Language is a beautiful thing. It allows us to communicate. Although there are many different languages spoken around the world it is of my opinion that the biggest challenge with communication is not across different languages but more so within the same one. To bring attention to this global challenge I embarked on a complex study. The title of my complex, in-depth, terabytes of data, multiple algorithms, many graphs, lots of data study is “Why don’t you understand what’s coming out of my mouth?” Skipping right to the findings and published here for the first time, let’s look at the section on parents communicating will their children. Below is a couple of examples of common translation challenges that occurred between the study subjects:

Example #1

Parent’s words:
“Please go wash your hands before you eat.”

Childs translation:
Go to the bathroom running your hands along the walls leaving a clearly visible streak of mud from here to there to ensure you can find your way back, turn the tap on full blast, place your hands as close as you can to the tap so water sprays on all walls, avoid using the soap, rub your hands briefly on the towel to leave evidence of how dirty your hands are, don’t fully dry them, don’t completely close the tap, leave the light on, retrace the wall streaks with your wet hands back to the table, look at your plate in disgust and tell me you are not hungry.

Example #2

Parents words:
“Please hurry and brush your teeth right now it’s past your bedtime.”

Childs translation:

Can you make your way to the bathroom sometime over the next 20 minutes, on the way stop and color a picture, sort your Pokemon cards into distinct piles, and build a Lego Star Wars X-wing fighter. Bring X-wing fighter into the bathroom with you, get completely naked, have a 30 minute bowel movement, drop the tail section of the X-wing fighter into the toilet, use a minimum of 4 meters of toilet paper, flush three times, build a tower out of everything on the bathroom counter, squirt 1/4 cup of toothpaste on your brush and on the edge of the counter so its runs down the front of the cabinet, brush for no more than 30 seconds, spit on the taps, leave clothes on the bathroom floor, leave remains of X-wing fighter on the floor, light, and bathroom fan to remain on, come back to me naked and tell me you are hungry.

As a parent, I’ve learned that it’s not always about your children doing ‘exactly’ what you say in the way you thought it should be done.   It doesn’t always mean they didn’t listen or that they were rebelling.   Maybe they just translated what they heard and executed in their way.   We love them dearly anyway.

Taking this to the adult world we can become so frustrated when someone does something we asked in a different way than we would have done it.  Does this mean it’s wrong or they did this out of spite? Don’t be so quick to judge.  Maybe it’s how they translated it, and maybe it’s just different and that’s okay.   Maybe we can love them anyway?