How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow, this book was great. As I am preparing to be a parent, it is so nice to have some concrete examples of how to handle communication with kids to the methods that my parents used.



This book basis it’s ideas around encouraging autonomy in kids. It encourages kids to have their own feelings, mistakes and creativity by encouraging parents to back off when appropriate. In addition to having examples, there are a number of pages that are done workbook-style. I think these will really come in handy when I have a kid and am frustrated with my interactions with them and need to seek some guidance.



I think this book is a great resource for any parent or anyone that has relationships with kids.


View all my reviews.

Having to make plans for our future children in case anything happens to us really highlights the fact that we do not know them.  Isn’t it weird that we are going to be committing our lives to children that we don’t know?  Not only that, but we are asking our friends to commit to them, as well.  I guess that for anyone, choosing godparents is a difficult decision.  But, in our case, we will be entering the lives of children that are already somewhat developed. They will be capable of liking and disliking things, as well as being liked or disliked, more so than an infant.

Once we have matched with children, there are approximately 1 month of visits, with increasing amounts of intimacy with the kids.   Many people have asked if this is a trial period, which is a really logical question, but it is not.  The social workers ask that we be pretty sure that we can commit to the children once we get to the point of meeting them, since it would be no good for them to be rejected.  The visits actually provide the healthiest emotional situation for the children to begin properly detaching from their current care situation and begin their attachment to our family.  While these children may have been rashly pulled from place to place previously, for this placement, they try to be as careful as possible.

Our friends that have gone through the adoption process, describe it as a leap of faith. No one can ever be 100% sure that they are making the “right” decision. That concept is even a bit irrelevant, just as one will never know whether they’ve birthed the “right” kid.  Of course, we go into this knowing that we will be dealing with the emotional fallout of their difficult pasts from the very beginning and we do need to assess the level of behavioral issues that we are able to handle.  I suppose that most parents are able to handle this more organically and slowly as the child develops.  But, within establishing this criteria, we are just going to trust in the fact that we will be able to work it out.

As my nieces and nephews get older and I see the relationship with their parents change, I see that blood is thick, but not always thick enough.  Kids are often not going to choose to be close to their parents, but the reverse is also true, a parent may not like some of the choices their kid is making as they grow and become independent.

If it weren’t for the support of the people that are closest to us, I don’t think I could enter this process at all. My biggest fear is having a migraine, which basically incapacitate me, and having full responsibility of my kids.  Luckily, I do have many friends and neighbhors that I can call.  Of course, this is really no different than if we were to birth our own child.

We were first required to have a respite parent, who is a secondary emergency contact to us. That is the only person that the children will legally be able to spend the night with while they are our foster children.  N- had his background checked, was fingerprinted and took CPR.  It wasn’t a great leap from there to figure than N- and his partner would also be great godparents, since they will be two of the primary caretakers in these kids lives with us.

We picked them as godparents for a number of reasons.  They live near us, we trust their judgment and they are two of our best friends. R- has a teenage son that we adore and we are looking forward to him being a part of the kids lives, too.

They also have some qualities that are different than us, which we hope will help enrich and balance our children’s lives.  N- is a Christian, which many children in the foster system are.  We plan to support our children in any interests that they want to pursue, but if Christianity is one of them, it will be much easier with N- involved.

Finally, they are a trans-racial couple.  It is very possible that our children will be of a different race than us. We feel so lucky that we have people of many colors in our primary support network and we decided that this was an ideal quality in our godparents, as well.

The third and final class that we took in preparation to becoming foster parents was a class on state home certification.  The state of California has certain requirements for the home that the kids will be living in, most of which have to do with preventing accidents or injury in relation to water bodies, medications and chemicals and falls.

The inspection doesn’t actually happen until the household is matched with kids.  Different ages may have different requirements.  The height of the kids may affect what is out of reach for them. The gender and age of kids may affect whether they can share a room or whether they can have bunk beds.  The class is there to give you a general idea of the things that will need to get done and some of the things may happen last minute.  A few people have recommended that the child’s bedding is bought together, as a family during one of the visits with them, for another example.

By the time that expecting parents make it to this class, they are all the way through the agency’s process or very near the end.  Everyone was really excited and eager.  We had jumped through the hoops and earned our place in that room.  All of us had a nervous anticipation.  Those of us that were still working through the process had typically spent between 6 months and a year getting to that place, patiently waiting for each step.  In this boat, we all felt like giving our social workers a nudge to finish that home study already!

