On Thursday night my son with his two weeks old license came to pick me up along with my wife. On our way back we had couple of heart stopping moments, in which I went "stop stop stop". My son was not happy. But I did not talk to him about it then. It never works that way. This Saturday we decided to go to Barista at night, and I asked my son to drive again. He said "You will let me drive again?" "Sure but we need to have a talk before that" "what's the point. You do not understand how I feel". It was more or less a standard script. Not very different from most father-son script through out human history. I decided to make a change this time. I said ok this time we will change roles and I will argue your case and you will argue my case. But you do it in first person, you do not say "i understand that you want me to do this", you will say "I want you to do this because...". and I will defend from your side. So we started our discussion, my son was sceptic and was not sure how to handle it. But soon caught on and we had a 20 minute discussion which resulted in norms that we will follow. I said that when I (that is my son) make a mistake you (that is me) do not shout. My son said, but I am going to tell you what to do when there is reasonable danger. I said what do you mean by reasonable danger? and many such arguments. At the end I asked my son whether it helped. He was very quiet then he said, I didn't know you
understood my problem so well.

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