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Story Shuffle 10 happened this month and the theme of Parents offered a handful of interesting stories.
See them all here or listen to mine below.
The structure of my story:
- As children, we have an opportunity to experience so many different friends households that its an under appreciated opportunity to evaluate what type of home life we want to live.
- I loved my childhood and my family and my parents but I still sought to find out how others did it.
- Particularly in high school, I remember how distinct the homes of my friends that I visited.
- I loved getting to know people’s parents at an early age. I was the guy in the car to the bowling alley talking to your mom.
- And I fell in love with the idea of personality types. There are lots of theories about how temperament define us. One of the oldest is the four temperaments which anthropologists say has been on display for thousands of years in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
- It was Hippocrates 400 years before Christ who tried to make it a medical theory. That’s all debunked but it’s still a novel way to see the world.
- It says there are four: the sanguine or impulsive pleasure seeking; the choleric or ambitious leader type; the melancholic or introverted and thoughtful and the phlegmatic or relaxed and content.
- The homes and parents I would visit as a kid fit into those groups.
- Reinhardt: ping pong and pool and firework and what gate. His father would play and yell. It was the sanguine house.
- Avondoglio household was neat and across a beautiful pond from the family restaurant. U remember first talking politics and business with Bryant and his father. It was the choleric house.
- Medvidick was behind overgrown bushes, dark and you never went in the front door. Dark and books were everywhere. Father tinkering, mother referencing literature. It was the melancholic house.
- The Sheehan household was. Always unlocked, simple and cared for. Unnecessary apologetic and nothing ever changed. Time warp, hours passed. It was the phlegmatic house.
- Years later, I have such a broad understanding of how a home cn be run and how parenting can be done. I was give the chance or success because f my parents but had so many other lessons elsewhere.
- And that sharing of learning from one generation to another is parenting.
This was great, along the lines of public radio’s old “This I Believe” segments. It’d be great to see you line up something recurring along those lines.