Kid Pro Quo:

Management Tips from Mothers with Toddlers

(2000)

In the 1970s there arrived in the American workplace something that would change the business world forever. This thing would prove more important than Arab oil embargoes, dim-bulb Carter-era monetary policies, or even the desktop computer. It wore lipstick. Although only if it wanted to. Until about 1978 the majority of adult female Americans did not have a job, even when they were supposed to during World War II. Why is a matter of debate. Sexual discrimination, social tradition, and lack of economic opportunity doubtless played their parts.

My own opinion (and I have known a number of adult female Americans personally and am married to one) is that women decided to go to work because they felt like it.

Anyway, the results have been spectacular. The Independent Women’s Forum, a nonpartisan pro–free market think tank very much devoted to having women do what they feel like doing, has collected statistics on the subject. Between 1960 and 1994 women’s wages increased ten times faster than men’s. Females are currently starting businesses at twice the male rate, and women-owned enterprises are growing more quickly than the overall economy. In 1973 only 11 percent of corporations had women on their boards of directors; now 72 percent do. In 1970 the legal profession was 95 percent male. Today there’s a 29 percent chance that your wife’s divorce lawyer will be … your wife.

Some professions are, in effect, controlled by women, who make up 51 percent of editors and reporters, 66 percent of PR “men,” and 62 percent of the psychologists telling us to get over it about the Mrs. making more than we do. Even the federal government’s Glass Ceiling Commission, created by the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to bird-dog the remaining boys-only boardrooms, had to admit that women are getting along all right. The commission conceded that the two economic sectors expected to grow most at the beginning of the new century—service/trade/retail and finance/insurance/real estate—are well on their way to becoming hen parties.

No ethnic subculture or immigrant population has ever swept capitalism off its feet the way women have. The last time any group rose so quickly to the top was when men first got jobs and the only competition was from woolly mammoths.

What accounts for the distaff triumph? Of course, as every son, brother, boyfriend, and husband knows, women are smarter than we are. But it can’t be only that. Looking around at my fellow males I realize everything is smarter than we are—the copy machine, for instance. And, when I was working, the copier never got promoted ahead of me. Although, as I recall, it did have a nicer cubicle.

The fact is women possess a certain body of arcane knowledge, an eons-old set of complex skills, an ancient esoteric understanding that no one else has. This profound wisdom and well-learned craft is shrugged off by the ignorant (i.e., me) in the single dismissive phrase good with kids.

Or I used to shrug it off. But one day I came home from New York and was fuming into my martini about childish articles editors, infantile managing editors, and a publisher who was a spoiled brat when what should my eyes behold but—a spoiled brat. My spoiled brat. There was my daughter Muffin, age two and a half, in the middle of the living room shouting no, kicking the furniture, and otherwise acting like every corporate executive since the great Ice Age Inc. takeover of Woolly Mammoth Ltd. in 11,000 BC.

Then my wife breezed into the room and did something involving a sippy cup and a Barney tape. Peace reigned. During that reign of peace I had a brilliant insight. Well, brilliant for a man.

Women are successful in the business world because the business world was created by men. Men are babies. And women are … good with kids.

So if I want to be successful in the business world, I need to be good with kids too. But how to go about this? Well, I could undertake to become principal care provider for Muffin. But there’s our daughter’s welfare to be considered. I have no idea how many Ring Dings and packages of beer nuts a toddler needs each day. And are diapers supposed to be changed three times a week or only twice?

I could ask my wife how to be good with kids. She’s certainly good with the one who is, at the moment, contentedly singing along with a fuzzy Tyrannosaurus rex. (I’ll bet the Microsoft antitrust division wishes it could get the Justice Department to do this, although, actually, in that case the Tyrannosaurus rex is Janet Reno. Which shows there is an exception to the good-with-kids rule; Janet would scare the hell out of Muffin.) My wife also rose higher on the corporate ladder than I ever did, before she resigned to run our wholly owned subsidiary of Toys “” Us. But would my wife tell me how to be good with kids? Does Macy’s tell Gimbels? (Since Gimbels—like me as a freelance writer—is out of business, apparently not.)

