Before I came to these United States, I had no idea how easy it was to raise healthy, optimistic, energetic, and wildly open minded children.

Apparently, it’s all down to shampoo and breakfast cereal.

I am also informed that if you pick out the right fabric softener your kids will love you and your life will become stress free - wow.

That has to be the reason why so many parents are bemused and confused that their teenage children give them so much grief.

I mean, they bought all the right brands, color coordinated their living room and even said “no” to drugs. Yet, their children didn’t laugh all the time, like the ones bouncing down the stairs holding the latest fluffy toilet roll.

Spend one evening in front of the television (not recommended) and the message is clear: children who brush with the right tooth paste (I’m not going to tell you which one I use) don’t worry, and they make it abundantly clear, the only reason the parents worry, is they don’t drive the right car.

What’s next? Dog food that reduces the national debt, eye glasses that bring world peace, and tea that stops the polar ice caps from melting?

In the never ending brand wars a line was crossed. Brand "X" coffee promised something that brand "Y" did not. That promise might be finding love, peace, wisdom, and the winning lottery numbers. And even though it's just coffee, for some reason people seem to buy the product with the bigger lie.

And so do our children. You may instruct them that if they study hard and work diligently they will succeed in life, but so does Nike for just wearing their latest endorsed shoes. 

The more designer our lives have become, the more generic the children seem to be, with all the generic problems associated.

I have more than a sneaking suspicion that the less confidence children have, the more brand-name shoes they need to buy. And vice-versa. Not only don't famous names on your clothing do anything for confidence, the sad truth is that it’s the antithesis.

If you want to give your children real confidence to follow their dreams, you have to show them how to dream big.

When children don’t know how to dream big, they end up following their desires. To them these desires will seem like dreams, but they end up being nightmares. 

Last time I looked on Amazon there were more than 50,000 books on parenting. Assuming no plagiarism, that’s an awful lot of help.

Even if parents had the luxury to sit and read, by the time they covered the subject of infants, their children would be married with kids of their own. Maybe parents could read everything there is to know about the Terrible Twos by the birth of their third or fourth grandchild.

One has to wonder what people did before these piles of parenting books anyway? Was the world overrun with psychopaths? And since Dr. Spock created the parenting book genre, has our ratio of psychopaths diminished?

I don’t think so.

Parenting has two basic categories: The crisis at hand and the end game. And while most parenting books fall under the former group, the real advantage comes to those who understand the end game.

Think of parenting as you would business or sports or just about anything you take seriously. The more strategic your thinking, the more you are able to categorize problems and provide solutions proactively. A strategic player will often see one solution to many problems.

Effective managers know the tell-tale signs of worker unrest, market fluctuations and product inconsistency. They don’t wait until costumers cancel their orders, they see where problems on the factory floor will lead. 

The same is true in parenting. The strategic parent doesn’t wait till the bad report card shows up, or the police come knocking on their door before they start reading up on another pile of parenting books.

However, most parenting books are the equivalent of crisis-management manuals, which, while necessary -- even the best managed company gets into occasional trouble -- is no way to live 24x7, and no way to effectively raise children.

In business, don’t you need a game plan? Don’t the great businesses have a definition of success? Parenting is the same. We may be able to break parenting up into 50,000 different tasks, and it could be that you might find success along the way, but that doesn’t mean you will end up where you thought you should.

What kind of parent says, “Where did I go wrong?” A parent who cared. They wanted to get it right, and thought they did. 

It’s easy to do if you just focus on getting over the current hurdle of car pools, sibling rivalries and diets. But if all you are focused on is the current crisis, then you will always be playing catch-up. And as your children get older, you will fall farther and farther behind until your life starts to resemble a soap opera.

My personal guess is that around 99.98% of the population, give-or take 0.02%, strongly believe there is an elite group of perfect people roaming the planet.

What else can explain why these so-called perfect people make news when they show up drunk, violent or fill-in-the-blank, when millions of people are doing the same disgusting things every single nano-second?