Those that were done with the process knew that kids were so close, they could almost taste it (so to speak).  A woman in this situation summed it up well by saying that she was constantly putting up shelves, it was her way of dealing with her nervous energy.  She couldn’t believe how many places that there were to put up shelves!  Closets, hallways, near other shelves…

For the last few weeks, I have been obsessing about painting. It started gradually, by just thinking about it.  We gave our tenant notice for July 1st. It was J-’s birthday right after and I was working a lot. He spent most of a week, using his elbow grease to get the place clean. We hosted the party and collapsed in a exhaustion for a little while.  Once we got our energy back, my work slowed down.  I started finishing painting projects in my massage studio that weren’t quite done. I started going to paint stores and looking at pictures online of kids rooms.  I became fixated on creating a giant chalkboard for teh kids to write on.  Actually, I wanted 2 walls.  After a few days, I started waking up from painting dreams and not being able to sleep.  At this point, I realized that painting was my version of putting up shelves, it was where I was storing my nervous energy.  It was my way of nesting and incorporating our new space into our home.

Finally, I had collected enough pictures that I showed them to J- and we were able to narrow it down.  We had chosen our colors, and I started mulling over where they would be applied.  J- dropped me of at the eco paint store and I spent about 20 minutes looking through their colors until I had made my choices. With one small adjustment from J-, we made the purchase.  That night, I did have a dream that I had made one wrong choice, but in the end, I am perfectly happy.

There were a few things that I didn’t realize until after we had started the painting and gotten several of the colors up.  The colors that we had chosen happened to be very similar to the colors in the rest of the house, just brighter, more playful versions of them…appropriately so, since it is giant kid romper room that we are painting.  Secondly, the colors match (not exactly, but well enough) the kids furniture that I grew up with that we now have.

Ultimately, putting up shelves, painting…are all just ways for us to have tangible milestones that our lives are changing.  To bring the reality of children in our home one step closer.

About a year ago, when we first began working with our agency, it seemed as though the “home study” was the holy grail, that once we got there, we were home free. Now, it is beginning to feel like the Sisyphus challenge.  The home study is the document that the children’s social worker uses to determine whether you are a good match for the children on their caseload.  Therefore, the more accurate and detailed the homestudy is, the better the match will be.

The initial interviews in June went well. We had two visits from a social worker who interviewed Jeff and I together and each of us separately.  Our tenant was scheduled to move out July 1st, and we we had been telling our friends that we expected to begin the matching process sometime in July. Our hopes were still high as everyone was telling us that writing the home study would not take long.

After the interviews, G- had written the first draft of the homestudy fairly quickly.  The most frustrating thing about the process has been that during our initial interviews, I wasn’t careful about some things that I said and they are still coming back to haunt me.  See my previous blog entry about this.

The last phase of the process is making edits to the first draft.  This is what has taken much longer than we expected.  There were several rounds of questions going from the director to the social worker to us. It seems as though every time we talk to someone at our agency, they are expecting it to be just a few days until the next step of our home study happens.

The real problem is that we had to call them each time there was a delay after a few times, our confidence has begun to wane that we made the right choice to go with this agency.  We realize that if we had gone directly through Alameda County we could have had kids in the home by now. On the other hand, we realize that the deliberateness of our process will more likely lead to a better match.  It turns out there was some staff turnover, which led to the delays and the poor communication.

The good news is that we are the last eyes that may edit the homestudy and it is in the mail today.  So hopefully, this anxious time is coming to a close and we WILL begin matching soon.

Punk Cookery, The Punk Rocker’s Cafe Cookbook, Vegetarian Specialties by Ian Finn

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I certainly haven’t tried every recipe in this book, but I have tried enough to know that it is spot on for what it is offering, which is a variety of grubbing, basic vegetarian recipes that provide some quantity. You won’t feed hundreds with these recipes, but you will feed 10.

I don’t use cookbooks very often. When I do, I am looking for inspiration for something new to try or I am looking for a basis on which to apply my own creative process upon. Even when I do use a cookbook, I rarely prepare the recipe exactly as directed.

There are a number of things that are especially cool about Punk Cookery.

