S2EP35-Rosemary Olender-The Small Moments that Matter: A Chat with Rosemary Olender

Herb: 00:00:19

Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Rosemary Olender. Rosemary is an educator, consultant, speaker and non fiction author who blends professional expertise with heartfelt guidance on child development.

With advanced degrees in teaching and administration and decades of experience supporting families and schools, she offers practical, compassionate insights to help navigate the everyday challenges of parenting and education. Her books provide more than information. They offer guidance, reassurance, and a shared sense of purpose.

Her signature talk, put your wallets away and raise rich kids focuses on the real gifts children need to become emotionally rich, confident, resilient people in these difficult times. She shows parents, educators, counselors and mentors of children young and old how to teach invaluable life lessons leading to success.

Rosemary's goal is to bring families together and use stages, podcasts, summits and workshops to make a positive difference in their lives. Welcome Rosemary. It is a pleasure to have you here. It sounds like you do a lot what we do, so I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Welcome.

Rosemary Olender: 00:01:28

Thank you. It's good to be here.

Kristina: 00:01:31

Yeah.

When we did our pre chat, you know, it was one of those things like, oh, wow, we're so aligned in so many different ways and you know, the backgrounds are similar as well, but at the same time you have a special message that you want to give out to parents. So tell me about that message. When was it really obvious to you that you needed to start writing the book and doing the podcast and doing the things?

What was that pivotal point that made this all like, it's got to get out there more than just what I'm doing in my local community?

Rosemary Olender: 00:01:59

Well, you know, the theme of my book and the overall message is our riches come from the small moments in our life, not from material things, but from experiences and what happens to us day to day in the little things. This book started as a conversation with my father on his deathbed. He was dying. We were in the hospital.

We had spent three weeks and we knew he was very near the end. And the night before he died, he said to me, and this was the tipping point for me, he said, I need to apologize to you and your sister.

And I said, for what? And he said, for leaving you with nothing. And I didn't. I immediately, I could not fathom what he was talking about.

He was talking about material wealth. He was talking about when he passed away, we did not have a bank account that was large. We did not own our home.

He didn't, he, he never bought a new car. We came from a middle class, lower middle class Italian family and me being who I was, as a result of growing up with him.

I looked at him and I said, look, I know that you're sick and I know that you're dying, but are you out of your mind?

Do you not understand that the gifts you have given us our whole life, that made us rich and made us the professional and personal people we are and the successful people that we are, and that's all because of the gifts you gave us. And he said, I, I don't know what you're talking about.

So what followed was a 40 minute conversation which was more me speaking to him and thinking in my head, what am I talking about? And I had to formalize it. And so I started talking to him. And that's where the book came from.

r, I had this conversation in: 1991

And over the years, I used my journal about this topic to just jot down thoughts and ideas, which is my writing process. And the book is set up so that each chapter is a gift.

And there's an explanation of how that gift that a child needs helps them to gain insight or a core value that helps them down the road to navigate tough times, to celebrate the great times, to bring people together, to communicate, and to all of the things we need to do as individuals to master and be resilient in, in our world. So those gifts are things like love and acceptance and the gift of time, the gift of patience.

And as I started to develop the book, I started to realize that I have put into practice in my teaching career these values and strove all along to give these very things to my colleagues, to the kids I taught, and to the families I've worked with over the years. My predominant specialty when I started out was disabilities.

So I was working with a lot of stressed families and had to tread very carefully and think very carefully about, okay, what do we need to do for this family to make them feel better? Because they tended to blame themselves. I mean, the commonalities were there and that just isn't what it was about at all.

And they didn't, a lot of them didn't have hope, so how do we give them hope? A lot of them, you know, it was a real strain between husband and wife, within the family, between siblings and all of that.

So I spent some time working with them, the families, and having parent meetings and having parent powwows in my office and things like that. And as a teacher, I tried to show them the specialness of their kids. So that's how the book. That's how the book came out.

And the way it's written is each chapter explains why that's important.

And then I reflected back on how my father gave that to us, how he modeled it, or how he talked about it, or how he out and out taught us why that was important to do. Now, my father wasn't a teacher by any means, but he was the best teacher I ever had. He truly was a teacher.

He left school in 10th grade, got up one day, and he was stressed. His brother had been killed in World War II. He got up, left, went down to the naval office, told them he was.

Told them he was 16 when he wasn't, and he said he was going to be 17. So they signed him up and off he went. He quit school and off he went. But he was a very. He was a very learned man.

He read a lot and he talked a lot about what he read a lot about politics, current events. He was an avid lover of this country and how this country was built and designed and how it works. And that was really. That really special to him.

So he's the one who taught us a lot.

