Chapter 3: Stop Doing What Doesn't Work

If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.

— W. C. Fields

Stop doing what doesn't work! This sounds obvious,

but people tend to get caught up in negative patterns of behavior that they either cannot or will not break, even though those patterns of behavior don't give them what they want.

We have all heard our parents say, "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times!" We have probably all said it ourselves at least a thousand times. It is amazing that intelligent people need to say something a thousand times before they realize that what they are doing is not working. It is as if we are automatons that are programmed for one behavior, and we automatically continue with that behavior, whether it works or not.

It only takes most people one time to take a cake out of the oven without an oven mitt before they realize, "This was a bad idea; this burns." And yet we allow ourselves to be burned again and again by our ineffective parenting act.

A WORD FROM THE WISE

You haven't learned anything from a mule that kicks you twice.

— Folk Saying

Dare to be different

A good example of stopping what doesn't work and trying something new is in the movie "The Madness of King George."

George III suffered from the royal malady, porphyria. He would suffer long bouts of lunacy. During one of his worst attacks, after all the court doctors had failed to diagnose him with their daily inspection of his stool samples, and failed to cure him with bleeding and other forms of tortuous medical treatments applied in the 1700s, an unknown doctor was called in by the prime minister. This doctor's methods were unorthodox for the times, and it was said he would never succeed where the other learned physicians had not. They were galled that he even had the audacity to presume he could make a difference without using the techniques that had been employed for centuries. "He's a quack!" they exclaimed. "He doesn't even belong to the Royal College of Physicians!" But by trying something new, something different, he succeeded in alleviating the King's symptoms.

If what you are doing isn't working, try something else. Do not get caught up in the attitude of, "I've always done it that way," or, "That's the way my parents always did it, and if it was good enough for me, then it's good enough for my kids."

I Want Cheese and That's No Baloney!

Think back to some of the things your parents did when you were a child. Were they really good enough for you, or would your parents have done things differently if they had had more choices, or if they had known a better way of doing them?

A woman came to us frustrated about the attitude her husband had toward their children. Whenever they would go grocery shopping, he would become incensed when she would buy special luncheon meats or expensive snacks for the children's lunches. On every single occasion, without fail, he would launch into the story of how, as a child, his lunch consisted of nothing more than bologna on white bread. "I didn't even get a piece of cheese until the eleventh grade," he complained.

Our client was less than sympathetic. "Get me a violin," she said. "If I had this on tape, I could save him the trouble of repeating it for the umpteenth time. I'd just press the play button whenever we got to the deli section. What's astounding to me is that he always told me what crummy parents he had. Now he wants to treat our children the same way. Go figure."

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