Video Message - Children Build Bridges

Children build bridges, and parents provide them with the building materials.

Parents need to make sure that they aren't setting children up to build bridges to places where they shouldn't be going.

Implicit Communication

“I come from a part of Nigeria where a lot of value is placed on implicit communication. The 'well brought up' child is the one who can pick up nonverbal cues from adults and interpret them correctly.”

-Ayobami Adebayo

Communication is not limited to words. Feelings and desires can be communicated through other methods such as behaviors, tone of voice and hand gestures, just to name a few.

When using non verbal communication techniques, it is extremely important that both sides be on the same page.

Years ago I saw a fascinating documentary. This documentary discussed how people in different countries use different head and face gestures to communicate. Sometimes these same gestures have the opposite meaning.

For example, in the United States, if a person points his index finger above his ear and makes a circular motion, he is try to convey to people that he believes that something or someone is crazy. But that very same act in China, indicates that the person believes that “the wheel is spinning”, meaning that the person or idea in question is brilliant.

Exactly the same communication technique, very different message. Therefore it is of the utmost importance that both parties be on the same page.

I once heard a story about a US diplomat who was sent to a South American country to do some work there. In anticipation of his arrival, a party was scheduled in his honor and he was asked to speak.

The party was called for 7pm.

The diplomat arrived at 6:45pm and no one is there. The banquet hall isn’t even set up for the function. The diplomat is both confused and angry.

He waits, at 7:30 the hall gets set up.

Still no one is there. His anger becomes worse.

7:30 turns into 9pm, some guests and the organizers start trickling in.

Finally, at 10:15pm the place is full and he is handed the microphone to speak.

The diplomat is furious and insulted. He tries his best to hide his rage and he makes it through his speech.

He immediately buys the first ticket back to the USA and quits his post.

Yet all these South Americans tried to do was show him honor, yet he took it as an insult.

In this particular country, they very much believe in the phrase “the sooner we start, the sooner we finish”. It is considered an insult to start on time, as it shows the speaker that you have no interest in him i.e. you want the speaker done as soon as possible. By having the event start over 3 hours late, the people were trying to show the diplomat much respect, but he took it as an insult.

How to interpret non-verbal communication is a skill that is very hard to grasp. It is especially hard when dealing with two different people from two different backgrounds.

This is one reason why the beginning of any new relationship, whether it be marriage, new job, new friends etc can be so difficult. It takes time to learn how people work and it takes time to decipher each person’s unique set of communication codes.

Kids find it especially hard to crack the code of implicit communication. Therefore, parents should try their best to both assist their children with deciphering the codes that they’ve received as well as trying their hardest to avoid giving their kids new codes to decipher. If you have a message to give your child, try the verbal method as it leaves much less room for error.

Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes, enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child safety.  

You can email Yisroel at yisroel@ympicker.com

Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here 

Special Guest on NAASCA - "Stop Child Abuse Now" talk show

No Article this week, I spent my time preparing to be a guest on the Stop Child Abuse Now radio show. 

Audio can be seen on their site: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/naasca/2018/12/13/stop-child-abuse-now-scan--2028

Or on my google drive: Click Here to Download from Google Drive

The Stop Child Abuse Now radio show is part of the National Association of Adult Survivors of Child Abuse (NAASCA).

You can learn more about the organization here: http://www.naasca.org/main.html

The show was recorded from 3am - 4:30am local time. Here is me at 4:15am doing the show

Willful Blindness— How Abusers Groom Kids In Plain View

There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know.

-John Heywood

I recently watched a documentary on YouTube called “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”. This movie discusses how the company Enron was able to fool the world into thinking it was a profitable billion dollar company, when it was mainly just smoke and mirrors.

One of the common questions that people kept on asking throughout the film was “Why was it that no one asked? How could it be that so many people were silent?”. The signs of fraud and irregularities were there well before they were made public. So why were people both inside of the company as well as those outside of the company so quiet?

They were quiet because when the results are desirable, we don’t want to ask questions.

Those that asked questions were “encouraged” to remain silent. One questioner was fired from his position with an investing firm, and the firm immediately obtained a favorable contract with Enron after his firing.

When people or companies are providing us with what we want, why should we risk it by asking questions? Is it advisable to bite the hand that feeds us?

In legal terms this is referred to as willful blindness, and the US Supreme Court has consistently ruled that willful blindness is not valid defense.

There are too many stories of parents, teachers and communities being willfully blind to child molesters.

Former Penn State player and coach and current convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky ran an organization called The Second Mile. It was for underprivileged youth, providing help for at-risk children and support for their parents in Pennsylvania.