Instead I decided to buy books about raising children. But not just any children. Not babies—anybody with a dairy farm, a chain of rug-cleaning establishments, and 200,000 shares of Procter & Gamble can raise a baby. And not teens—raising teens is the business of the police and the National Association of Television Broadcasters’ Code of Standards and Practices. I bought books about the most crucial and difficult periods in child raising: the God-Awful Ones, the Terrible Twos, the Threes That Are So Bad There’s No Name for Them. I bought books about raising the variety of kid that I am absolutely clueless about raising: ours.

Of course, I chose books that were written by women. I remember the disaster that ensued when a generation of parents listened to Dr. Benjamin Spock. Trying to gain management acumen from Spock’s ultra-permissive Baby and Child Care would result in running a brokerage house full of people in bell-bottoms eating peyote and handing out stock certificates for free on the street. I also wanted books that received high marks from women readers, so I consulted the Average Customer Review page at the Amazon.com website, looking for things like: I am still using the “respectful” techniques I learned from this book. (Note the sly use of quotation marks.)

Here’s what I picked.

• 1,2,3 … the Toddler Years: A Practical Guide for Parents and Caregivers by Irene Van der Zande

• Parenting Your Toddler: The Experts’ Guide to the Tough and Tender Years by Patricia Henderson Shimm and Kate Ballen

• Your One-Year-Old: The Fun-Loving, Fussy 12- to 24-Month-Old by Louise Bates Ames, PhD, Frances L. Ilg, MD, and Carol Chase Haber

Was I imagining it or did the lady at the bookstore cash register look suspicious? “My wife is going to a Theta reunion in Bloomington, Indiana,” I said, “for the whole weekend.” I placed a concealing copy of Sports Afield in my shopping bag and slipped home. I opened Your One-Year-Old at random and … the shock of recognition was so severe that the gin bottle almost dropped from my hand. Listen to these excerpts from the chapter titled “Characteristics of the Age.”

• He seems to want everything, to prefer everybody else have nothing.

• A busy little person. Though much of his activity is purely … bumbling around from one spot to another.

• Almost anything may attract his attention, and then he almost seems to have to respond, without rhyme or reason.

• Extremely self-involved. He relates to others if and when it pleases him.

• All too likely to put on a full-fledged temper tantrum over what may actually be only a minor frustration.

• Can be seen as enchanting if the viewer appreciates an almost total egocentricity.

Is that not the most brilliant description of a boss ever limned? Especially of, I’d say, the nation’s boss, Bill Clinton.

Nor does women’s sagacity stop at mere keen observation. The books I bought wade right in and tell you how to deal with the SOB you work for.

“You control him,” says Your One-Year-Old, “by controlling the surroundings and by just not having too many things around that will get him into difficulty.” White House interns, for example.

“If you do use language to motivate him,” the book continues, “keep it very simple, and use words of one syllable only.” The most famous bossmotivating monosyllable is, naturally, the Yes. But its opposite, the I will get right back to you on that, works too, because, as Your One-Year-Old says, “he has such a very short attention span.” And try “Your golf game looks real good,” and “You’ve lost weight.” Your One-Year-Old points out that “Whatever gives comfort is worth its weight in gold.” Naps are also suggested. They worked with President Reagan.

The three books are full of good advice about how to make people who think they’re in charge think they actually are. Never ask your boss a yes-or-no question.

“No becomes his favorite word even when he wants to say yes,” states Parenting Your Toddler.

“He quite typically says ‘no’ instead of ‘yes,’ ‘down’ instead of ‘up,’” notes Your One-Year-Old.

“There’s almost always a way to give … a choice,” vouchsafes 1,2,3 … the Toddler Years. “Notice,” the book continues, “that these questions are all offered in the form of closed questions.” One of the examples given, since we’re using President Clinton as our specimen awful boss, is rather too pertinent.

“Do you want to wear your red pants or your blue pants?” It’s important before asking the question to decide what choices we’re willing to live with. Open questions such as “What do you want to wear?” lead to answers we may not be willing to accept, like, “Nothing!”

The closed question—it is so easy, so obvious, and yet every one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff forgot to ask Bill Clinton, “Do you want to stay out of the Balkans or not get involved in former Yugoslavia?” The problem is, the Joint Chiefs are guys.

