Non sequitur

I have been trying to get the Gen-Y-Fish to stop just blurting out his random thoughts as they come into his head. He has a bad habit of voicing these very annoying non sequiturs.

The best I can do in such a short period of stewardship is to suggest that this is ineffective; hoping that this works away in his sub conscious and eventually he becomes aware of the issue and does something about it.

I also gave him a summary of how effective communication works, namely to think carefully before talking, and to ensure whatever is coming out is useful. I note to him that people who randomly ramble also suffer a similar problem to the boy that cried wolf, namely that people only vaguely listen to them on the basis that whatever is coming out at any particular moment is probably rubbish.

Remember this – kids don’t work it out for themselves very quickly, and we can offer them years of short-cuts if we just observe them and open our mouths. Too many people think they are being nice to kids by not ‘criticising’ them because they think such activity would destroy their ‘self-confidence’.

Well why then does the Gen-Y-Fish have such low self-confidence? I smell a rat and that rat is the modern parent’s false justification of the avoidance of conflict and parental hard-work, as well an over-indulgence in re-living and repairing their own childhoods. To put it bluntly – it is weak, lazy and self-centred behaviour.