How to Talk to Your Kids About Sex

in All Entries  by Paddy Ducklow 0 comments

My advice is “earlier than you think you should” and “more often than you think you ought.” Thankfully there are better informed people than me.

Eryn-Faye Frans is a sex educator and a long-standing friend (I have known her since she was born!). Formerly from Vancouver, Texas, Scotland, back to Texas and then Vancouver and now in Toronto — its been hard to keep up with her — Eryn-Faye is a great parent, a loyal church-type (though not at all “religious” in the stuffy meaning of that) and provides thoughtful and thorough advice and hope to couples who are finding their sex life less than lovely. (I actually don’t know how a sex educator could possibly be stuffy.)

And she knows about parenting. Her recent blog reports some recent research that advises:

* Spread out the conversations
* Use anatomically correct terms
* Don’t lie
* Don’t assume
* Don’t judge
* Pass it on

I found this advice helpful. I hope you do as well. And sign up for Eryn-Faye’s  blog — you will learn lots of interesting stuff.

The Ways of a Listener

in All Entries  by Paddy Ducklow 0 comments

“I can’t speak with you right now. I am in the middle of a sentence.”

“You know, you don’t have to say everything you know.”

I learn great things from my client friends. The first comment came from a couple interchange that was lively, funny, heated, pointed – good conflict, in other words. The second comment was reported by a man who discovered that he didn’t have to win every argument, position himself in every discussion or make a comment on the wary ways of his teenagers.

There are thought to be three basic styles of listening, one better than the other two.

1) The first is “listening to be right.” Competitive listening happens when we are more interested in winning a verbal war or promoting your own point of view, than in understanding somebody else or their thoughts. It is the communication style of the arrogant (“Knowing it all, why would I waste time understanding someone else?”).

2) In “hearing” (“I heard what you said!”) the listener is passive, meandering in and out of the verbal stream, not engaged enough to make a comment, not passionate enough to disagree, and not thoughtful enough to carry the conversation further. Weak and wimpy or, at best, distracted and dismissive, less a communication style than a communication impairment.

3) Participative listening creates a partnership, a team activity with all the cooperation and friction this implies. Engagement is high because you are interested, expressing interest and inviting interest. It is interesting conversation and it goes somewhere and with some panache (a word my Dad used which still sounds wonderfully soul-ish to me).

It might be helpful to know the ways of a listener. I feel myself irritated with me when I listen to prove my rightness; and I feel even more miserable when I sense someone is waiting to find my logical fault. But I love talking when there is an interchange of meaning and (e)motion. It feels to me like being a member of a motorcycle gang (the friendly kind), all of us moving in the same direction, creating lots of lovely Harley noise, and with élan (another word my Dad used to use).

Suck the Marrow Out of Life

in All Entries  by Paddy Ducklow 0 comments

You may remember this quote from Thoreau read by Robin Williams as the professor in “Dead Poet’s Society.” If there ever was a definition of “self-differentiation” or just vectoring your life, this would be it.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” (from “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau and popularized in “Dead Poet’s Society”)

Strikes me as fresh and real as I grade graduate essays and theses, look forward to seawall walking with my grandson later today, reflect on the revolutions in Egypt (Mubarak just resigned) and Thailand (just beginning their Facebook / Twitter inspired insurrection), that I had better get to doing with my life what I want to do with it.

Creating Space — Loneliness

in All Entries  by Paddy Ducklow 0 comments

“When we feel lonely we keep looking for a person or persons who can take our loneliness away. Our lonely hearts cry out, ‘Please hold me, touch me, speak to me, pay attention to me.’ But soon we discover that the person we expect to take our loneliness away cannot give us what we ask for. Often that person feels oppressed by our demands and runs away, leaving us in despair. As long as we approach another person from our loneliness, no mature human relationship can develop. Clinging to one another in loneliness is suffocating and eventually becomes destructive. For love to be possible we need the courage to create space between us and to trust that this space allows us to dance together.” (Henri Nouwen)