Callable on demand

One of the nightmares of any would-be homeowner is that his contractor might not finish building his house, or worse, simply disappear halfway through the construction. As some of you may know, these nightmares can occur despite the owner’s best efforts to check the contractor’s reputation and references. In order to allay my fears, I therefore asked my contractor to purchase a performance bond that was “callable upon demand.” A performance bond is a surety bond issued by an insurance company to guarantee the satisfactory completion of a project by a contractor. Should the contractor default, then the house owner is guaranteed compensation by the insurance company for any monetary loss up to the amount of the performance bond. Moreover, if a bond is “on demand,” then it is normally considered as the equivalent of cash in hand. It should be sufficient for the house owner to simply show, in good faith, the insurance company that the contractor violated the contract or had failed to perform. Well, the worst case scenario did happen as my contractor bailed out on me. At least he had the decency to formally acknowledge his failure and sign a waiver. However, instead of living up to their word, the insurance company is apparently more interested in playing basketball — they’ve been “dribbling the ball,” so to speak, for two months now, hoping perhaps for me to lose interest in pursuing my claim. Alas, and I thought all along that they were really madaling kausap (easy to talk to).

My insurance blues notwithstanding, there is another service some family experts say ought to also be upon demand: parenting. We fathers and mothers have to be available to our children all the time regardless of how busy we are with other things. They need to be sure, especially when they are at a young age, that we will always be there for them. And unlike my insurance claim, they don’t even have to show a bona fide need to warrant our attention. This is, of course, a very difficult ideal to always live up to. How many times have our children run up to us demanding immediate attention about some trivial matter while we were busily working at the computer to beat a deadline, or were in the middle or making dinner, or were just trying to get a brief catnap after a long hard day? During these situations, we are often tempted to snap and tell them to take a number. And when we do, we reason to ourselves that no parent is superhuman and that our kids need to learn how to wait. But according to Dr. Larry J. Koenig in Parenting On Demand, we are actually doing our children a disservice when we react in such impulsive manner. Not even adults, he says, feel good about being shut out for any reason. Besides, Dr. Koenig adds, when we ignore them or cast them aside, tears and a full-blown temper tantrum may not be far behind. Things could then easily escalate and get out of hand, resulting in much more stress to everyone.

Ironically, Dr. Koenig recommends the same strategy that my good insurance company is currently using on me: freeze the ball and buy some time. He calls it the “Let me think about it” strategy. He suggests that the next time our child comes up to us while we’re busily trying to juggle two or three other balls in the air, simply take a moment to acknowledge his or her request and say, “Let me think about it” or “That’s a good question and I need to think about it before I can give you an answer.” First of all, by reacting in this manner, we prevent our child from feeling ignored. Secondly, it gives us more time to really think about what to answer our child. And third, even if we react unfavorably to their request, our child will feel that we at least considered their request before we came up with a decision or answer. Of course, Dr. Koenig acknowledges that our kids may soon wise up to this strategy and may retort, “But you always say that!” Nevertheless, with consistency and some humor, he says that our children will likely accept it.

If the bond manager or any other staff from the claims department of my favorite insurance company reads this article, however, be forewarned that kulit (persistence) is my middle name. And that they are bound to experience the mother, the father, and even the grandmother of all temper tantrums if they persist in ignoring me!

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Please e-mail your reactions to kindergartendad@yahoo.com.