How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk

"Yes, perhaps the best book every written: How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk, by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. This was a book that I read years ago because it happened to be on my sister’s bookshelf, and it really did change my life. It has all sorts of practical advice. There are simple things like if a kid has to do something you offer them choices: Instead of saying, ‘We have to go now’, you say, ‘Do you want to go now or in five minutes?’ You don’t offer them a choice they can’t take. These tricks don’t work forever, of course. We started doing this with the kids and then of course they started saying, ‘Don’t give me choices.’ But I found it was useful in my life before I ever had kids. There are a lot of very clever ideas in there about the ways you can role-play and practice things. And it’s great to have tools like this when you teach. Every year there’s a new crop of students and the tricks will work like new. Like most skills, it seems very doable when you read the book. When you actually try to do it in real life it’s a lot more difficult, unless you’re naturally cut out to do it…which I’m probably not. The reason I think it’s implicitly statistical is because it’s really about what works and what doesn’t work. There probably is research on it – but if there isn’t, there could be research on it. It’s also sort of fascinating at a deeper level, in the sense of, if these ideas are so powerful, which I think they are, why are they so hard to do? Why is it so hard to do the right thing? It’s so true in many aspects of life. It’s easier to tick somebody off than to say something nice. Why is that? It doesn’t make sense, that it would be so difficult to do the constructive thing. Often it takes a lot of work. It’s just a wonderful book. As this is one of those rare occasions when I’m allowed to recommend books to people, I thought I’d better put it on the list. It definitely works with my students. It made a big difference to me. My wife is just good at this stuff naturally, she’s a social worker and she read the book and said, ‘Yes, this is very reasonable.’ She didn’t think it was so special, because she already knew it. But for me, it was very special. It’s hard for me to remember because with students I’ve developed my own thing. I wrote a book called Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks, which is all about how to involve students. But sometimes things come up, difficult situations. Also, when they’re in my office, I have to physically use my left arm to hold back my right hand, so I do not pick up a pen or chalk. I tell the students, ‘You hold the chalk, you go to the board.’ A lot of professors know that – but it’s just so tempting to start writing oneself. You have to really think from the other person’s perspective, and get them involved with solving their own problems. There are things in there like, when someone is supposed to do something and they don’t do it, you just have to tell them that it’s important to you – that kind of thing. Bill James once said that you can lie in statistics just like you can lie in English or French or any other language. Sure, the more powerful a language is the more ways you can lie using it. There are a bunch of great quotes about statistics. There’s another one, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know.’ And there’s Earl Weaver: ‘It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.’ There are a lot of sayings that emphasise that not only is uncertainty an important part of life, but that recognition of that uncertainly is itself an important step."