And then the next section of each chapter is ideas and suggestions for parents, many of which I'm sure they have, but some that they could throw in the pot and think about and say, well, maybe we can do this. What made this all work and what I would encourage families to do is to spend time, really concerted time with their kids.

Now, parents who homeschool their kids spend a lot of time with them because they're teaching them, but they need to spend time away from that time because that's has to be, you know, the kids will see that as well. You're, you know, you have to be my teacher. You need to be the parent sometime, and you need to be the reflector sometime.

What my dad did for us, and he did it with my sister, my sister is 13 years younger than me. So we grew up in different houses. Yeah, I went to the day I went to college was the day she started kindergarten.

Kristina: 00:09:15

That is quite a difference, isn't it?

Rosemary Olender: 00:09:17

It is.

So I was out of the house, but as we've talked about this and I started to put the book together, we realized that we grew up with the same mother and father. They didn't change their spots. They were essentially the same. And my father kept essentially the same routines.

What he did for Me, from when I was little is he was a. He loved television.

I mean, if he were alive today, he would love the ones where you could see three things at a time, especially football games and stuff. You. Because he would have a television on, and then he would have the radio on and another radio for different games and stuff.

So he would just love that. But he gave that up at night for me, and he would, almost every night from when I was little, say, you want a snack? Come into the kitchen.

And we would sit with a glass of milk and cookies or crackers. When I got older, it became coffee. And when I say older, I'm talking 11, 12. I started drinking coffee back in those days.

Kristina: 00:10:17

That was time to drink coffee.

Rosemary Olender: 00:10:19

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, it's.

It's interesting because that's why the book is called Coffee and Wisdom, because we would spend a minimum of 30 minutes, and it usually was longer than that. Sometimes it would be two hours. In the back of the book, there's a reflection I wrote the year he died. I.

Just before he passed away, I wrote a reflection for a writing class I was taking called Reflections over Coffee. And it explains how every night we would sit at a kitchen table and we would talk. And he would say, you would always start with, how was your day?

What happened that excited you? What happened that upset you? Why do you think they did that? And so critical thinking was always part of his package.

And he never told me I was wrong to think that I was think. But he would say, well, let's reframe it. Maybe we could look at this a little different or put it through a different lens. What do you think?

Kristina: 00:11:25

I want to just stop you there for a second and highlight that because it's so, so important. We have so many parents who come and say, oh, I asked my kids how their day was, and then they don't say anything.

But the thing is, the key is, is the way you ask the question and the way your dad was framing it. Right. My husband used to do thing for me when I was coming home from school. I was frustrated with my day of teaching.

And he would do the same thing, reframe the question a little bit different. Like you said, what excited you or what frustrated you or what, you know.

Herb: 00:11:56

What made you feel competent today?

Kristina: 00:11:58

Competent.

Herb: 00:11:58

What made you feel like a good teacher today? What made you feel like you reached a child today.

Rosemary Olender: 00:12:03

Yeah.

Kristina: 00:12:04

And if you can do that with your children.

Rosemary Olender: 00:12:06

Yeah, Right.

Herb: 00:12:08

And.

Rosemary Olender: 00:12:08

Right. And then we would talk about, okay, could you have done that differently?

You know, could you have done something else to diffuse that situation, those kinds of things. So those were the conversations we had nightly. And. And it lasted right up until he. Well, in the.

In the Reflections piece, at that point, he was very sick. And we would talk on the phone once I moved out, and I was with my own family not too far away, but we would talk on the phone at night. And it was.

It was an interesting. It was an interesting growing period with my dad.

Because, you know, people who have read this book who knew him said, and one of my cousins said, you know, you're right. I never saw your father really mad, really angry. And I said, well, it's because he always.

One of the chapters in the book, which I think is the most important one, is called. It's called Perspective and Empathy. Because without those two things, everything else falls apart.

You know, if you can step back and gain some perspective on a situation, you know, we say walk in somebody else's shoes. And that sometimes that's really hard to do. But if you can say, all right, let me play act that. That happened to me.

And my father said one time to me, think about what would happen if all of us ran around with a billboard on our forehead that explained what point in time we were at. My mother just died. You see a person that says, I just was told I have cancer or whatever, whatever, and imagine your reaction to them if you knew.

So you're not going to know. But think about the what ifs. What if? And if that were the case, would you treat that person differently? So we would talk about things like that.

And in schools and for teachers, it's important. I used to say to teachers, I always opened faculty meetings or workshops with large groups of teachers and educators with this piece of information.

In the: 1980

They took 100 people that were adults, adults being anywhere over 25, and that they felt were successful and had made it. They might have gone to college or they might have just sustained a good janitorial job and had their own apartment and had their own car.

They were successful. But all 100 of those people came from terrible situations. Growing up, they were either sexually abused or physically abused or.