First is Ian’s commentary. Although we are from different ends of the country, we are from the same scene. Like Ian, these recipes have history, which he shares with the user.

Second is that these recipes are good for a beginner or an experienced cook. I admit that a lot of times I pull out Betty Crocker when I am baking and modify these old school recipes to be vegan. But how do you do that for Lentil Loaf or Chocolate Tofu Pie? Well, you don’t…but this book has these recipes that can be followed to the T by a beginner or modified by an experienced cook.

Finally, there are simply some really cool and unusual recipes in here. My favorite section is the salads, which includes recipes for Sweet Pea Guacamole, Wild Rice & Artichoke, Greek Potatoes and more. I think there are probably recipes from about 8 different cultures. I also have Ian’s Ethiopian-Inspired Cooking, which I have been wanting to try.

ooh…I gotta go wisk my herbed polenta before it burns…


View all my reviews.

Several families at our Foster Parent class recommended 1-2-3 Magic.  I was talking to my friend A-, who is a quadriplegic mom (so she completely relies on verbal control of her kid); her kid is almost 2 and she really needed to figure out some new methods of getting behavior from her daughter.

I loved this book because of a few key points that I learned a lot from and will use in my parenting, regardless of whether I am using the 1-2-3 Magic method.

• It seperates “stop” and “start” behaviors, pointing out that how you get kids to do these different categories of behavior is going to be different.
• It seperates the “heat of the moment” of conflict from the lesson of the conflict.  It doesn’t try to get communication going when tempers are flared.
• It focuses on giving kids individual attention rather than trying to do things in larger groups when jealousies may be triggered and when sometimes noone gets their needs met.
• It gives clear examples of how to set up systems of punishment and reward that gets the whole family in a habit of understanding what is expected.

Basically, the premise is that behaviors can be stopped by simply getting the kids used to counting up to a time-out.  It gives them 2 chances within a short period of time to alter their behavior, then leads them to a punishment. The book also offers 7 suggestions for starting behaviors, including punishments and reward systems.

After reading the reviews, I have noted several problems with the book that others have mentioned.  First is that counting to get desired behavior can be obnoxious sometimes.  On the other hand, I see it as a last resort.  The whole point is that talking to your kids isn’t working, it can escalate into an argument and your kid still isn’t getting the desired behavior.  I actually think that this book is oriented towards people that have anger-management issues because at the beginning it speaks of avoiding hitting your kids.  Not that the book won’t work for anyone, it can.

Secondly, it has a bias about kids that not everyone will agree with.  It is premised on the fact that children are not rational small people, but selfish and greedy by nature.  They suggest that teaching kids from a young age is more similar to animal training than to working with other adults.  This leads to a pretty formulaic approach to time-out based punishment.  I agree with the criticisms that there is more to teaching kids than this.  Again, the whole point of the book is that during the heat of the battle of wills is probably not the right time to have that conversation for most families. The kid is upset, maybe the parent is, too.  Everyone needs a time-out before the lesson can really be considered.  Of course, this may not be true for all families, but many of the negatively portrayed scenarios described in this book sure remind me of my family.

So, I think that rather than dissing this book, it needs to be considered that it is actually not meant to be the only resource that parents will be using.  It is simply a discipline system that is a tool among other resources that one is using to teach.  Now I am reading How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so that Kids Will Talk, which I hope will be a good companion to it.

It has been hard for me to claim the word “abusive” with regards to my childhood, partly because I knew families that were much more violent than mine.  On the other hand, there was spanking, pinching hand-slapping and a lot of emotional abuse in my upbringing.  I would say that physically, my childhood was borderline abusive, emotionally, it was abusive. 

I have not done much to confront these issues other than come to terms with myself, my desires and how my choices reflect these.  I haven’t ever felt like demonizing my parents for the situation that I grew up in; it is easy for me to see that they did a much better job raising their children than their parents did raising them. With one exception (where someone that I was working on a project with had a highly charged tantrum that brought back all of the fear that I experienced when my dad “went off”), I have been able to push the abuse to the back of my mind and simply make choices that are different than my parents so that the issue doesn’t permeate my life any longer.  Until now.