The signs were there, but no one wanted to think that the person helping all these underprivileged people was abusing them.

While the Sandusky case was more high profile than other cases, it was by no means unique. Many child molesters utilize this modus operandi. They put themselves into a giving position, taking a role which would leave a major void if they were removed from that position. They try to be the missing parent, the missing sibling, the missing financial provider, all in an attempt to create willful blindness.

And it works.

Rather than seeing the truth and acting accordingly, people are more afraid of potentially losing the benefits that this molester is currently providing.

People are also willfully blind because the ramifications of the truth scare them.

We as parents and community members need to stop being willfully blind. We need to realize that sometimes things ARE too good to be true when it comes to others helping our children. Most importantly, never should we ever feel that protecting our children from a molester is too big of a sacrifice.

Willfully blind doesn’t work in the short term, and it definitely doesn’t work in the long term. Learn how to ask the tough questions and ask them. Be ready to act appropriately if concerns of abuse are validated.

Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes, enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child safety.  

You can email Yisroel at yisroel@ympicker.com

Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here 

Products of Our Surroundings - Twitter

"Twitter is not a technology. It's a conversation. And it's happening with or without you."

-Charlene Li

There is a perspective in the social work profession known as “person-in-environment”. It states that people are a product of their environment. Social, political, familial, temporal, spiritual, economic, and physical factors combine to create this environment which shapes the individual. This concept includes the idea that one cannot adequately understand a person’s actions without consideration of the various aspects of that individual’s environment.

News stories and political climate are also part of this environment which affects us.

We are currently living in the Twitter era.

In an instant, millions of people hear one side of a story and they are immediately demanding action.

These demands are then heard by people and companies who often care more about themselves and their profits than they care about truth.

This is an idea that has been on my mind for quite some time, but recent events are causing me to write about this today.

Recently in Minnesota, a small group of African Americans walked into a fast food restaurant and attempted to place an order. The manager told them they needed to pay before they placed their order.

The consumers objected. They insisted and questioned why they were being treated differently than other customers who didn’t need to pay upfront. This entire event was videoed.

Scores of people took to social media to call on boycotting the restaurant. Many others called for the manager’s dismissal.

The company obliged and fired her.

All because of a video and post which depicted one side of the story.

As this former manager sits at home unemployed, news is breaking that these customers allegedly made a habit of taking their orders without paying.

Reports include accusations that they had even posted about this habit on their social media pages and that this restaurant had been a victim of theirs before.

So without this manager even getting the opportunity to defend herself and her decision, she lost her job.  All because people heard one side of the story and felt that they had all the facts they needed in order to act.

Link to Story

This case isn’t an isolated incident, and these behaviors are contagious.

Our children see this “quick to judge” mentality, and they follow suit. They are living in this “twitter/quick judge” age.

Living in a society which demands immediate judgment and action not only affects our children, but it rubs off on us as well.

Do we give our children the opportunity to defend themselves, or do we immediately believe the teacher when they call us to complain about our child’s behavior?

If we judge our children without hearing them first, we have added more “quick-judge” to their already “quick-judge” environment.

If we want to break the cycle and if we want to raise children who are able to hear all sides prior to forming an opinion, these lessons need to start at home. These lessons can’t be verbal, our children need to see that this is how we act with them and with others. That’s how we can break this destructive habit.

Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes, enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child safety.  

You can email Yisroel at yisroel@ympicker.com

Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here 

Resistance and Friends/Family Members

ASAP!

The art of effective listening is essential to clear communication, and clear communication is necessary to management success.

-James Cash Penny

The goal of communication is to convey your message over to the listener in a way that will enable them to understand your message in the way that you intended it to be understood. Problems arise when the message that the listener hears isn’t congruent with the message that the speaker intended on delivering.

Issues can occur when the speaker uses relative terms or terms that have shifted from their original meaning. In order to ensure that messages are understood correctly, one should try to be as clear as possible, choosing words that leave little room for ambiguity.

Example of a relative term:

A parent sends their teenager to the store to purchase a new pair of sneakers. The parent gives the child their credit card and says “Please don’t spend too much”.

How much is “too much”?

Does “too much” for the child mean the same as “too much” for the parent?

If the child spends $150 on the sneakers, did the child err? If so, who is to blame?

If the parent wanted the child to stay within a $100 budget for the purchase, they should have said so clearly. The child is not at fault for interpreting a relative term differently.

There are also terms that have changed over time. The term “ASAP” (as soon as possible) used to mean exactly that, please do this as soon as possible.