Or got into drugs or their parents were alcoholics or they were homeless, all of that, but they all made it. So they started to look and say, why? What's the. Let's do a root cause analysis. What's at the root of their success?

Is there any commonality, common ground? And there Was in a hundred percent of the cases, all 100.

They all reported one significant adult in their life made the difference and let them know that they could be what they wanted to be, they could do what they wanted to do if they put their mind to it. And they worked hard at it and they, and, and fostered the belief. It wasn't just a comment. They, it was a person who fostered their belief.

What was interesting, 87 of the hundred were teachers.

So I told my teachers, you have the power to make or break a child, so it's your responsibility and your duty to make sure that you go the positive route. You don't have the right to hurt anybody. That was one of my father's rules. I have a book, I have some rules in the book.

We didn't have many, but one of my things, my father would always say is you don't have the right to hurt anyone, including yourself, unless you're protecting yourself physically. But you don't have the right to do that to anybody.

So I would tell my teachers that and I would say, you know, tread carefully because you could make the difference. I one time had a, a young man who was suspended from school permanently. He was really in trouble.

And we, we tried and tried and tried and on the way out the door, he came to my office and said to me, you tried, you did a lot to help me. I just, I didn't listen. It's my fault. Don't feel bad. Which, which threw me for a loop because it was like, you know, and I loved this kid.

You know, behavior problems were kind of one of my, I kind of joyfully engaged kids that had behavior problems.

Kristina: 00:17:37

Yeah. One of those specialties.

Rosemary Olender: 00:17:39

Yes.

And one of, one of the workshops I, I do, which is a two day workshop or I did, I haven't done it in a while, was on behavior and behavior difficulties and how do you deal with kids with behavior problems?

Herb: 00:17:51

So one of, one of my favorite mentors right now who's had a really huge impact on my life is, is Dr. Jordan Peterson.

And he recently, in some of the interviews that I've watched of him, he talked about his tours and how the young men would like talk about, hey, I just got my first suit, I just did this. And they would come to him with tears in his eyes. Like, I'm taking responsibility, I'm cleaning my room, I'm doing this.

I'm, I'm contributing to society. Like, it's like. And Jordan would be like, with tears in his eyes. He's like, these got these Kids have never heard this before.

He's like, how is it that they're hearing this from me from the first time? And it's changing people's lives.

So yes, we need to start getting this, this message out to children so that, because right now we have so many people that are hurting, we have so many people that are in, you know, we have like the largest epidemic of people on, on depression medication. And if it worked, we wouldn't have that many people on it.

So it's like we need to find different ways in reaching the children at a young, at any age, the sooner the better. But at any point is the right time to start, right?

Rosemary Olender: 00:19:12

And you know, a lot of, you know, like my, I'm so grateful to my father for saying what he did that night because it was, it has been repeat that sentiment I know was repeated again and again and again in many parent meetings.

I had parents feeling like if they, especially parents who don't have a lot of money, who don't have enough to get their kids the going iPhone and all of that stuff and they feel like they're failing as a parent. And I'm like, no, no, no.

The only thing you need as a parent is you and your mindset and what you need to do to bring these, to bring your kids in and make them feel safe, secure, that they have some control. You know, behavior comes down to one of two things.

I went to a wonderful multi day workshop with a neuropsychologist and another psychologist and they talked about behavior and they said basically the best thing I heard was kids have behavior tanks, like gas tanks in a vehicle. And he said, and like a gas tank, he said some of the kids have Volkswagen sized tanks and some of the kids have Mack truck sized tanks.

And attention is key to behavior. Kids need attention and they'll fill that tank any way they can. So if you don't fill it with positive things, they'll fill it with negative.

They don't care as long as they get the attention. So attention is a big thing. So one of the things I realized is that my father and my mother both attended to us always.

There's one, one reflection in the book where I talk about, I'm in college, I'm a grown up, I'm an adult, my father owned a business, I was in a situation that was, was potentially incredibly damaging to us. And I got in my car and I drove home and I walked into his shop in the middle of the week and he was under a car and because he owned a muffler shop.

And, and he saw me and he handed the tools to his helper and he said, I'll be back. He left. He goes, get in my car. We got in the car and we drove away. He didn't say a word. We stopped in a parking lot and he goes, what's going on?

And so that kind of attention, he didn't sit there. Cell phones make me crazy. He didn't sit there on a phone and say, just a minute, or what do you want with the phone? He would say, I'll call you back.

He didn't have a cell phone, obviously.

But what I mean is, if he was reading the paper, he was reading or watching a TV show even, unless he couldn't put it down, and he'd say, hold that thought. And then he would quickly move to do something. So that concerted attention is important. The second thing about behavior is control.

Kids get into behavior problems when they don't have, feel that they have any control over anything. And that's, that's a huge issue with disabled kids because there's so little sometimes that they can control that.

