Kettani skip the rest of his commitment goes like this:  A ridiculously small percentage of college football players are talented enough to play in the NFL.  An even smaller percentage of service academy players can make that cut. By allowing those one-in-a-million cases to pursue their dream, the service academies can attract a much larger number of student-athletes to attend their schools. 99% of them will fulfill their commitment when the NFL doesn’t offer them a spot.   Recruiting extremely athletic people is a good strategy for a military organization, especially when the pool of qualified applicants seems to be dwindling in this country.

This must be the logic used by the Air Force and Army, who have recently waived commitments from their academy graduates who have opportunities to play professional sports.  Kettani’s agent has raised this as an issue, citing some sort of double standard.  His real issue is that his client is being held to a standard at all.

Because here’s where the previous argument falls short:  athletic ability, while a highly sought after attribute in the Navy, even in today’s technologically advanced military, is not even in the top three in our list of desired character traits.   The Navy’s core values are “Honor, Courage, and Commitment”, not “Honor, Courage, and Run the 40 in 4.5 seconds”.  

Or to quote a Senior Enlisted Advisor who gave a talk to my class at Command and Staff College, “No amount of ability will make up for a lack of integrity.”

The Navy Times writes, “While he likes Navy life, he’s concerned that the Navy just yanked his best chance to play in the NFL.”  Besides the incredible sense of entitlement that statement exudes, it misses the larger point that those of us who go to college on an ROTC scholarship or attend a Service Academy and fulfill our commitments have also forgone other professional opportunities.  One might argue that, unlike becoming a doctor or lawyer, there is a short window for Kettani to pursue his dream.  If he waits another three years, it will be too late to play in the NFL.

 Tell that to Roger Staubach.  The Dallas Cowboys drafted him in 1964, but he didn’t play for them until 1969, after he completed his full commitment to the Navy, including a one year tour in Vietnam.  But of course, Ensign Staubach understood the real meaning of “America’s Team.”

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.