Choosy moms

"You cut, I choose" has been the general principle for settling disputes and potential disputes between two people forever. How startling to see such wisdom in a Jif peanut butter ad that's been running on TV for the past couple of weeks. A mom is distributing the last slice of bread, spread with Jif, to her two kids and tells one he gets to cut it in two, but the other one gets first choice of which piece to take.

Of course, she is a "choosy mom," and all you sensitive people out there know how much damage to self-esteem such elitist thinking can do:

The slogan "choosy moms choose JIF" is famous in marketing circles for having been extremely effective.  The reason, of course, is that the implied corrolary to the slogan is "crappy negligent moms who don't care about their kids give other brands of peanut butter."  The harm here is that it gets moms into the habit of thinking that the place to concentrate their efforts to be better moms involve choice of peanut butter, instead of things that might actually work.

The heart of "you cut, I choose" is creating buy-in. Any good teacher (especially the one attempting the Socratic role) knows the value of that. An editor I used to work for had a good version of the method. He'd give a challenging story to a reporer, involving a lot of research, and ask the reporter how much time he or she thought would be needed to do it. Whatever the reporter said, he would add to it in coming up with the deadline. "I can do that story in three days," the reporter would say. "Take five days," he would say. There was then no possible excuse the reporter could come up with for not having the story done in five days.

Considering the state of our institutions today -- including government -- I'd say we could use a few more choosy moms.