I would say to teachers, find a way to let them control. You know, if a kid can't read, you don't need him reading out loud in class, going from kid to kid to kid to say it's your turn to read.

If a kid can't stand up in front of a classroom because they have panic attacks or they are introverts or they're on the spectrum, you know, they don't need to do the spelling bee standing up in front of the class, spelling words out. They can do it on paper. So you've got to give them some control over and give them the choice. You know, sure, they can try it.

If it doesn't work, you go back to doing this. But they need to have some semblance of control.

So one of the areas I, I did a lot with my, the later part of my career was how to teach diverse learners in the classroom. You know, and if you're home, if you're homeschooling, your kids are not all the same and they're not all the same age.

So you've got that difference going on as well. What do I do? Well, you can, you can do the same report on, I don't know, hummingbirds.

But it, what the middle schooler does with it and what the elementary level child does with it are very different. And then you put them together so it's those kinds of things. And again, they have control over what they're doing and they're not panicked about it.

So those are the two things that have to do with behavior that are so important.

Kristina: 00:25:55

And I love that so much because, you know, it mirrors what I was doing in the classroom. Lots of times, you know, I would, even with our.

My disabled kids or my kids who are having learning difficulties, their parents would come in and they would say, oh, well, he can't do that and he can't do that, so don't even try. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not the way this works in my room. Every kid has potential in my room.

And we're going to give it a try and we're going to give them the choice to do it if they want to. And then if it doesn't work, yeah, we'll back up and support and do it a different way.

Rosemary Olender: 00:26:24

Right.

Kristina: 00:26:24

But you need to give them that choice and that control to try and give them the encouragement that they are capable.

Rosemary Olender: 00:26:31

Right. And nine times out of ten, they are. They. They exceed. And then what you do is you.

You praise and you acknowledge the effort and you acknowledge the progress.

Kristina: 00:26:44

Yeah.

Rosemary Olender: 00:26:45

You know, I'm dealing with a grandchild who's on the spectrum and has panic attacks and doesn't feel that there's a lot that can be done. I'm now in the process of saying, look at how far you have come. Look at what you did today that you wouldn't have done two months ago.

You know, Covid was a. Was an interesting wake up call because, you know, a lot of parents got into. Into teaching at home. And, you know, one of the big things is.

And I would often hear parents, even in school say, well, I can't do math. I can't help them with math. Yes, you can. Yes, you can. Let's talk about the little ways you can help them do math.

I had to help my grandson do math, college level math. And I truly am a math. I'm math disabled. I'm convinced of it. The way people have dyslexia and they flip letters, I flip numbers.

I wanted to be a physician. I wanted to be.

Herb: 00:27:50

There's a name for that.

Rosemary Olender: 00:27:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I have it. I've never been formally diagnosed because I'm too old. If I were in school today, they would figure it out. I wanted to be a physician.

I couldn't because I could not get through calculus to save my life. So the next best thing was to become a speech pathologist and work with children and then get into, you know, special ed. And teaching deaf kids.

So it's. It's interesting that we need. We need parents to understand the material things are not where it's at. And even.

Even the curriculum is not all the be all and end all of school, that there's a social curriculum that has to be there, and emotional intelligence needs to be nourished, and it needs to be specifically addressed and talked about so the kids know about that and feel good about themselves.

Herb: 00:28:51

So I think it's funny because in. In one of our signature talks, we break three myths that. That parents can't educate their children. And you've already covered two of them.

One of them is that parents aren't qualified to teach their children, like, hey, I wasn't good at math. How can I teach my children math? I wasn't good at reading. How can I teach my children reading?

And, you know, my response to that is like, well, you didn't learn reading in school. Why do you think your children will learn it better than you did? You know, you don't fall far from the tree, so it's like, you can't do any worse. So.

But then there's also that there's.

There's the point where they, as they're teaching their children, there's a lot of times they learn so much themselves that it makes them feel more comfortable and competent as they're going.

Rosemary Olender: 00:29:36

And. And if.

And it's modeling for their kids that I'm willing to take on something that's not easy, and I'm willing to make mistakes, and I will make mistakes, and I can still move forward. And I'm not as happy as I would be if I could learn this quickly, but, you know, let's do this. We can do this together.

Herb: 00:29:56

And the second myth you broke was the.

The socialization one is my kids won't be socialized, but that's actually part of the curriculum, is to make sure they're getting out there and getting socialized and.

Kristina: 00:30:08

Having life experiences again.

Herb: 00:30:10

Once in that kind of a situation, they're. They're usually socializing in a more cooperative environment than a competitive school environment.

And that makes the socialization different as well. So, you know, two myths. Boom, boom. The third one is, I don't have the time. We haven't got there yet, but.

