Sans Fig Leaf
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"Meeting of minds"
17 January, 2008
A mother once told me the
story of her daughter's first checking account. Not long after the
first paycheck was deposited into said account, overdraft notices
started coming in the mail. The woman sat down with the daughter to
discuss what had happened. As she looked through the checkbook, the
mother was flabbergasted not just at how far overdrawn the daughter
was, but that she had continued to write checks after the first
overdraft notice had come in. "You've written checks totally more than
five times the amount you deposited! Why did you do that?"
The daughter's answer:
every check was for less than the amount she had deposited. Since each
check was, by itself, less than the amount she had deposited, she
reasoned, then all of the checks should have been good. She assumed
that the overdraft notice was a mistake, "because banks make mistakes
all the time."
My own mom occasionally
tells the story of how she'd told me to do the dishes while she was
busy elseswhere one afternoon. There were a rather large number of
dirty dishes that time, and long before I was finished washing them
all, I had completely filled the drainer. So I stacked the clean (but
wet) dishes all around the drainer.
When Mom came to check on
me, there was a rather precarious mountain of clean dishes dripping
water all over the cabinets and floor. And the rest of the kitchen was
even a worse mess than it had been before she left. It had never
occured to me that I could dry some of the dishes and put them away.
Nor had I understood that tidying up the counter top around the sink
was generally considered part and parcel of the job.
In my defense, I was only
nine years old at the time. Sadly, the daughter in the other anecdote
did not have that excuse.
One lesson you could glean
from these two stories that it is important to explain to kids,
explicitly, the details of any responsibility you give them.
To me, the deeper lesson
is that explaining isn't necessarily enough. Both mothers were certain,
before things went wrong, that they had explained thoroughly. Both kids
were certain they understood what was expected of them.
Unfortunately, it isn't
always easy to tell that there hasn't been a meeting of the minds.
Words and phrases can mean very different things to different people.
Our perspectives, assumptions, and past experiences all color our
understanding of each thing said and heard.
The more people involved,
the more ways misunderstandings can occur--rather than just add up,
they seem to multiply.
I try to remind myself of
that whenever I'm having trouble explaining something to someone else.
Until I understand them and their perspective, I can't possibly
construct an explanation that will make sense.
--Ruth Benedict
.