Door-2-Math Blog

I’m not a car person, so up keeping an old car (especially an old Ford minivan like the one we’ve got) is by no means a pleasant task. But, as it’s ingrained into any Chinese, you just simply don’t toss an old working thing in favor of a new one. Anyway, when the AC failed on of the hottest desert days, I dreaded to take my chance with a unknown mechanic with a shop that literally looked like a hole in the wall. What does this have to do with helping my child to learn math, you ask? Well, let me get to it.

Taking the old grandma-car to this unknown mechanic turned out to be a blessing in disguise. As I returned for his verdict on the state of our old AC, he ingeniously read my discomfort and brilliantly used my kind of communication currency to:

1. get through to me that not only he is looking out for my best interests but
2. that he is the best one for the job and
3. managed to leave me feeling I’ve been taken care of.

Now mind you I ended up spending $300 that I was in no mood to spend. Now imagine you can get your Johnny to feel the way I felt after he spent 2 hours on the homework the he was in no mood to complete!! Talk about miracles! Reflecting back on my experience with the mechanic, here is my take on how he managed to get through to a person like myself, as non-mechanical as they come:

1. No jargon – I have no idea what a high-pressure cutout switch is nor do I care. He made sure that he had a diagram on hand and pointed to the parts that he intended to fix. That left me feeling good about not having mechanical vocabulary like he does — he was talking to me, not through me.
2. No threats – Not once did he say state the obvious that without AC, driving in a cooked minivan is uncomfortable. Maybe he was just using reverse psychology on me, but when he said that if you wait one more month, you might be able to wait till next April to fix the AC. Well, I know better. If I don’t fix it when its broken, pretty soon the whole car would be wasted away. It’s kind like saying one spoke off a wheel is no big deal, well except, with one gone, two is not far behind and pretty soon, the whole wheel collapses.
3. No denial of my discomfort – The mechanic, as unknown to me as a stranger on the road, did not try to brush away my discomfort with “it’s no a big problem. Only $300 will do”. $300 may or may not be lot, but what my discomfort of not really knowing/trusting him is.By acknowledging my discomfort with ‘I know you don’t yet know me nor my service,’ I didn’t have to keep on communicating my discomfort to him. A small passage in a Taoism text just popped in my head and it says, “ When too great forces collide, the one who knows how to yield wins”. Just like how water interacts with a stone -it is the ‘weaker’ water that shapes the stone and not the other ways around. By yielding to my discomfort and letting me be, the brilliant mechanic managed the formidable task at hand: winning my trust.
4. Reassurance – as I was signing by the X to pay for his service, he offered a 6-month insurance (or 6000 miles) for his service. What really finished me up is the following thought provoking quote he typed up on the warranty sheet:

“It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money…that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of dong the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot….it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
- John Ruskin (1819-1900)

So what can we take away from this mechanic and apply to helping your child to do homework? We have to understand their language or their communication currency. For some, the communication currency is the language of urgency, for some is obligation, and still others is emotion. Here’s what I mean (asking a 5 year old child to put out the plates for dinner): ¨

• Urgency – Johnny, can you please put out the plates before the casserole is warmed up in the microwave ¨
• Obligation – Johnny you promised to put out the plates ¨
• Emotion – mama will be sad if I sit down at the table and there is no plates

Why does this matter? For my son Byron, it can be extremely frustrating to talk from urgency or obligation. The request has to be repeated 5 times before he does it. This can be especially frustrating for my husband. However, when you talk to him from emotion, it works every time. This is his nature. He cares about whether mama is lonely, papa is sad, or sister is angry. For my daughter Alexa, urgency does the trick. Her communication style is opposite to Byron’s. She likes direct requests but sometimes has trouble seeing other people’s emotions. It’s easier to make a request of her, but it’s harder for her to steer clear of a fight with her brother.

Now what about doing homework? Both the parent and the child hate nagging that typically happens with the homework. But this is a familiar pattern that us parents typically get into when it comes to homework. Figuring out your child’s communication style is a shortcut. If you are not sure which one it is, first mimic his/her method of communications, and if this doesn’t help try several styles until you find something that works. Children inherently want to please their parents, and talking to them a certain way is not “manipulating” them but finding a language that they can understand.

Did he get my car fixed, you ask. You bet! Was I happy about his service? Absolutely! Am I stubbornly hanging on to my old minivan? You bet, but I’m also looking for a Toyota just in case!