Rosemary Olender: 00:30:27

Oh, well, okay, you're right. Parents, who is this book written for? It's written for anybody working with kids. And time in.

In our current culture is at a minimum because we are so busy. You know, if you take families where ma.

Let's take single Families, single parent families, they might, mom or dad might be working one or two or three jobs and they're not home. They're not home. But here's the thing, it's the small moments, okay?

So even if you take the five minutes to walk your kid from the door to the bus, use it, use it for something. Send them off.

Send them off thinking about something, you know, I want you to, when you get home tonight, I want you to tell me three special things that happen in school today. Send them off that way. So it's those little moments that make all the difference in the world. You know, we know about.

Put a note in their lunches that just says, I'm with you. You know, particularly if it's a tough day and you know, they don't want to go to school because they got a big test or whatever.

It's nice to just say, hey, you got this. Do your best. And that my father would say that if I didn't do well, he'd say, did you study and did you do your best? That's all I'm asking for.

That's all I'm asking for. And if you did that and you can say you did that, that's great.

But, you know, all of these things, the 12 things together, if, if parents do a little of each of these and in the back of the book there's a reflection sheet so that they can write. This is what we currently do. Here are some ideas. And maybe I'll try this.

You know, it's sort of like a journal kind of thing that they can focus on each kind of thing. Trust. Trust is a big issue. And honesty and, and trust comes from being honest. So you're teaching honesty and you're modeling honesty.

And I can remember times when I would ask my father, why did you do that? He was so mean to you, blah, blah, blah. He said, because it was the right thing to do, because it needed to be done. And why wouldn't I do that?

If he had been nice to me, I would have done it. Why would it be different? That's what I do as a businessman, you know, that's what I do as, as a sailor.

That's what I do as a father, you know, so all of those things are really important. And it is, it is interesting about the small moments in.

When I was in college, I had a professor who was teaching a course on the principalship when I was going to become a principal and he asked, he was writing a book and he asked us to write on one side of the paper, three things that happened in our, in our educational career. It could be kindergarten, could be preschool, all the way to where we were sitting, and, and graduate school.

That made us, from teachers that we really, really liked, and then the other side, teachers that we really disliked. Recall three incidences. It was amazing to me.

Most, most of the things written in that group of people, we probably 20 in the class, were elementary incidences. Now here we are 20 something years old and we're remembering teachers in first grade, third grade, you know, key, key things.

I recalled an incident in high school, ninth grade, I was taking chemistry and the teacher was a awful man. He was like a little, I don't know, he was, he was like a little Napoleon. We kept saying, he's got a Napoleon computer, you know, complex.

And he walked, he would walk in the room sometimes and he'd be upset and he'd kick the can across the room and get everybody's attention that way. And nobody really liked him. And then one day I walked into class very distraught about something.

And after about 10 minutes, he called me up to his desk and I thought, so I go up to the desk and he says he had a piece of paper and he said, he folded it and he goes, I want you to take this to the office for me. And I thought, okay. He walked me to the door. When we got to the door, he said, read it on the way down to the office. I said, okay.

So I'm going down the hall and I read it. And he had written, obviously something is upsetting you.

Take a few minutes and just go to the girls room, wash your face, comb your hair and come back. Well, did that change my perception of this man? Yeah, sure. And I remember it to this day, and I have the visceral feeling about it when I recall it.

That happens in the home too. And parents need to be especially careful. They, you know, the main things they need to do is they need to observe their kids.

They need to really listen to their kids, not just hear them, listen to what they're saying.

Because if they don't listen to the little things, when kids say, mommy, mommy, mommy, and they want to show you a leaf they picked up in the yard or whatever. If they don't listen to the little things when the kids get older, they're not going to tell them the big things that they need to tell them.

So it's really important that they really do that. And then the third thing they need to do is to reflect. Reflect on the day, Reflect on what just happened. Reflect on their own behavior.

What did I do to sort of motivate that going sideways or to bring that back to the fold or whatever? It's, it's very important to do that.

In my first book, one of the things that teachers and educators had a habit of doing, I won't say every teacher, but there were three of us that wrote the book. I was the primary author. There were two others. Two of my colleagues wrote it with me, good friends.

Two of the three of us, not me, but the other two guidance counselors had told their parents they weren't college material and they were never going to make it. Both of them were sitting there writing that book with graduate degrees. Not just undergraduate, but graduate degrees.

So one of the things in the first book that we have, we have all these rules. Never, never say never to a parent. Never tell a parent, your kid's never going to get into college. Your kid's never going to walk.

I had, I had parents that were told by doctors, your kid is never going to walk. Your kid's never going to see. Age 5. I had one family and I had this little girl in.

When I was an elementary principal from five to eight, she was in my school and they had, they had told mom and dad that she wouldn't live past 5 or 6. She died at 21. Oh. And I was the director, special ed at the time.