Today ASAP means something very different, it means: “Drop everything and get this done. This is your new #1 priority”.

If one party is using the old definition and the other party is using the new meaning, it will be problematic.

When engaging with people who are toxic, one thing that you will notice is that they are heavy users of vague terms. They do this for a reason. They are trying to set you up for failure, while keeping their hands clean.

Try to recognize this as soon as possible. If you can’t avoid engagement with them, try your hardest to make sure that they are 100% clear with their statements. It might cause some minor headaches initially, but it will save major headaches down the road.

Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes, enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child safety.  

You can email Yisroel at yisroel@ympicker.com

Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here 

Should I Try?

Failing to plan is planning to fail.

-Alan Lakein

Very few pieces of advice are universal, the rest require the wisdom to figure out when the advice applies, when it doesn’t apply, and when it is detrimental.

When I was young, I received the following advice: “Don’t say that you can’t, always try”.

I do not believe that I was alone in receiving such advice. As with most advice I received as a child, I believed that it was universal.

In the summer of 1998 I saw firsthand how the advice has its time and place, and by no means is it a universal.

In June I went to Shea Stadium to watch my beloved Mets play the Baltimore Orioles. Prior to the first pitch a woman came out to sing the National Anthem. I am not very musical, but even I was able to tell that she started on too high of a note. When she got to a high note in the song, she cracked.

Rather than continue on, she shouted “That’s it, I can’t do this anymore!”, and she ran off of the field.

Anyone who knows New Yorkers knows what happened next. There was a huge chorus of boos from the 30,000 in attendance. Some of the loudest boos I’ve heard in a stadium.

That’s when I learned that this isn’t a universal rule. She tried and she couldn’t, but she really didn’t have an “escape”. Her name was on the scoreboard and she just left 30,000 people after telling them she was going to perform for them.

In retrospect, it would have been better had she never gone on the field, than having gone on and quit in the middle.

A person needs to develop foresight and learn how to use it. A person should know the answer to the following questions before deciding whether to go ahead and try:

● What can I do if I realize it isn’t working?

● Is there a possibility of backing out or am I stuck once I’ve decided to try?

● What’s the likelihood of my trying and making things worse?

● What’s the potential penalty were I to make things worse? (e.g. If I try to fix a small problem on your iPhone, what’s the likelihood that I might break it to the point that I’ll owe you a new iPhone?)

Parents need to assist their children with preplanning and discussing the possible issues along the way. This will allow their child to develop healthy decision making practices. For example, If your child is invited to a hike, sit with your child to make sure that they understand what it means to be on a hike, write down the reasons to go, the reasons not to go. Make sure your child understands that a hike means that there is no quitting in the middle. This will enable the child to make an informed decision. It will also show your child the advantage of making informed decisions versus impulsive decisions. 

Here is a more recent example of how I suffered from someone who misapplied the rule:

Someone decided to try and be helpful and attempt to move my baby’s crib to a different room in my home. The issue was that in order to move the crib out of its current room, it needed to be disassembled first. This person started disassembling the crib, only to give up after taking apart two thirds of the crib.

Before they “helped” I had a fully functioning crib, albeit in an imperfect place.

Now I had a disassembled crib in the same place.

Sometimes trying is enough and sometimes it is better not to do anything versus to start and quit.

Help your child develop the skills to determine which applies when.

Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes, enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child safety.  

You can email Yisroel at yisroel@ympicker.com

Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here 

Gripping or Gripped?

“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

- Jim Bouton

Baseball players sacrifice a lot to become professional baseball players. They spend years honing their craft. They spend their summers playing minor league baseball in outdated stadiums, in rural towns, in front of sparse crowds, all while earning below minimum wage. The only thing that keeps them going is the light at the end of the tunnel, the hope that they will one day play in the “big leagues”.

Even once they get to the “big leagues”, players need to keep improving, keep hustling, keep succeeding, knowing that there are others waiting to take their job from them.

Those who view “getting there” as the ultimate goal, will quickly find themselves out of a job.

Everyone’s journey is different, but they all agree that things would be very different had a few “breaks” gone differently. Sometimes the breaks are outside of the player’s control, while other times it is due to the direct actions of the player himself.

Jim Bouton was a pitcher for the New York Yankees, Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros. In 1969, while he played with the Pilots and Astros, Bouton kept a diary. The diary would later be published into a book titled Ball Four.

I plan on discussing the book and its effects on Bouton in a later article, but there is one quote from his book that I would like to focus on:

“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

This is not exclusive to baseball. People from all professions spend years, decades even, trying to grasp their job, only to discover that it is their job that has grasped them.