It is easy to be critical of my parents and the choices that they made around my growth. It is easy to say that I will never be like them and that I will do as good of a job or better without resorting to corporal punishment or threats.  Based on conversations with our adoption agency and with J-, I realized that some of the bigger holes in my ideas about child raising are around discipline.  It actually isn’t enough to not believe in hitting kids.  I have been told that without actively understanding and practicing the alternatives, it will be second nature for me to revert into the sorts of punishment that I was raised with.

I had trouble believing this was true.  I mean, I have steered my life so far away from the life that my parents had. I am a lot like my mom in some ways, but I married a man so different than my dad.   But recently, I have been noticing behaviors of my mother showing up in me around J-, when I am tired or grumpy and in a zone where I am saying things without really thinking about them first.  I am proud of myself that I notice, and sometimes I even catch myself before I speak.  I am confident that I will not just “slip into” physically punishing my kids, but the emotional control is much trickier.  Both of my parents had a temper had a very emotional relationship to our discipline.

The one easy answer that I have had to how I will deal with disciplining our kids is humor.  I think that humor can be very effective for changing the dynamics of  a situation and getting the kids out of immediately critical situations, but something more is needed.  Breaking the children’s habit of getting themselves into trouble and helping them understand the consequences of their actions are important, as well. 

So, I have been hitting the books. I have been paying attention to how other parents interact with their kids.  I have a network of friends that I will be able to contact when I can’t figure out the right thing to do.  We also expect to be in a lot of therapy.

I originally saw our second dog, Rocky on petfinder.com. I knew as soon as I saw him that he was the dog for us. He looked a lot like Clover, but was smaller and male. We thought that all of these things made him very compatible with Clover.  Not to mention that he had the cutest little underbite that gives his face an adorable frowny quality that made me crazy about him.  Every so often, even though I know that we can’t get another dog anytime soon, I look at the site to coo over the puppies available.

I found out a long time ago that there is actually a website with kids posted for adoption in California. Some counties use it more than others, but generally, the kids are difficult to place kids with either large sibling groups or major disabilities.  These kids need as much exposure as possible to increase their chances of getting adopted.  They keep the level of exploitation of the kids at a minimum by making the descriptions pretty vague.

I find this site a little off-putting, but of course, I can’t resist looking, especially now that we are getting closer to the matching process.  With a picture or two and a paragraph, it actually doesn’t seem very realistic that we will actually end up with a kid that I see there, but it is all that I have to go on and so far I have seen a couple of potential matches for us.

By the way, the website is really NOT kidfinder.com. I entered that address in and a splash page from Korea came up.  They may be able to help you find a kid, but it isn’t actually clear what their site is for, but it is probably not for foster-to-adopt.

When we do enter the matching process, we will have access to our agencies books that are filled with pictures and profiles of the kids available from all over the state.  Apparently new profiles are released the 1st and 2nd week of the month and it is a big scene with all of the parents showing up and looking at the books together.

All foster parents are required to take a class through the county or their sponsoring agency.  It covered a wide range of topics from an overview of the fost-adopt process and parenting techniques to typical scenarios that children “in the system” have gone through.  The class was a very positive thing that relieved many of our fears. On the other hand, looking at the big picture left me with a feeling of angst that I haven’t fully come to terms with.

One of the exercises discussed in the class, and also in A Child’s Journey Through Placement was imagining that you are at home with your spouse, who is slightly drunk and watching a football game.  Your spouse and your kids aren’t perfect, but you love them and they are your family.  Suddenly, some people show up at your door and take you away to a different house with a whole other family. The family’s house is really clean and they are all smiling and welcoming, but it is weird and you really want to go back home to your own family. 

This is the first time that it really dawned on me what it means to go and live with complete strangers.  In addition to not knowing us, we will likely be so very different from any people that they have known, certainly very different from their parents.  They may have no frame of reference in which to place us; if they do it may even be negative.  This made me reflect on my own past.

My parents did not have many friends and they didn’t have contact with my godparents from the time that I was about 10. Nonetheless, we had a close, but small, family and I had several friends whose families I was close to.  I think that if something had happened to my parents, I would have had familiar places where I would have been well taken care of.  So if I had places to go, even with the little amount of “community” that my family had, where does that leave these kids?  How ravaged are the communities that these kids are coming from, where there are no family members, no neighbors, no friends of the kids that are able and willing to take them?  Where does this kind of background leave the state of the hearts and minds of these children?