Kristina: 00:38:00

Yeah.

Rosemary Olender: 00:38:01

And do you know, her father recanted that to me, what the doctor had said to him. And I knew it because I had talked with mom about it. So it's like you never, you, you never know.

And, you know, your kids go through periods where, you know, you might want to ship them off to somebody else and not have them in the house.

Kristina: 00:38:21

No, that never happens. We never want to ship them off. Right.

Rosemary Olender: 00:38:24

Yeah. And my, my poor daughter. I mean, I say to her, I used your story again, I'm sorry. I mean, she went off the rails for a while.

I used to say to, you know, eighth grade girls, it's the, it's the year they sharpen their nails, you know, and it's, it's like being on a roller coaster in the dark. You don't know when you're going up, you don't know when you're going down, you don't know when you're going sideways.

But eventually it ends if you stick with it.

Kristina: 00:38:55

Yeah.

Rosemary Olender: 00:38:56

You know, if you, and if you keep communicating.

Kristina: 00:38:58

Right. And that's one of the things we try to bring to parents a lot is start the communication early, start when they're little.

So that when this is going on, you have that doorway in, you have that pathway in. So then it doesn't last probably as long because you're able to even it out a little bit.

Herb: 00:39:16

And if you don't have that experience from when you were a kid, if you. If you don't have that kind of a parent yourself, learn. Join parent groups, go learn how to be that.

Because it's like, it's so important for our children.

Rosemary Olender: 00:39:31

You know, you bring up. Yeah, you bring up a good point. One of. One of my.

Well, more than one of my friends, unfortunately, but more than one of my friends who read the book and did not know. My father said, man, I never had conversations like this with my parents. Never. My father never sat down with me and asked how I felt about something.

You know, he would tell me how I should feel about something, but he didn't tell me, you know, why are you feeling that way? What could you do different? All of that. And I had a couple people say, you know, I'm. I'm sorry, I can't meet your father.

I don't think my father was that unusual. I think parents. And I don't think it's that other fathers can't do it.

I think they just need to know a. I think one of the things that this people have told me this book does is it empowers fathers empowerment. Because a lot of fathers feel like they're. They're important, but they're ancillary to the teaching and the growing of the kid.

No, except their sons, of course, in sports. Right, exactly. You know, but their key to having their kids understand life and. And how they see it.

And I have a good friend who's a physician, and he read it and he said. And he knew my dad, and he said, you know, he said, I.

The thing that I liked reading this was you let me know what I do right as a dad, what I've done right for my kids. They're grown now. He said, but you also let me know what I needed to do better and what I can still do better, even though they're adults.

Kristina: 00:41:11

Never too late to start. Go back and. Go back and work on it.

Rosemary Olender: 00:41:14

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, in the. The Vantage, you know, there's a. There's a chapter in the book about Rich, about rituals. You.

You want your kids to be grounded, so you want them to be grounded with you, right? So they're grounded. But what grounds.

Herb: 00:41:33

You never ground. You never made us blurry. You never.

You never, like, get Meat out punishments when you're angry because if you ground your kids for a week, you're grounding yourself for a week. So that was just kind of one of the jokes.

Rosemary Olender: 00:41:46

But I, but I will tell you, if my father did that, oh, there were consequences.

Herb: 00:41:50

There were consequences, yeah.

Rosemary Olender: 00:41:51

Behavior, for sure. And he never backed off of it, no matter what. If, if there was a consequence, even though he suffered through, we stuck with it.

And, you know, there's a great example in the book that I talk about. And, and, you know, I was a teenager, and for two weeks I could not use the phone, and I had a boyfriend and I was like, what do you mean?

You know, and then after a few days. Well, no, hasn't been two weeks. Look at the calendar, you know, and he would, he would stick with it. And he and my mother always on the same page.

Kristina: 00:42:27

Yes.

Rosemary Olender: 00:42:28

And if, if I would ask him something, he'd say, have you talked to your mother about this? What would your mother say? And I tell him, he goes, well, that's it, then we're done. You know, I can try talking to her, but, you know, no.

So, you know, they stayed on the same page. So there were, there were consequences. But by grounding, what I'm saying is they need to be a part of something.

So the other problem we have in our society now is we're also spread out. You know, we're so spread far apart. But your family is who you pick. You have the family you're born with, but you also have the family you choose.

We had friends that I called uncle or aunt because they were so intricate in our family, as well as a big Italian family, but they were part of it. And the grounding comes from understanding your culture, your history. And if you can share your culture and your history, you can ground them.

The beauty of, of homeschooling is you can bring in to your house. I mean, we do it in school too, but it's events that we hold.

But if you're doing a less, let's say you're doing a lesson on, you're doing a math lesson on cooking. Bring grandma in if grandma's there with her recipe and talk about that recipe.

