This week over at BNET, I had two posts. The first was called “How To Get a Raise (And Get Your Kid To Eat His Veggies).” I interviewed Stuart Diamond, author of Getting More and a famed negotiation professor at Wharton, about ways to better handle negotiation, including negotiation with our little ones. I can’t say the negotiation tactics have worked yet with my 3-year-old. Our positions (Resolved: we will eat vegetables and Resolved: not even if we have to starve) are pretty diametrically opposed. I’ll keep you posted on that one.
I also wrote a post on Fighting the Email Addiction. Over the holidays, I went on an email fast for 5 days while my husband and I were outside the country. His phone worked, so family members could reach him in emergencies. But everything else I decided not to bother with. A few emails did come in that normally I would have responded to right away. I did miss some opportunities. But others will come, and more or less life moves along. It’s a reminder to me that if nothing goes horribly wrong when I don’t check for 5 days, I can certainly not check for 2 hours while I focus on a bigger project.
Good for you to stay “out-of-touch” for a while. I have been going on an email/computer diet too. I only check on Tuesday and Friday mornings, otherwise i spend (read: waste) too much time on the computer altogether. My closest friends and family know that if it is important, I have a phone.
Getting More is on hold for me at the library and I am interested to see how it will help me work things out with my principal/
co-teachers/students, when I return to the classroom in the fall. (My observations have told me that there are LOTS of meetings. I don’t like useless meetings.)
@Denise – it’s funny, because as I’m learning as I write for BNET, one of the big games of blog readership is to get people to click on the various links you stick in there of other content. The idea is to keep them clicking on different pages — hopefully within your site — for hours. And the human brain definitely works that way. You follow a link, then another link to something that seems interesting and then, whoa, is it noon already? I’m thinking of writing a time management post called “Don’t Click On That LInk!” but of course I get paid a bonus based on clicks so this would be pretty self-defeating 🙂
About the veggies specifically, I can tell you what worked for me. I didn’t love Stuart Diamond’s suggestions, because to me, they sound like they involve constant negotiation.
My daughter, at about 3 1/2, shut down on eating all veggies. Just refused. I kind of understood where this was coming from– we had just moved, she had gotten a new brother– and we were having major control wars over whether she was going to eat any veggies. Every meal was turning into a battle. Who wants to spend their hours doing that?
I finally made a deal with her, because I didn’t like fighting about it every night. I told her that she must come up with ONE veggie that she is willing to eat without complaint. If she tells me the ONE veggie, I, for my part, will make it available every night at dinner. If we go out, and her veggie is available at the restaurant/friend’s house, she has to eat it. If it’s not, I will not even suggest she eat another veggie. No nagging. But she had to be willing to always eat that one veggie without complaint.
This worked like a charm for us. She picked (believe it or not)– lima beans. Lima beans were convenient because it is rather easy to keep bags in the freezer and nuke a few, no matter what else you are having for dinner. She kept her end of the bargain– I kept my end. No mention of eating vegetables if we were at a restaurant with no lima beans. (OK, the downside of lima beans were that restaurants/other people basically don’t serve them–though maybe that was an upside– gave me a chance to demonstrate my commitment to the bargain). This lasted about a month.
After about a month, one night she said, “do you mind if I eat your broccoli instead of my lima beans?” And that was it– I kept producing the lima beans as an option for maybe a week or so, but she consistently chose what we were having for dinner. She never gave the slightest difficulty about eating veggies ever since—– she is 12 now and first choice on any menu is the most vegetable and bean laden soup. Actually, the only veggie she doesn’t like now is……Lima beans!
@Judy- I love this. I’m going to try it with my 3-year-old. We are actually at zero veggies at the moment, though he will eat various fruits (mandarin oranges, bananas, grapes, strawberries, pineapple, applesauce, etc.) I’m trying to think what the most kid friendly veggie is. Probably baby carrots, but we will have to figure this out.