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 They spend their summers playing minor league baseball in outdated stadiums, in rural towns, in front of sparse crowds, all while earning below minimum wage.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 

Man Bites Dog

“If you should see a dog biting a man, don’t write it up. But if you should see a man biting a dog, spare not money, men nor telegraph tolls to get the details to the [newspaper] office.”

-Charles A. Dana

There is a rule in journalism which states that “Dog Bites Man” is not newsworthy, while “Man Bites Dog” is newsworthy. The reason is quite simple, an occurrence as often as a dog biting a man isn’t something that interests people. However, if something as odd as a man biting a dog were to happen, that’s newsworthy.

People want oddities.

People want sensationalism.

People want extreme.

These type of stories are newsworthy whilst common happenings aren’t.

This is something to remember when watching or listening to the news. We need to remember that the editors decided which stories to report and which were not deemed newsworthy.

Just because something is seen more often in the news, doesn’t mean that it happens more often in life. Actually, the inverse is usually correct.

Parents need to recognize that the media might be corrupting their views on child safety.

“Stranger Danger” is real.

It is frightening.

It is a parent’s worst nightmare.

The stories of Adam Walsh, Hailey Owens, Eitan Patz, Michaela Garecht, Amber Hagerman and Leiby Kletzky (among many others) give parents good reason to educate about “Stranger Danger”, but those cases are statistical anomalies.

It is much more likely that someone known to the child victimize the child than a stranger. About 8 or 9 times more likely, depending on the study.

Therefore it is much more important to emphasize other child safety topics. (e.g. my body is mine, not keeping secrets, boundaries). Too much emphasis on “Stranger Danger” could potentially leave a child more vulnerable for grooming.

In conclusion:

1.  Teach “Stranger Danger”.

2. Explain what it means (if you ask a class of 3rd graders what “Stranger Danger” means, they will not all give the same response).

3. Give the child tips for what type of stranger they should look for if they need help (e.g. If the child gets lost, who should they seek for help? Perhaps a mother with children? Police officer?)

4. Don’t spend too much time on this topic, there are more important topics. Too much emphasis on “Stranger Danger” can end up being detrimental to the child, as they will believe that all “non-strangers” are ok.

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