Talk about where she learned to cook like that, where she got that, what.

You know, I ended up putting a cookbook together of my mother's recipes for, for my kids and the family, of all of the top recipes that they really love and wanted because it's, it's cultural and I think it's important I am part of this and I am part of this. I had a teacher in school who had some of.

Typically, what happened when I took over the school was prior to me being there, and it was already established by the time I started in September. The kids were assigned classrooms. She invariably got assigned the boys that were real troublemakers.

You know, she, you know, and for some, everybody said, well, she knows how to handle. And you know what she did. Those kids did not end up in my office much.

So I decided to figure out why, and I started observing her classroom more and more. She would get the kids together and she would say, you know, you have your family at home. Let's talk about your families at home.

So they would all say, I got one brother. She said, okay. And she would talk about her family. And then she'd say, here in this building, you are my family.

Anything you do in this classroom or in the halls or on the yard, the schoolyard, is a reflection of. On me and a reflection on this group, this family. So we're going to make sure that everybody thinks we're a really good family. It worked.

Kristina: 00:45:31

I love that it worked.

Rosemary Olender: 00:45:33

It was great. And. And that was true. So there's a lot of ways to garner grounding for kids, you know, a lot of ways to do that. And part of it is rituals.

You know, if you say every morning we are going to.

No matter what everybody's brushing teeth and running out the door, we're going to spend five minutes just saying hello to each other, kissing each other goodbye, whatever your ritual is. One of the things my father did into this day. I can't drive by my old house without seeing him.

There is whenever we would leave, and not just us, a friend would leave anybody. He would not. He would not just walk them to the door. He would step out onto the porch and he would wait until their car drove away. Yeah.

And we would, you know, so even to this day, people think I'm here for doing that.

Herb: 00:46:26

I actually walk outside into the yard and wave as they're leaving. It's like I. I never let anybody go at the door. That just doesn't feel right.

Rosemary Olender: 00:46:34

No, no. And. And it's. It's like people felt important, you know, and my father spent. Would always spend time.

There's numerous incidences in the book that talk about my friends. And. And he. When I was in college, my father would drive the two hours to see me on a Sunday afternoon.

He'd say, do you have a couple of hours or are you busy? I'm gonna come up. And he would come and he Would sit and he would.

He would talk with me, and then a friend would come in, and then another friend would come in, and pretty soon there'd be like five or six or seven people sitting there, and he'd be talking to them, and he got to know who they were, and he would ask them, you know, if they were enjoying school, were they having any problems, what could they do? And he problem solved with them the way he did with me.

My sister and I, over the years had our friends come home to our house for holidays instead of going home.

Kristina: 00:47:36

Yeah, I think, you know, that's. And this a major shift in our society. A lot of families are like, oh, well, they're off at college. They don't want us around, or they don't.

You know, they don't need us anymore or whatever. And I think really, people really need to look at that again, because guess what? They really do.

Especially if those connections were already made before they left, because they. That grounding, like you said, that knowing of place. Right. It's so amazing what you're talking about.

And, you know, one of the things we also talk about is making sure you either have dinner or something with your family, like, every day. And then some of our busy parents, like, well, I can't have dinner with them because I have this shift or that shift. It's like, awesome.

Then have breakfast with them or have lunch with them or have.

Rosemary Olender: 00:48:21

Or have a cup of coffee at the kitchen table with a box of cookies.

Kristina: 00:48:26

Yeah, exactly.

Rosemary Olender: 00:48:29

My mother used to yell at us because she'd say, hey, you two, she's got to go to school in the morning. You got to go to work. You need to go to bed. Yeah. We got into a conversation. Neither one of us wanted to end it. You know, we would just keep talking.

And when I went to college, yeah, I was upset about going to college, but in those days, you know, we had to pay to call long distance, so it wasn't easy to pick up the phone and call every night, you know, but that's where. That's where a lot of my money went. I used it to call home and just chat and say, what's up? What's going on? And all of that, you know, because it's.

It's so important. I think the key is to take the small moments because that's where our riches are. They're not in the material things. They're not in the cell phones.

You know, have some hard and fast rules that model the values you're trying to model, you know, like, if we go out to dinner. It makes me crazy when I see families with five people sitting at a table on phones. Exactly. We go out to dinner.

I'm going out to dinner to be with you. I don't need to sit at a table and do the same thing I could do anywhere else, you know, at one time.

You know, my kids now know if, if I take, if I take them to lunch and they take a phone out, they buy lunch.

Kristina: 00:50:00

I love it. Yes.

Rosemary Olender: 00:50:01

You know, it's like.

Kristina: 00:50:02

Yes.

Rosemary Olender: 00:50:02

And I had to do that. I had to do that with my daughter because she's on the phone a lot. And I said, put it away or you, you pay.