This made me feel selfish, that instead of supporting these communities to keep their children, that through the system, I will support their removal.  Is it just a band-aid solution to find more stable home placements for the kids?  Or, is it breaking the cycle of neglect and abuse that takes place in multiple generations of these families, which in turn will eradicate these wrongdoings.  Many studies have shown that it is better for the children to be removed from these negative situations more quickly and more permanently.  And ultimately, what is best for the children is best for the future.  Right?

What has also been studied is cultural assimilation, which remains very controversial.  As far as child development, most studies show that children in a transracial family can do as well as children in a family of their own ethnicity, provided that they are given resources to connect with people and ideas of their own ethnicity.  The law has used this to rationalize transracial placements if that is the best for the child.  But the flip side of the question is what is best for the community?  Seperatists would most certainly argue that the children can only truly maintain the values of their people by living, eating, schooling and communing primarily with those of their same ethnicity.  I do not know the details of this, but Native Americans have a different level of control over children that leave the care of others in their nation, which takes that issue to heart. 

The county’s philosophy of concurrent planning does a little to remove the conflict from this senario.  They expect the foster parents to join in community with the child and support them and stay in their lives, whether they will be adopted or not.  This is a tall order for people like us, who don’t see ourselves as foster parents, primarily, but as adoptive parents.

Since we do not have children yet or know who they will be, we do not know what is in store for us as far as contact with family members, friends, communities or institutions that the kids will be a part of before we met them. I do know that we expect our lives and relationships to change based on the needs and desires of our children, which may be very different from ours. 

I recently watched Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.  I didn’t learn anything new since I had already studied this stuff in college.  15 years later, it is totally mainstream.  Although I believed it all along, the fact that it has become more widely accepted has still made it feel bigger to me, more impending, maybe.  The main thing that struck me about the movie is the graphs that Gore uses to demonstrate his points.  And things have changed in 15 years.  The number crunching has improved and the our earth’s balance is on an ever-increasing course to destruction, accelerating along the way.   

Okay, I admit it. I have a dark side…it doesn’t take much for me to start envisioning large scale disaster scenarios, man-made or natural alike.  I don’t know where it comes from, maybe being allowed to watch really violent movies from a young age or from reading a lot of science fiction.  Top this with a college education focused on economic geography and critical theory meant that I kissed any kind of naivite away along time ago.   So, the last few months with water rationing, global food shortages, soaring gas demand, midwest floods and recent earthquakes, I immediately start imagining impending doom and gloom.  Now that I can smell the fires of the last few weeks…I can smell the doom and gloom; and I know that it is much worse where live.

When I saw Mark Morford’s SF Gate column, I was amazed that this kind of thinking made it to the mainstream press, although Morford does tend to be darker than your average liberal.  This kind of mindset has its advantages; I am very prepared…my earthquake kit is stocked and my gas tank stays 1/2 full.

Ironically, I actually think that my apocalyptic thinking comes from a place of hope and optimism.  I have always had trouble reconciling my radical utopian ideals with the process that will actually get us out of the mess we are in and into something better.  I have often considered mass destruction, either man-made or a series of catastrophes driven by nature to be the most likely “solution” to the question.

Of course, environmental and social problems are not the same.  I think that inevitably, they do have a relationship and my assumption is that they drive each other.  I often wonder; how bad can things get?  Not to say that they are bad for me, personally…on the contrary, but I am one of the last people that would be a victim of a systemic breakdown.  The do seem bad around me and moreso, they seem on the verge of getting really bad.  I wonder if my view of the current status of the world is egotistical and due to the fact that I am a product of the uber-materialistic Regan era.  For those who are closer to the Great Depression or the Holocaust, do things look so bad? 

This is not to say that I want mass destruction.  If I see it as the most likely way to the end result that I want, do I have to want the event itself? I don’t think so.  I see many downsides to catastrophe, including the potential for a Malthusian population cut.  I also don’t see a utopian, radical future as the most likely end result to apocalyptic events, there are a lot of other options that would be very ugly and are much more likely.

On the other hand, movements of ecological change and social justice may be taking hold on a larger scale.  Sometimes I think they are, other times I believe that I am in a small bubble of the world in which they are.  Most of the time, I am not really sure that it matters.  At this point, maybe these changes are just band-aids that are keeping the status quo while we progressively march to in inevitable revolution.  At this point, maybe it is just too darn late.