The books are equally savvy about temper tantrums. Says Your One-Year-Old, “The less they bother you, chances are the less frequently they will occur. It is not much satisfaction to play to an uninterested audience.”

Parenting Your Toddler gives six rules for dealing with tantrums:

1. Don’t punish.	(“I quit.”)
2. Don’t reward.	(“I quit. Sob. Sob.”)
3. Don’t bribe.	(“I’ll quit if you ask me to.”)
4. Don’t placate.	(“You don’t really want me to quit, do you?”)
5. Don’t leave the room.	(“I quit. F—you.”)
6. Don’t have a tantrum yourself.	(“I quit. F—you. I’m suing.”)

Then the text goes on to posit a strategy worthy of Napoleon, if Napoleon had been a woman. But he wasn’t, so he wound up getting fired and moving to Saint Helena. The strategy is: just name the feelings that caused the tantrum. “Once your toddler calms down, explain in short sentences why he gets angry.”

Let’s try using the example that Parenting Your Toddler gives, about putting crayons away, with some minor modifications to aid Napoleon’s case.

Napoleon should have said, “General Wellington and General Blücher, you got really mad when I said it was time to put Louis the Eighteenth away. It’s okay to be angry; next time you can tell me this. You can say, ‘Napoleon, we get mad when you escape from Elba.’ I will listen to you. And you know that no matter how mad you get at me, somebody stinky is always going to run France.”

Just naming things seems ridiculous to a male. But think how often females make it work around the house: Because I’m your mother or Oh, no, you don’t, you’re a married man.

Equally effective for dealing with tantrums, and with almost all other lousy executive behavior, is a technique that women invented at a very early date—distraction. “Not right now, Adam, I’ve got to go fig-leaf shopping. Why don’t you have an apple instead?” Or, as Your One-Year-Old puts it, a “new and interesting object if offered may prove to be a satisfactory substitute for the thing he really wanted. Or a total change of scene … may help him forget his frustration.” Hence the importance of the business jet, which, you’ll recall, came into use in the middle seventies just when large numbers of women were gaining influence over America’s executive suites. If the corner-office carpet apes get completely out of control, put them on the G-5.

Besides sage advice, the books contain a variety of real-life anecdotes to help better understand how corporate and professional life looks to women. It looks like a playdate gone horribly wrong. Thanks to the following item from Parenting Your Toddler, I now know everything about telecommunications networks and am ready to go toe-to-toe with the sharpest gal in the industry.

Lily walked into her friend’s house and her eyes immediately lit upon a beautiful new doll. Lily quickly said, “Joan, I’ll share your new doll.” Joan, who obviously had heard that sharing was a good thing, replied, “Oh, yes, we’ll share the doll.” Lily then grabbed the doll and ran into a corner with it, saying, “Now, we are sharing.”

I suppose women thought men would never read these books. Or women thought these books would be read only by the kind of man who bikes to his job at the organic food co-op—not a threat to their corporate promotion. Anyway, women are spilling the beans here. Peruse the following passage, allegedly about biting, from 1,2,3 … the Toddler Years. First, however, we will substitute account supervisor for “eighteen-month-old,” new executive assistant for “four-year-old sister,” PalmPilot for “doll,” and vice president of account services for “Mama.”

Account Supervisor Kenny stood quietly watching his new executive assistant. It’s possible to guess at the sort of thoughts going through Kenny’s head. “I wonder about this girl here. I know what she looks like … I know what she smells like … but what does she taste like? I’ll just find out … Wow, she made a big noise! And she dropped that PalmPilot she never lets me play with. Uh-oh! Looks like the vice president of account services is real mad at someone … Who, me?”

You members of the business sisterhood should be more careful about putting your secrets into print. Or at least you should make a pretense of actually using these books to raise kids. I’ve noticed you never look at them. When anything untoward happens in our house you call your mother. “Mom,” you say, “I’m having a terrible problem with bedtime. It’s just, No, no, no! More bottle! More bottle! Nothing seems to work. What did you used to do?”

And your mother says, “I used to hide your father’s gin.”