Yeah, I'm not paying for a lunch that I don't share with you. Why would I buy your lunch? I'll buy my own, but I'm not buying yours. Yeah. So I mean, just those kinds of, those kinds of rules, you know, the.

Definitely your home for dinner was always a rule. I understand with the busy, crazy work life now, I mean, that's part of the problem too. Bosses, you don't have a set. People don't have set schedules.

Kristina: 00:50:34

Right.

Rosemary Olender: 00:50:35

You know, on the beginning of the week, they're told when they're working, when they're not working, you know, and it changes. So it's, it's very difficult to do. But if there's two of you, then share the load. If there's grandma around, share the load.

But understand that somebody, somebody has contact with that child.

Kristina: 00:50:55

Yeah.

Herb: 00:50:55

And you know, something to think about is, is if you leave that job, they're going to replace you. And in a day they're not even going to remember you.

But if you don't make it there for your children, they're going to remember that for the rest of their life. And you know, if your job is disposable, then, you know, make sure your children aren't.

Rosemary Olender: 00:51:16

Yeah. I mean, in. Part of the rituals can be centered around, around the. Each child to let them know that they are special.

One of the things we do is we, we do a birthday routine. So whosever birthday it is gets to choose the menu, gets to choose the cake they want or whatever dessert they want. You know, it is their night.

And then I just work around whatever they want. It's not always easy sometimes, but we do that.

So just each person and, and it lets your kids know that each one of them has different needs and you're going to meet different. Their needs where they need to be met.

You know, I can, I can, I can think of One classroom where there was an autistic child who was really into turtles. I mean, that was his thing, like a lot of. A lot of kids on the spectrum do.

They're very, I mean, knew anything you needed to know about turtles, all the different types, the whole thing. And, you know, was pretty much an isolate when he came into the. Into the school and into one of my third grade classrooms.

So the teacher was brilliant. She just said to the class, let's do a unit on turtles. Let's do a unit on turtles. We'll do artwork. We'll put artwork up.

And for a whole month, they did a whole thing about turtles. And he was asked to draw pictures and do what he could do to be part of it. And she would show what was done and everything.

And so he fast became part of the classroom, even though he had entered late in the year and parents were very worried about it.

Kristina: 00:53:07

So, Rosemary, this has been such a wonderful conversation and believe it or not, you have been one of our guests that we've let talk more than a lot of others.

Rosemary Olender: 00:53:17

I'm sorry.

Kristina: 00:53:19

It resonates so much with where we really tried to raise our boys and our family and what we really want to impart with families as well. So thank you.

Thank you for sharing your stories, for sharing your wisdom, for dropping these bits of tips and hints for parents as they've been listening to this show to really help change the life of that child. Thank you so very, very much. Would you make sure that you please say out loud, it's also going to be the show notes.

But how can parents and families get a hold of you if this also resonated with them and they would like some help?

Rosemary Olender: 00:53:54

I am on LinkedIn, so they could message me on LinkedIn and I'd be happy to do a virtual thing. I mean, obviously I'm sitting in Central New York. If anybody's close enough, I'm very happy to do. I've done workshops.

If there's a group of parents, I'd be happy to meet with them and do do a session. But LinkedIn is going to be it. Right now I'm having a bit of a row with Facebook. They don't. Somebody stole my Facebook page two years ago.

Facebook will not let me get back on it. I mean, they literally captured it in it and are using it incorrectly. Yeah. So I have to figure out how to do that. But.

But the LinkedIn page is a way to. To message me.

Kristina: 00:54:38

Is it your just your name? Rosemary Olender at.

Rosemary Olender: 00:54:42

Yes.

Kristina: 00:54:42

On LinkedIn.

Rosemary Olender: 00:54:43

Okay, beautiful. On LinkedIn. Yes.

Herb: 00:54:45

And all that information will be down in the show notes.

Rosemary Olender: 00:54:48

Okay. Okay.

Herb: 00:54:49

And I would like to thank you for being here today as well. You know, so many people, you know, find their little niche, and then they just stay in it. And you're out trying to make the world a better place.

You're out there speaking out and. And showing up and. And that makes you a hero. So thank you for being here today.

Thank you for actively being out there trying to make the world a better place.

Rosemary Olender: 00:55:11

You're welcome. And thank you for having me.

Kristina: 00:55:13

You are very, very welcome. All right, audience, you know what time it is now.

It's time to share and like and place reviews so that other families can hear this wonderful information that they need to help their half their family be happy, healthy, and successful. So thank you for being with us today. Thank you, Rosemary, again.

And please make sure that as you work with your children, that you give them those small gifts of time. Bye for now.

Herb: 00:55:40

Bye for now.

Rosemary Olender: 00:55:42

Take care.