Fiel's Files

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May 26, 2008 - When you are the parent of two boys who are still in elementary school, you hear a lot from parents of kids who are in middle school and high school.

“Cherish these times,” they say.

“My kid won’t even talk to me now.”

“All they do is sit around the house and yell at me.”

According to all those public service announcements they show during commercial breaks for Rockies games, the key to making sure your kid is open and talks with you when they reach adolescence is to talk to them frequently now.

This is fine … in theory.

In reality, my kids yammer on so much that my brain would explode if I listened to even a fraction of it.

Please don’t get me wrong. I love my kids. I love their thoughts and ideas. But there’s just so many of them.

I know that if I ask my kids how their day at school was, they’ll just say, “Fine.” But, because the TV commercials say so, I figure I should ask it better. So, I ask “What did you do in school today?”

My 8-year-old then responds with a nearly real-time (to the minute) account of how the day went.

“… and then we got out our notebooks and I saw that my pencil wasn’t sharp, so I went to the sharpener to sharpen it. I put it in and I checked to see if it was sharp and I pushed the writing part with my finger and it broke, so I put it back in the sharpener …”

Real time may work for Jack Bauer. Not for an 8-year-old.

I remember when my sons were babies. I practically begged and bribed them to talk. “Just say Dada!”

Nothing.

But these days, it’s more like “Just stop talking.”

My sons LOVE videogames. And when they aren’t playing videogames, their favorite thing to do is to talk about videogames. And if you’ve ever heard someone talk about about a videogame for two minutes or so, you should try it for the entire length of a road trip.

“… and then I got the magic mushroom. I threw it at the one guy, but he jumped and it bounced off a wall and it hit this other guy. But it didn’t do anything to him …”

There truly is only one defense to this verbal onslaught. It’s called the “tuneout.”

This is a technique where your head and body give the appearance of actually listening to the blathering going on, but your brain is focused on some other completely separate issue. I have found that trying to remember the words to the entire Pink Floyd album “Wish You Were Here” works well.

Dads are pretty good at the “tuneout” because we have perfected it over the years with our wives.

The biggest difference is that generally kids don’t even notice the “tuneout” and will just keep talking as opposed to my wife who occasionally throws in the “You’re not really listening to me, are you?”

There is a tremendous downside to the “tuneout” with kids, however. I’m still not sure if my kids do this on purpose or not, but they will occasionally ask me questions in the middle of their babbling.

I know that most of the questions are silly and pointless, like “Isn’t that cool, Dad?” or “Did you ever do that?” or “Can I shave a Mario symbol in my hair?”

And because of that, I periodically drop an “Uh-huh” that usually is all the encouragement they need to continue talking.

The problem, of course, is when “uh-huh” is interpreted by my sons to mean “Yes, of course, you can ride your bike to Disneyland.”

I have learned, over the years, to listen for the response “REALLY?!?!” from my sons. This usually means they can’t believe I agreed to something and I better bring my brain back to reality for a few minutes to clarify.

But sometimes I find out about it later.

“Why are you hitting plastic bottles with a baseball bat?” my wife asked my son.

“Dad said we could,” they sell me out.

My wife and both boys look at me.

“I did not,” I argue.

“Yes, you did! I was telling you about the high level that I reached in Smash Brothers and then I said I wanted to hit bottles with a bat and you said uh-huh.”

Like I said, they talk too much.

Column updated every other week