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Shamelessly Destroying Another Person’s Reputation

You learn so much more when you ask questions opposed to passing judgmentsDestroying a person’s reputation is easily done.  Destroying a person’s reputation for some people can be so much fun.  Destroying a person’s reputation when they don’t have first-hand information is a mistake many people make.

Even better fun is destroying a person’s reputation so badly that they can never live it down and it continues to build’s on itself like a meme leaving the person to spend the rest of their life in misery and finding solace in the all the wrong places especially drugs.

How proudly some people say about other people when they do this is that they can never live it down meaning what they allegedly have done.  Certain people when they say these deprecating things are so sure they are right that they never even think that they might be making a mistake.

Also, some stories involve two people (often a male and a female) and it appears unjust that often the female’s reputation is tarnished, but not the male’s, especially when other males are talking about the situation.  Then other females’ reputations become tarnished also if they associate with and/or defend the woman.

Judge and jury is what most people become when they gossip.  The person who is the focus of the gossip can never live it down.  Also being defamed hurts and can do personal and public damage to the person while the person doing the gossiping can walk away and possibly even totally forget what they said or did to the other person.


Does Therapy Come Too Late?








rp_8150559597_f6b72c73b6_m.jpgIt all depends on your point of view.



Decision-Making Time


myopia (Photo credit: haglundc)

Adolescence is decision-making time for many.  These decisions might effect a person’s whole life.  Have you ever felt that you couldn’t take back something that you have said or done.

There is sometimes a cockiness to adolescence which gives them the power to make judgments, not only for themselves, but others as well, usually their parents or anyone whom they do not really understand.

What preparation do adolescents have for these often very enduring decisions?  “Do what I say; don’t do what I do,” some folks seem to imply when disciplining their adolescents.  Adolescents can be near-sighted and see things only from their own point of view.  They are quick to see the faults of others, but not their own.  Someone else’s problems, especially those of older adults, are easy to solve if they just did what the adolescent thinks that they need to do.

Knowing the repercussions that would accompany most decision choices are usually necessary precursors for making these judgments.  A lot of topics that adolescents need information about are not always covered in public situations but it is reserved for the family or church to do teach these things and ultimately if they don’t get this done, the electronic media or equally uninformed peers do it.

It is amazing who and what teaches our kids.  Their babysitters, preschool if it is a choice, and then there are the parents if they make to decision to keep the children at home and sheltered from outside sources of this information.  In the past, we tried to protect our kids from disturbing information only for them to get it elsewhere sometimes under less than desirable conditions.  Some parents take their responsibility very seriously and others do as little as possible and sometimes they can’t wait to kick the teenager out of the house and on their own at 18 with little or no preparation for independence.

Adolescents ultimately have to make it on their own.  They need to know who they are, what their values and talents or abilities are, how they view the responsibility of being sexually active, answering the question of, “Why am I here“,  and solving their own problems so they can live a happy life.  Also there are 0ften also the jobs of picking a life partner, parenting children, and finding a way to support oneself and dependent others.

What are some other decisions that adolescents usually have to make?  Are they prepared?  Also one part of the brain that has to mature in order for them to make good decisions and to be able to consider long-term over short-term effects of making decisions is not fully developed until sometime in young adulthood.

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Your Own Bragging Rights






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Read My Lips!










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It’s All About You


Thinking (Photo credit: Moyan_Brenn)





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What A Way To Go


Thinking (Photo credit: Moyan_Brenn)

If you watch much TV or look at too many popular  magazines,  you might be led to thinking that you are all washed up when you reach 49.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I never thought that my grandparents looked anything but wonderful to me.  We are constantly told what we should look like, what we should wear, and what we should like to do.

How many well-to-do people get their houses “decorated” by an interior decorator and then worry about it getting, dirty, cluttered, or appearing “out-of-date” or well-worn?  What is the idea of having something if you can’t use it?  On the other hand, decorating a home with comfortable well-made furnishings that are pleasing to the eye can enhance your life and increase your house’s useability.  As a result, you spend more time there; you enjoy entertaining there; and the longer you have had it, the more you appreciate it.

