Listen to this“There exists a people with enormous heads. Perhaps you know one. Take another look at your toddler. Ask him to raise his arms. Notice anything? Yup, his entire arm is about the same length as his whole head. In fact, he probably couldn’t clasp his hands over his head if he tried. So why is his head so enormous? So he can soak up about a million things everyday including everything you say and do. (you've probably noticed this already, much to your alarm or embarrassment). Just think, if your head was that big you’d fall over a lot, but you’d also learn about a million things everyday too. Rather that, than your arms be half their length. Anyway, being able to look at things from another perspective is what parenting is all about.”
I love this little advert. A while ago an agency I was affiliated with was picked by a large advertising company to receive a free advertising campaign. I don’t know if the gesture was motivated by corporate guilt or genuine community spirit. I suspect it was motivated by both on some level but at the end of the day who cares. The point is we got lots of free advertising to try to get our message across. Probably numerous thousands of dollars of free advertising. The real interesting part of the whole deal was that the advertising company held a contest throughout the colleges and universities in the area for people to generate the campaign thoughts They weren’t looking for marketing or advertising students to contribute but rather for people from different disciplines. They wanted to have people not involved in advertising to come up with fresh ideas and thoughts about how to get a message out to the community. The contest was a big thing. The winners got some serious scholarship money and had the thrill of seeing their work plastered around the city. They also got to work with some of the most creative people in advertising. The company got to work with people outside of their day to day work environment. They saw it as a chance to expose some of their people to new ways of seeing the world so that they wouldn’t get stale in their thinking. The agency got free advertising.
At the time, as I do now, I thought what a brilliant concept. Everyone wins. I’ve also thought that we in the human services have something to learn from those advertising people. I don’t mean something about advertising our messages. Rather we have something to learn about how to bring new thoughts in to our field. My experience is that we tend to generate thoughts in a very insular manner. We like to keep our systems fairly closed because after all we are the experts. I don’t want to go into why I think this is but rather only to comment on what we may be losing by not inviting others form outside our environments to take a look at what we are doing. Maybe, just maybe if we did then we could gain a new perspective. After all look at the great job the students did at generating new ways of getting across old messages about parenting. Think about it.
“Mine. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. “Mine.” It’s a word you hear a lot. To your two year old the concept of ownership applies to most things ... O.K. everything. And your laptop makes a fine juice tray and busy board. You did play that puzzle game together this morning. He knew it. “Toy”. So why the fit when you deny him the chance to cover it with that unknown, paste like substance he generates? “Not toy?” Well, look at it from just being two. One minute it’s a toy, the next it’s not. To him “sometimes” is just too hard to grasp. Frustrating. For both of you. But despite the obvious height difference , you can see eye to eye. So get down on your hands and knees and enjoy the world from his perspective.”
