Tag: chaos

Posted on
by

I recently read Positive Discipline, the First Three Years, by Jane Nelson and Roslyn Ann Duffy, and have found their approach to be practically useful in learning how to better parent my almost three year old son1. It does not magically solve all problems, but does help me to roll with the punches. This is very important because when parenting a small child everything can be going along fine and then all of a sudden things change abruptly. Nelson and Duffy illustrate the importance of understanding your child’s (mis)behavior, so you can understand what is age appropriate and what could be an effort to regain connection. With that understanding of your child as a foundation, Nelson and Duffy recommend being kind and firm toward your child.

My wife and I are frequently realizing that we need a new plan when my son’s behavior abruptly changes. This happened after Christmas, when my son picked up the habit of throwing all his toys on the floor and then climbing on Mom or Dad’s desk and getting into stuff2. He also started throwing marathon fits when we turned off the TV. I started getting frustrated and angry and was overly forceful in taking my son away from my desk. It wasn’t effective because my son got a defiant look in his eyes, and went right back. Things felt out of control and unworkable for me. I wished that my son would just “listen” to me more.

Nelson and Duffy point out that if we want our kids to be strong and assertive as adults then we can’t demand them to be quiet and compliant as kids (Ch. 2). So that argues against yelling or punishing to enforce my arbitrary rules. But I also can’t let him watch many hours of TV and play with scissors, because things would get chaotic and dangerous – not good for us parents or the child. So what can I do? Positive Discipline gives some parenting tools that can help.

First I need to understand my son’s behavior, to figure out what is age appropriate (Ch 9.). At his age play is super important so it makes sense that he would want to get into his toys right away. With more toys than normal because of Christmas, maybe he just wants to see all of them before he decides on a toy. From that perspective throwing them all on the floor makes some sense. And then getting into Mommy and Daddy’s desks makes sense too because he has a need to explore and because he wants to imitate us. Finally with the TV, my son wants to have the autonomy to decide how long to watch. So these behaviors are totally age appropriate, but very difficult for us parents. This knowledge helps diffuse my anger. My son is not a little demon, he’s just a little person trying to explore and have autonomy.

Next I need to take action in a kind and firm way, that is respectful of my son’s needs and desires and of mine and my wife’s. Nelson and Duffy talk about the importance of deciding what you will do instead of what you want your child to do. It makes sense to focus on what you control. So in this case, I decided to pack away some of my son’s toys to make it more manageable when he throws them on the floor. It turns out that with fewer options, he ended up playing with the toys more and got into our desks less (a nice surprise!). With the TV fits, I didn’t know what to do so I looked it up and brainstormed with my wife. We came upon the idea of using a timer to set up an agreed upon time for TV (use of timers described in Ch.5). I was shocked when my son quietly shut off the TV after the timer went off! Since then there have still been fits, but the timer has helped a lot.

In writing about this episode, I realize how I could have done things differently that might have been better. The most important thing is to first connect with the child before taking corrective action. I could have validated my son’s feelings and apologized for being overly forceful. Sometimes just asking for a hug makes all the difference. Second, I need to remember that these Positive Discipline tools are not about controlling the child to make my life easier. Instead the idea is to collaboratively come up with a solution that works for all. As the parent with more experience and power, I definitely take the lead, but it’s critical to involve the child as much as possible. Sometimes that means offering limited choices and letting the child decide, or sometimes it means asking the child to help.

It’s about finding what works for you and your specific child. The specific actions will change with each kid and over time, but the overall approach can be helpful. Instead of yelling and punishing the child, we can seek to understand and connect. Letting kids do whatever they want is not the only alternative. Nelson and Duffy show there is a way to be firm while still being kind. We can involve kids in decisions and activities, allow them to face the challenges of life, and be there for them to encourage them. Ideally this approach respects the needs and desires of the child and the adult. I find it hopeful. I don’t think it will make things easier for me (or the child!), but I hope that it will make the experience more meaningful and joyful.

It’s difficult to share my experience with applying Positive Discipline to my parenting because I don’t want to come off as having figured everything out. Since starting to write this post, we have come up against new parenting challenges. Things are definitely a work in progress! But, writing about it helps me to learn, and maybe someone else will find this book useful too. To anyone who interacts with kids, I’m curious to hear what you find helpful. And if you are a kid, let me know what parenting approaches you prefer!

