Translating to teenagers turns tedious
For years, I kept a cartoon on my refrigera- tor door. It showed a teenage boy sitting in a chair in front of a kitchen sink piled full of dirty dishes. His legs were stretched out in front of him, his arms crossed over his chest. He was the picture of patience.
His outraged mother stood beside him, her hands on her hips and the boy was looking up at her, obviously confused. The caption read, “I thought you said you wanted me to ‘watch’ the dishes.”
Well, I can relate.
Like the mother in the cartoon - which mysteriously disappeared, by the way - a lot of what I say to my children, especially my teenagers, seems to get lost in translation. I try to give them clear, concise, instructions, or timely and relevant advice, but they either misunderstand me completely or don’t hear anything at all.
My situation reminds me of another favorite cartoon in an old book of Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” comics. It shows a dog listening intently to her master who is saying, “Okay Ginger, I’ve had it. Stay out of the garbage. Understand Ginger? Stay out of the garbage or else!”
Of course the dog hears, “blah, blah Ginger blah, blah, blah Ginger, blah, blah…”
The difference in kids and dogs, however, is that dogs usually try very hard to figure out what we’re saying because they want to make us happy. That isn’t always the case with our children.
I don’t want to sound jaded or anything, but I’m suspicious that my children aren’t even trying to learn to speak my language because they don’t want to inadvertently comprehend anything unpleasant.
But, I want to be able to communicate with them so I’m trying to determine just which words they do understand. So far I’ve narrowed it down to four: Car, keys, money and yes.
We’re still working on: Chores, curfew, grades, overdraft and no!, but I have to admit I’m not making much progress.
It only makes me feel worse when my children tell me that the families of their friends don’t have this problem. According to my children, other families communicate perfectly because other parents know exactly what their children want and give it to them immediately.
They don’t muddy things by asking for something in return, and they certainly don’t throw foreign phrases like “Clean your room,” or “Be home by midnight,” and that especially difficult to decipher sentence, “Because I said so,” into the conversation.
My children imply that the mistake I make is insisting that they, in turn, listen to me. That’s just asking for trouble.
So I’ve come up with a new tactic. In order to make things clearer to them, I’m going to mix the words they don’t know into sentences with words they know too well.
For instance, the next time someone asks to use the car I’m going to say, “Yes. The chores to the car are the keys to the money. No?”
We’ll see what they make out of that.