Without explaining anything, I simply made a mark every time he spoke. By mid morning the third row had ticks lined up like a picket fence, while the first row had one lonely scrawl. He was more curious than a cat in a bird shop. 

 

"What are you writing?" he wanted to know. 

 

"Oh, nothing." I made a mark in the neutral column.

 

"Why does that row have more?"  I left his inquisitive mind idling awhile longer, keeping the score running as routine sibling interactions continued with their surplus of prickly remarks being duly noted. 

 

Finally he couldn't stand it any more. "Why do you do that every time I talk, but not when the other kids talk????"

 

"Oh, I am just keeping track of how many times you say something positive, or neutral or negative. That's all." I had no intention of offering rewards or punishment. It was purely for research purposes. 

 

"Thank you for breakfast. Are you going to mark it? Chara I like your shirt. Did you hear that? Those are pretty flowers..." His head was bent over my pad as if it were his SAT scores being transmitted. I made a mark in the first column for every kindness and in a matter of two minutes the positives were winning by a landslide. 

 

The exercises jarred my kids out of the ruts they were in. Simply being aware of how we present to the world is an aspect of one of the flavors of intelligence identified by Howard Gardner. 

 

But the memory revisited me later, when I started to wake up to my own score sheet. What proportion of the things I said to John were positive, vs complaints? Did I cram the honey dos to the front of the queue and leave the affirmations unspoken? What was my own ratio of sweet to snippy?

 

I have an app on my phone that measures my heart rate. All I need to do is put my finger over the camera lens. I wonder if there is one to give me instant calibration on the tenor of my speech. I talk into the receiver and I see a graph of the fluctuations of my words. 

 

Photo by Kristin Kinsey

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