Go ahead, master your profession. But don’t let it define you and don’t let it consume you. And never EVER allow it to become a greater priority than your own family.

Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes, enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child safety.  

You can email Yisroel at yisroel@ympicker.com

Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here

One Size Does Not Fit All

“As such, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.”

― Clayton M. Christensen

I have many pet-peeves, but none greater than gurus and experts that proclaim to have all the answers. Advice is helpful, but people aren’t one size fits all. Often the experts/gurus will forget this fact when they provide advice. Telling people to spend more time with their children is one thing, but telling fathers specifically that they must teach their sons how to catch with a baseball mitt is another.

In order to give accurate advice one needs to know as many of the details as possible.

If your daughter is having a pain in her arm, if you called a doctor and said “My daughter’s arm is in pain”, how accurate do you think the doctor’s diagnosis will be based upon that info?

Yet people seek info from books and experts who don’t know their child, who don’t know the variables, and yet the parents expect the advice to work.

Why?

I mention this because I’m going to share a personal story about bullying, but I am not going to mention a lesson from it. For some my story might work for them, but for others it might backfire.

My story:

Back when I was in high school, I would return home via the school bus. It was after a long day of school, we were teenage boys, and there was no one supervising us on the bus. This led to absolute chaos some nights.

Nothing was worse than the “pile-on”.

A “pile-on” was when a person was forced to lay down on their seat, other kids would then start laying on top of him until they reached the ceiling. Once the top person went on top, he’d push his feet against the ceiling, adding pressure onto the pile.

I’d say that it hurt to be on the bottom of the “pile-on”, but that would be a massive understatement.

One day I heard the guys conspiring, suddenly they shouted “Pile-On Picker!!”.

I knew what was coming, but I had a plan.

My plan was to put my bag on the floor so that my stuff wouldn’t get broken. I was also going to position myself near the edge of the seat so that I would be able to slither out of the “pile-on”.

But I needed to stall a bit to make sure that I could put my plan into action.

So while I got my plan into action, I said “Yay! ‘Pile-on’ Picker!, Awesome”. I put my bag on the floor and laid down on the edge of the seat, preparing to slither off the seat as the “pile-on” progressed.

But there never was a “pile-on” me. Not then, not afterwards. They all looked at each other dazed and confused.

“We can’t do it to him...he wants it!” was a common theme that I heard.

Bullying isn’t about the actions, it is often about the control and the reaction of others.

Even though it wasn’t my intention, but I was able to show them that I wasn’t someone that they wanted to bully.

Will this work with all other cases of bullying? Absolutely not!

While this saved me from a high school “pile-on”, I highly doubt that the result would have been the same had this occured while I was in the 4th grade.

Nevertheless, I am sharing this story because perhaps it will be the solution for someone else who is having a similar issue.

Share tips, share advice, try to see if it will apply to your situation. Be wary of doctors, gurus and experts who know what ails your daughter’s arm when they don’t know your daughter and they haven’t even examined the arm.

Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes, enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child safety.  

You can email Yisroel at yisroel@ympicker.com

Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here 

got milk?

A child's mental health is just as important as their physical health and deserves the same quality of support.

-Kate Middleton

The Law of Unintended Consequences says that actions of people always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended.

Sometimes in our attempt to do what is right, we get things so very wrong.

This is also encapsulated in the famous phrase: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

I would like to discuss the famous “Milk Carton Campaign” in the 1980s, and the unintended consequences that followed.

Back in the 1980s, pictures of missing children were printed on the sides of milk cartons throughout the country. The goal was simple, the odds of finding missing children will increase if more people are looking for them.

So for a few years kids and adults were eating breakfast with a picture of a missing child in the middle of the table for all to see.

Every day a picture staring at you.

Every day a different missing child.

Every day millions of kids across the US seeing another missing child.

A missing child that was their age.

A missing child that looked friendly.

A missing child that could easily have been them.

The campaign of saving children ended up frightening millions of children across the country. Kids thought that there were kidnappers everywhere and that they might be the next victim. This led to the cancellation of the campaign.

There are a few important lessons from this story. First, one should always be evaluating whether there are any unintended consequences and one shouldn’t be afraid of changing course if the unintended consequences are damaging.

Additionally, one should be extremely careful when educating child safety to children. While the issues are serious and potentially dangerous, one should be careful to teach children in a non-frightening way. Scaring children and educating children are NOT the same thing and they don’t accomplish the same thing. Making a child afraid will not make the child safer, and it will also contain numerous disastrous unintended consequences.

Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes, enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child safety.  

You can email Yisroel at yisroel@ympicker.com

Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here