  1. Jane Nelson and Roslyn Ann Duffy. Positive Discipline, the First Three Years. Harmony 2015. https://www.positivediscipline.com/products/positive-discipline-first-three-years-revised-and-updated
  2. As remembered by me and with permission from my wife and son. March, 2021.

Posted on
by

I’m interested in building up a personal store of knowledge – good ideas, data, memories, and notes – and saving it in a way that I can quickly and easily make use of this information. Without some external way of saving things, I tend to forget them. The dream is that these ideas and pieces of information don’t have to be re-thought up or re-found each time but can be explored to rapidly generate more ideas. Ideally this would help me solve problems and help generate new knowledge for the wider society.

In reality this has turned out to be much harder than I expected. In my experience, it is easy to save information but hard to find it and make use of it later. The vast majority of my files have never been used after I saved them. When I do happen to remember a piece of information that I want to look up, I tend to have trouble finding it. This unfortunate situation surprised me. I had bought into the idea that there is essentially no cost to saving things digitally so I should save everything, and second that digital tools should make it easy to find things. I was wrong on both counts.

The difficulty of storing information became a real problem for me in grad school when I was doing research for my PhD in physics. I had to deal with countless journal articles, presentations, calculations, brainstorming sketches, experimental data, notes from talks/classes, and different versions of code (I wasn’t using version control, aaahhh!). At first, I thought my problems were just caused by the wrong organizational system. So I tried different systems, but despite having advantages and disadvantages they didn’t solve the underlying problem for me.

Thanks to my misadventures, I’m learning that forgetting is a feature not a bug. When I try to remember all my ideas and information, the default organizational systems struggle and while specialized tools can help they also tend to silo information. It turns out, there is a need to limit the inflow of information and the amount of work in progress. I need the information and ideas that are relevant to me, and everything else is unlikely to be needed, and should be let go. In a way my organization system for saving ideas and information is an extension of my brain. My brain is quite good at forgetting things (sometimes too good!). So while it is important to have good tools and organization, shouldn’t my system also forget things?

The default ways of organizing tend to be digital analogues to the way we store papers: papers on the desk, in notebooks, and in folders. These systems fail in similar ways to paper based systems. The simplest approach is to just put everything you need on the desktop, but this quickly fails if you have more than around ten files. The next simplest is to create notebooks; essentially storing the files in chronological order (for example by starting the filename with the date). This helps because you can quickly find a file if you remember when you worked on it, which tends to happen for things you recently worked on. However this approach makes it hard to see connections between ideas from different times1. You can’t re-arrange the ideas as you learn more; they are fixed in chronological order.

The next strategy that I’ve tried is putting files in a folder structure according to topic. This seems like a reasonable idea, but quickly becomes quicksand for ideas. Inevitably, I need to change the folder structure as I learn to better reflect the association between my files. The changes make it hard to remember where things are and breaks any references to file paths. As I create more folders, I find it difficult to remember the context underlying the relationships between folders. This can lead to folders with mashed up collections of files and sub-folders that don’t make sense.

Based on these struggles, I have turned to more specialized tools as a way to solve my organizational challenges. They can make a huge difference, but can create silos of information. For example, I started using Zotero in grad school, to keep track of all my research articles. This was a huge improvement over putting papers in topic based folders and trying to cram paper keywords into the filenames. Zotero has useful tools that allowed me to generate bibliographies automatically and to save papers directly from the browser. But now I had a separate store of papers that wasn’t tightly integrated with my research data and information; it was in a separate silo. This turned into a problem when I needed to reinstall my operating system. All my other files were restored but I had trouble recovering my Zotero papers. Eventually I was able to recover them, but it highlights that separate silos increase the complexity of securing my data.

Ultimately tools won’t help if the information is not useful. Marie Kondo says throw away all papers (except what you really need)2, and I think the same could be said for digital information too. She says this because according to her core principle, your things should “spark joy” and she finds papers rarely spark joy. Do my digital files and information spark joy? The majority probably don’t. I’m not totally sure because most are in these old folders that I never look at.