You as a person do not have to be in style.  You can follow your own drummer and as you live longer, you can age well like a bottle of wine.  If you are over 29, 39, or 49, have you changed over time.  Are there things you know and do now that you didn’t do then that make a difference in the way you live your life?  What do you know now that you wish you had known then?  For example, I enjoy children  even more than when I was raising them.  I am freer to look at life with the perspective of some distance and little things don’t matter so much and sometimes they don’t even hurt as much.  I’ve learned from other people how others live their lives and I am not so narrow-minded and have gotten some good ideas on how to improve mine.

Early in life we often focus on getting things and on getting things done.  We sometimes have tunnel vision and we miss the forest for the trees.  As we get older, we can develop our own point-of-view of what is important in life and how to get it.  We may realize that we wasted time focusing on things we thought were important because that was what we were taught and not on what was really important when we started thinking for ourselves.

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How To Be A Good Parent


Sunflower (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

How to be a good parent.  Unfortunately most people become parents when they are young (and dumb?).  Please excuse the should’s.  I couldn’t think of another word.

Ideally a parent should love all children equally and show no favoritism.  They should shower them with unconditional love.  Not if you do this, then and only then I will love you for it.

Children are not born to be slaves (but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have increasing responsibilities as they get older).  Children should not have to be parents either to their own parents or to their brothers and sisters.  A child should also not be a substitute spouse for their parent.  Parents should not demand from children something that appropriately only should be gotten from the spouse.

Parents should not predict what their children should be based on similarities to other family members or acquaintances.  Predictions like this usually pressure the child and/or are negative.   Children often are what they are no matter what one might expect them to be.  Children might not follow their parents into business or a profession.  For example, my daughter-in-law is red-headed and so are her mother, sister, and father, but both of her kids are blondes.  I didn’t expect that.

I have always said that having a child is like planting a flower seed when you don’t know into what it will bloom so you plant it and you don’t know what you are going to get except that it will be a flower.  It may take a special kind of soil, a maximum or minimum amount of water and a maximum or minimum amount of sunshine.   You have to pay attention to how the plant is doing and change what you do for it based on what works.    You also have to be satisfied with what you get because a sunflower is not a rose and a rose is not a sunflower.  There may be different standards for sunflowers as compared to those for roses.

As children get older they become increasingly independent and do more and more things for themselves.  Parents cannot hold on to their children forever.  Children become parents themselves and they have responsibilities to fulfill with their own families.  Parents often have done their  job when they no longer have anything that they have to do for their children and their children no longer have to do anything for their parents.  This doesn’t mean that they don’t help each other out in a pinch or unforeseen circumstances.  They’re still family.

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Which Helps Us Grow Better?


Parenting (Photo credit: Leonid Mamchenkov)

Mistakes? or Successes?

Current thoughts on child-rearing encourage giving children a lot of complements.  Yes, initially when a behavior is just being established, it can be shaped by rewarding approximations to the desired end behavior.  At some point, praise can become meaningless if the performance being applauded is mediocre.  This does not prepare a child for the real world where competition is stiff and you can not hold a job and not accomplish something that justifies it.

Making mistakes can be a learning experience.  Sometimes knowing what can make something go wrong is the key to success.  For example, one may have a beautiful recipe for a cake that gets rave reviews, but it is not known what makes this recipe successful until something randomly is left out or the amount of it is reduced or  increased and it fails.  .

This is often where the breakdown occurs between generations in a family business.  The parent or grandparent is perhaps even a genius at what he or she does and has gotten where he or she is by hard work and sacrifice.  The heir can not just show up for work with little knowledge of the business and no idea of what it takes to continue the businesses’ success and grow the business because if a business doesn’t continue to grow, it will start slipping and fail.  A person learns by experiencing not only successes, but also failures.  Sometimes other employees in the family business are afraid to tell the boss’s son or daughter that he or she goofed and that if he or she keeps doing something that way it will have an adverse effect on business.

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