The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at Doctor kenner.com

How can we get our boys to keep their rooms picked up? The reward penalty efforts are not working.

The clean room dilemma, that's the one I struggled with with my son, and we talk about it openly, and he's given me permission to talk about it on the air. For kids, it's a battleground for independence. The kids are saying, Mom, I want to do it my way, and if you had told them to have a messy room, they would have a clean room. It's like, don't make my decisions, mom. Don't control every nook and cranny of my life, including my bedroom. Don't do that to me. So I recommend you get a book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. You need to learn that you cannot force your kids' minds. Rewards and punishments might have a short-range effect, but the kids just build revenge fantasies if you punish them, and if you reward them, they know it's a gimmick, so it doesn't come from their heart. You want them to clean from their heart. So notice, kids will learn to clean their room if you back out of the way. And if they say, oh my god, where's my wallet, where are my keys, where's my CD, they finally see that there are facts in reality that make them have the need to clean their room.

And here's a little more from Dr. Kenner:

Why should he lie? What's he got to gain? Attention? Maybe this is a quiet, frightened, insignificant old man who has been nothing all his life. Nobody knows him, nobody quotes him, nobody seeks his advice. After 75 years, that's a very sad thing. You mean nothing. A man like this needs to be quoted, to be listened to. Very important.

That's from 12 Angry Men, a dynamite film. If you haven't seen it, it's got Henry Fonda and a lot of famous people in it. It's just fabulous. Now imagine being 75 years old. The context of this is a murder trial for a young kid, and one of the witnesses is this 75-year-old man. So you say, Oh God, you know this old man is so innocent, he's just assumed innocent. But what if he isn't? What if he's in the limelight and he wants to lie? He wants to accuse this boy. He really doesn't care about the boy, but he just wants to get in the limelight. He wants to be the big-time witness that comes forward and says, the kid killed. The kid did it. The kid is the murderer.

Think about people in your own life. Think about maybe aging parents who reflect back on their lives, and it's empty. They didn't live the lives they want. They lived in the shadows of other people, or they just never made the effort to enjoy their life. And so now they're a rabble-rouser as they're getting older; they're cantankerous, they're angry, they're resentful, they're envious of people who are living their lives. If you're dealing with one of these aging parents, these elderly parents, it’s very tough to do that. I have a close friend of mine dealing with that right now with one of her family members.

So visibility, psychological visibility, is very important. We all want it, but we want to earn it. It's not—when I say psychological visibility, I mean feeling important to the people that matter most to you in your life, whether it's your kids or a spouse. How many marriages go down the tube because you no longer feel visible or valued or important? Or even as a coworker, you feel like your coworker doesn't give you any respect, or a boss doesn't give you any respect, or your employees don't. Those are the types of issues you can pick up the phone and call me on right now.

I'm Dr. Ellen Kenner, and my show is The Rational Basis of Happiness. That means this show's for you; your happiness matters. You can pick up the phone and give me a call on any question that you would ask a counselor or a therapist. And of course, it's not therapy. It's a time for me to give you some advice and possibly put you on a better track. And if you need therapy, you can pursue that also. My number is toll-free. You can jot this down: 1-877-DrKenner. That's toll-free, 1-877-D-R-K-E-N-N-E-R.

And also visit my website. It's Drkenner.com, so you can pick up the phone right now and give me a call if you'd like.

Now, my husband and I recently took a trip to Boston and back, and we were in Boston. We're behind two young teenage girls, and they're yapping away. They're adorable. They're darling-looking girls. We're listening to them not because we want to, but because our jaws were just dropping. They're talking about friends and boyfriends, and, like, you know, what struck us about their conversation was not what they were saying. I don't retain—I didn't retain a thing of what they said, all the gossip going on. But, like, you know, really, their style, the conversation went something like this, like, like, you know, I don't know, this guy, Joey, he's really hot. Like, you know, oh my God, is he hot? Like, really, you know. And it went on and on, and I'm thinking, can you imagine a translator from a foreign country trying to decode this conversation? He would get no meaning out of it.

So one teenager writes me a question that reminded me of these two darling girls, and it sounds like she went to the same school of fuzzy thinking. She writes that she's 17 years old, and that many boys have asked her to be their girl, and she goes out with one just to have fun, but then she goes out with another, and nothing happens until now. Unfortunately, she doesn't tell us what happens, and she begs, help me and teach me how to make a decision in my life, because I'm always confused.

Now her question is a perfect example of unfocused thinking and short-range, unfocused living.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to Drkenner.com.

And please listen to this:

Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and co-author Dr. Edwin Locke:

"Another virtue that makes you lovable is pride. Many people believe that pride is a vice. We all dislike boastful people, but these people feel false pride. Their pomposity and boastfulness serve to hide their inner doubt. Martyrs can also feel false pride for having given up all self-value for the sake of others, but they end up feeling resentful, cynical, empty, and depressed. We view real or earned pride as virtue. It results from the desire to be moral, or, more succinctly, a consequence of your moral ambitiousness. You earn a sense of pride by deliberately practicing the virtues and building them into your character."

You can download chapter one for free by going to Drkenner.com, and you can buy the book on Amazon.com.