How Parents are like Politicians

When Hera learns that her pet Dido would suffer a terrible and horrific fate, she goes to intervene by setting Cupid upon Aeneas.  While Aeneas talks to Dido, Cupid guides their falling in love, which in the end, destroys Dido, who kills herself upon a funeral pyre.

Parents often think they know better than their children, because a great majority of the time, they do.  Parents know the consequences of having unprotected teenage sex; they know the consequences of dropping out of high school.  They don't want their kids to make the same mistakes they did, and loving their children, they strive to keep their children out of trouble.

The problem is that knowing is not enough.  Intervening, if done badly, can worsen the situation.  Romeo and Juliet's parents learned that the hard way.  I am particularly bad at getting the message across to junior people that I think they're making mistakes.  One, I hate sounding like I know better, two, I may be wrong and three, I have a hard time after a certain point telling them things that they don't like to hear.  Sitting by and watching the prediction unfold, though, generates feelings of resignation.  I wonder if this was in fact the first best solution.  In my life, the blame gets thrown to me: I'm not a good enough communicator.

I accept that better communicators have easier times getting undesirable messages across.  I think it would be good for me to study great orators, debaters, speakers, advertisers, and marketers.

That having been said, politicians, managers, and everybody who has sat by watching a bad decision unfold knows this frustration.  Anyone who foresaw Bear's liquidity issue or the current credit crisis must have experienced a painful period where they knew this was going to come, nobody listened, and now this happened.  A number of good speakers predicted both; I think that we as a people didn't know how to listen or know that under all that good marketing and oration was an absolute truth, an undesirable truth, that was not being heard.

Knowing in advance could have helped.  We learn so much in school about how to be good speakers and debaters.  Schools should have an obligation to teach us how to be good listeners.  In Asia they say that flies enter American mouths we open them so much.  We know that here, the best speakers often gets what they want.

The best listener also gets what he or she wants, but in a different situation.  I think it would be great to be both.