MentorWords

Professionals who spend some or all of their time working from home have a challenge unique to their office setting – their families. I don’t just mean those with spouses or children, I mean all work-at-home professionals. No matter how often you say, “not right now honey, I’m busy,” the interruptions are constant and endless.

Sudden inexplicable tension has only a 50::50 chance of being about the situation taking place. Chances are great that the person escalating the situation is upset about something else.

The class photo has morphed from a charming snapshot of a child’s grade school years to a staged and airbrushed representation of the perfect child. What is this telling our children about our values?

I was always relieved to be able to send my older children off to school each day. It was a comfort to know they were someone else’s responsibility for the next six hours, and that that somebody else was far more capable than I of preparing my child’s mind for the rigors of the future. Once we moved to the southern state in which we currently live (and are moving away from), that relief turned to constant anxiety. The schools are a huge disappointment. The community is small enough that you have to know someone to get into the very limited number of non-parochial private schools (we didn’t), and I really don’t think most parents – no matter how educated we are – are the best option for educating their own children. So the only option was to turn my children over to someone else’s responsibility each day, but no longer with the comfort of believing they were in better hands than my own.

I have been acutely aware as my peers, all of us teenagers roughly a quarter of a century ago, begin to judge teenagers for their clothing, their speech habits, and their music. I don’t have the best memory, but I sure do remember my dad bemoaning my wardrobe, my parents telling me to turn down my music and what-was-I-listening-to-anyway, and being constantly corrected and chided for using teen slang. As an adult I have had very entertaining conversations with my parents about how their own parents were convinced that they (my parents) represented the end of society as they (my grandparents) knew it. And while we didn’t turn out so bad, I have a sinking feeling every time I see an adult behave poorly in public, act disrespectfully to other adults in front of their children, and show up regularly on the evening news as perpetrators of a broad range of crimes. If we are going to ask “what is the world coming to,” shouldn’t we be asking it of ourselves?

Nearly a year ago I logged on to linkedin.com and set up a profile. I was curious about it because a reviewer in some magazine, Time maybe, referred to it as “Facebook for grownups.” Anyway, I set up a profile, searched around a bit, and decided that not much was going on. About two weeks ago [...]

Dale Dauten’s most recent column should be required business reading. Of course, that’s sort of a teasing thing to say, because I can’t find an electronic link to it anywhere. The title is “Let Us All Praise the Quirky, Weird Ones,” and it starts with a quote by William James that says “A great many people think [...]