…mow the lawn!
My oldest child is a son named Philip. If we have spent time together and feel good about each other, and I ask Philip to mow the lawn, chances are he will agree. On the other hand, if I have been gone for a week and we haven’t seen each other, much less done anything together, and then I ask Philip, in that same loving tone of voice, to mow the lawn, the answer will probably be some form of no. He is saying to me, “Dad, you don’t care about me. If you did, you would have been here. All you care about is some cheap form of slave labor to get your grass cut!”
Several years ago, Philip came home from school on a Thursday afternoon. As he walked in, my wife and I asked him the usual questions about his day, like “How was school? Did you have fun today? What did you learn?” Philip’s response was to shrug his shoulders and walk into his room. My wife then turned to me and remarked that something was definitely wrong between Philip and us. I agreed with her.
She said, “What do you think it is?”
I suggested that maybe we hadn’t spent enough time with Philip lately and he had slipped into the “him against us” way of thinking. I said, “What we need to do is get into Philip’s world and convince him that we are not the enemy.”
My wife said, “How do we go about doing that?” At this point, we could hear Philip in his room playing with his toy cars.
I said, “Let’s go into Philip’s room and play with his toy cars with him.”
So off to Philip’s room we went. We got down on the floor with Philip, grabbed a handful of toy cars, and proceeded to make automobile noises right along with him. I have to admit that Philip was a little bewildered at first; the first thing out of his mouth was, “What are you doing?” We told him that we just wanted to play with him for a while. My wife and I stayed in Philip’s room playing with him for forty-five minutes and all three of us really had a great time. And for the next few days, Philip never stopped talking about what was going on in his life.
Yes, showing an interest can work wonders, but don’t be tricked into thinking that it’s a one-time shot. If you expect to keep the channels of communication open with other people, you must show an interest in them on a continual basis. If you don’t, they quick start to assume that you are taking them for granted. When this happens, you’re right back where you started, if not further back.
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