Yep, because we thought they were perfect.

I only mention this because it’s at the heart of 99.99% of all marital misery, give or take 0.01%.

We all know our spouses are not perfect – no news here. As such their imperfections fall into two categories:

(1)    Imperfections that are the same as mine, and

(2)    Intolerable imperfections.

People who make the same mistakes as us are quite pleasant (to us). As an extreme, alcoholics, con artists and geeks all get along great… within their own gene pool. However, they all detest people with other issues.

Since it’s impossible to find anyone that has your exact imperfections, your spouse is very likely to be a constant source of aggravation.

How is that working for you?

But you didn’t click here to read what you already know, you were hoping for a solution. As such, spouses deal with this in one of four ways:

1.    Some spouses think there are other people who lucked out and are married to perfect spouses, drats!

2.    If I divorce this one, the next one will be perfect.

3.    Maybe if I take up golf I won’t mind.

These first three ways are pretty much delusional, and since I hate to leave you hanging without hope, there is a fourth way that turns intolerance into bliss.

To use a martini analogy, it’s one part cracking your husband’s code (what makes men tick) and it’s one part understanding yourself (know your strengths). “Marriage made in Heaven” means that between the two of you there exists the formula to make it all work out.

I wouldn't say it's easy, but it is there, and because we are talking about bliss, it's ultimately worth it. 

One of the reasons Judaism does not like gambling is because for you to win, someone else has to lose.

It’s for this reason the Jewish way of marriage is to never compromise.

I can hear you saying, "I thought marriage was all about compromise, so what do you mean?" 

Let me explain. Let us suppose you and your spouse are going out for dinner. Your spouse wants to do Chinese, you fancy Italian. The problem is you have gone off Chinese food and they are not much into Italian. 

What do you do?

Compromise. Tonight we will go Chinese and next time out we will go to an Italian restaurant.

Sounds pretty reasonable. And to the average single person, that should work just fine.

Not.

Compromise means that this evening you will BOTH be miserable, and the next night out you will also BOTH be miserable. 

Why?  

Anyone who has been married longer than about 20 minutes understands that if your spouse is not happy, you will not be happy either. In other words, you wouldn't eat Italian food if you didn't like it. Well, if your spouse hates Italian, you are going to end up hating it just as much they do. Not the food, the company.

If you compromise every issue, then at least half the time you are going to do things you hate, let alone being with someone who hates the other half. Once you get this simple formula you will realize how absolutely fruitless it is to do something that makes your spouse sad or unhappy.

You may think you are used to it, but one day, just like a mud slide, all of a sudden it’s just too much weight, and it gives way. If either of you are unhappy, eventually you both will be.

This shows up in other areas as well. It’s not unheard of for a spouse to berate the other for something they did or didn’t do. Whether you are mad that the light bulbs don’t get changed, or receiving the anger for not changing them quickly enough, either one just adds to the pain, and one day it becomes too much.

I wish I had a Maserati for every husband or wife who called me up for counseling and started telling me, “I didn’t realize my spouse was so unhappy….” The truth is the other spouse didn’t realize how unhappy they were either. We get used to putting up with bad restaurants or light bulbs that never get changed, plus a whole host of other annoying issues. Then one day we wake up and we remember why we got married, and this isn’t it.

It starts very simply, one little compromise saves a whole bunch of arguments. Unfortunately though it becomes a dangerous life-style in how you deal with conflict. 

But there is a great way to avoid these terrible pitfalls and redeem your marriage.

The secret to avoid compromise is to find the third alternative. That’s the restaurant that you both love. 

It’s ultimately counter productive to make your spouse unhappy so that you get your way. In the long run what you gain through nagging or screaming is lost in resentment and bitterness. The secret is to make each other happy so each will be glad to help. This is not the easier path, it's much easier to simply compromise, that's why people do it. It's just the happier path, which is hopefully the path you will be on for a very long time.