Information tends to bring me more joy when it is connected to something bigger, and this is where tools can help. For example, the “Untitled” file in an old folder called “New” is probably not useful. The context is lost; it is just a fragment. In contrast, a note in an Evernote notebook is part of something bigger. Evernote allows the notes to be displayed in different ways which can help the context to be recovered, and it is easy to search. It’s also easier to make connections between different notes with tags or with links.

Based on these experiences, I have begun to seriously fight the accumulation of unnecessary fragments and now try to only keep things that are part of a “whole”. One practice that has helped a lot is to channel the inflow of information. By default, there many different places that new files are saved, which is bad because it’s hard to evaluate what should be kept. To make things more manageable, I create a single “Inbox” folder where any new file is saved temporarily until it can be saved in an appropriate place (I got the idea from this blog post3). This little change gave visibility to the problem, because I could easily see files building up. Now that the files were in one place, it was more straightforward to decide what to keep and what to delete (although I still put it off sometimes!). This is a small step toward protecting my digital space and being intentional about what I allow in.

Limiting the amount of work in progress is also critical. Work in progress can be many things: unfinished projects, ideas that need to be pursued, or emails that need to be responded to. Too much work in progress is bad for multiple reasons (Agile frameworks like Kanban4 and Scrum5 are dedicated to limiting work in progress), but in regard to storing information, the unfinished work means that there are lots of associated files and information that don’t bring joy. Instead of being sources of useful information, these incomplete files require additional work and are difficult to understand because of missing context. One tactic that helps limit the work in progress is to create a single “Current Projects” folder for things that are being actively worked on (this is another good idea from this blog post3). With all the active work in one place it is easier to see when things are getting overwhelming. When that happens, I need to let go of things that I am never going to do and work to finish the projects that are important.

Organization requires deep change in behavior. I am part of the knowledge organization system, so if the system is going to succeed then I need to be working too. This means being more intentional with what I keep and with how I keep the things that are important. The hard part is letting go. Sometimes that means deleting now and sometimes it means letting something be buried in the bottom of a list of notes. Either way this reserves the prime spots for the most useful information. As part of my system, I also need to focus on what is most important. This is a huge challenge because it requires saying “No” to some demands, and risking the disapproval of others. When those demands come from bosses, significant others, or children it’s difficult to say no. But by setting limits, I will be able to make the most of my limited resources and give the most back to those in my life.

The effort is worth it for me. As I have been implementing these changes, I have found that I spend less time searching for files, notes or projects from a few months ago. It still happens sometimes, but usually when I didn’t follow my own rules! My store of information is not some magically useful thing that I will use in the future, but a limited resource that I rely on and enjoy now. It has room to grow, with plenty of unneeded information that can be pruned and lots more that can be added in an integrated way. This practice is helping me to think more clearly. Letting go of information, forgetting, is helping me to make connections between the important ideas that are left.

  1. David B. Clear, “Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive”, https://writingcooperative.com/zettelkasten-how-one-german-scholar-was-so-freakishly-productive-997e4e0ca125.
  2. Kondo, Marie. the life-changing magic of tidying up. 2014 p 96.
  3. Mark Virtue, “Zen and the Art of File and Folder Organization”, https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15677/zen-and-the-art-of-file-and-folder-organization/.
  4. David J. Anderson, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business.
  5. Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process.

Posted on
by

I really like a little book called This Blessed Mess by Patricia H. Livingston. It is my go to book when my stomach is tied up in knots, and I am having trouble sleeping. I open it up to a random chapter, and tend to find a story that makes me laugh or sometimes to cry a little. Then I can sleep in peace.

Livingston describes how life can be chaotic and uncertain, but how there is goodness throughout. She describes how turmoil in her life forced her to challenge her ideas of God and the world. The science of chaos theory gave her a fresh perspective to appreciate the unpredictable nature of our lives and to make sense of where God is in all of the mess. Her personal stories make these ideas relatable and alive.

I find Livingston’s story to be hopeful and inspiring. Faith and science are both really important to me, so I love it when Livingston talks about faith in a way that takes science seriously. Chaos theory is great too; learning about it in college was part of what inspired me to go to grad school and study soft matter physics. I find chaos theory to be attractive because it shows that life can not be predicted. There is something wild and free about that. Livingston helps me to remember that I am not alone in the wilderness, but God is mysteriously there with me, ready to create something wonderful and new.