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In my previous incarnation as a family law and divorce lawyer, I probably handled somewhere in the range of 700 cases. I have also acted as a mediator in these disputes on several occasions. And between the practical demands of many family law clients, not to mention that I have many friends who seek out my advice, I have acted as a de facto relationship counsellor more times than I can count. That people have allowed me into this most intimate aspect of their lives has given me unprecedented access to the psyches of individuals during one of the most traumatic times in their lives, thus affording me a front seat view to the psychology of relationships.

Add to that my own personal relationship experience, replete with two divorces, several other failed attempts at cohabitation, and a string of broken relationships. However, do not feel badly for me, and definitely do not mock the fact that I will seek in this article and others to give relationship advice. From each of these relationships (not to mention the inevitable therapy sessions that follow) I have learnt much about the nature of romantic relationships and, of course, about myself. I am a better man for it, and in fact at 45 years old am the most evolved version of myself, perhaps more advanced than many who knew me in my younger days ever expected me to be. I have the cuts and scars and bruises that give me the gravitas to enter the dangerous fray of advising on relationships.

About 15 years ago I developed a seminar for the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto which had me travelling to about a dozen parishes a year as part of their marriage preparatory course. The 3 hour seminar was was entitled “A Divorce Lawyer Tells You How to Stay Married”. It was based on the simple premise that if I took all of those things my clients had told me led to the breakdown of their marriages and turned those items on their head, the opposite side of these negatives was a positive that if enacted may have helped propel the relationship upwards instead of down.

Arguably the most important thing I have learnt is that relationships involve a delicate balance. While we all strive for relationships of true equality the fact is that this rarely happens. One partner or the other usually has something over the other in some or all aspects of the relationship- money, intellect, child rearing ability, friendships, family relations, etc. Contrary to popular myth, sometimes the most lopsided relationships are the most successful and often the most equally matched people cannot keep it together. That said, the real balance of which I speak is in our heads and our hearts, not on some superficial checklist. It comes down to balancing how we feel about ourselves with the respect we have for our partner. Or put another way, try as we might, it is ultimately our egos, whether too strong or too weak, which entangle us.

If, in your mind, you are so far out of his league that you constantly feel he should be eternally grateful for your existence in his life, you will become complacent at best, disinterested at worst. You think you are doing him a favour because you tell him what to wear, what to eat, how to behave, etc, but you’re not- you are actually masking your contempt with the patina of caring. Who amongst us hasn’t been in a relationship where several years in we have gone from the extreme described above to complete disdain for our partner? My friend Deborah Mecklinger, one of the finest family counsellors and mediators in Toronto, is fond of saying that the very thing that attracts us to our mates will eventually be the thing that repels us. “He has such a great sense of humour” becomes “he never takes anything seriously”. Spontaneity comes to be seen as irresponsibility. Grounded turns into boring. Good with money becomes cheap while generous becomes bad money management. “She’s close with her family”  becomes “her family is overbearing”.

But walk around feeling so lucky and blessed that this person should deign to be with you and insecurity will eventually creep in to the mix. Suddenly your spouse’s bad mood, tiredness, illness or casual sarcastic off the cuff remark becomes blown out of proportion and you torture yourself with fear and worry. You start to read into everything your partner says and does in a way that negatively affects you. If she wants to have dinner with a male friend, you suddenly become suspicious. You become jealous of the time she spends with her girlfriends or her sister. Her working late suddenly gives you thoughts that she’s having an affair, or that you are playing second fiddle to her career. If she leaves the room to talk on her cell phone so as not to disturb the tv show you are engrossed in, you become convinced she has something to hide.

Everyone at the courting stage of relationships is overcome with the blush and excitement of new love. The new lovers write notes professing their eternal love, rejig their work and personal schedules to spend as much time as possible with each other, forsake friends and hobbies, try things they never would have thought of just to make the other person happy. Neither is prepared to make a decision on where to eat or what movie to see for fear of offending their new potential life partner, and for certain there is no criticism levelled at your future bride or groom. And yet this passes, as it must. It is impossible to sustain the excitement and passion of the early stages of love. As the relationship settles into one of normalcy and day to day minutiae our real selves manifest. This where we need to be aware of the ego lurking silently within us, either arrogance or insecurity or often, incongruously, both, just waiting to jump out and scare our relationship away.

There is no recipe for a perfect relationship. In fact, relationships by their nature are not perfect. But if we each learnt to recognize the arrogance and insecurity- these two sides of the same coin- that destroyed our past relationships, we can protect against the tide of our ever rising egos from inflicting further damage.

And while we’re on the subject of past relationships, leave them in the past. You must not project the bad qualities of or hurt caused by a former partner onto a new one. That is a sure recipe for disaster. I have enough of my own issues to deal with to keep a happy relationship without having to worry that I will be punished for some infraction I have never committed because of your last boyfriend.

The most confident of us have insecurities, and the most insecure of us can become smug. The key is to keep these two competing forces in check and balance. Come to think of it, this applies not only to romantic relationships, but to our jobs and our friendships as well.

As anyone who knows me well is acutely aware, my biggest pet peeve is society’s obsession with celebrity. I rail regularly, to all who will listen, against our celebrity-obsessed culture. I have spent what seems like hundreds of hours of my free time reading every available treatise that tries to explain the psychological, sociological and financial reasons for the current state of our celebrity-industrial complex. All academic explanations aside, it is a very sad state of affairs. We are witnessing the dumbing down of our nation. Oh, we Canadians are quick to believe we are smarter than our U.S. neighbours, but it cannot be argued that their popular culture has not been adopted as our own. We have become a society of spectators rather than participants. Of passive watchers as opposed to critical thinkers. Observers rather than readers. We willingly open our mouths like baby birds to have the mama bird of entertainment regurgitate trivial pablum into our systems to satiate our desire for celebrity. Sadly, however, it seems there is never enough, with the result that we have moved beyond the Paris Hilton famous-for-being-famous type of fame, past the Warholian 15 minutes, and reached a point where such is our desperation for a constant diet of celebrity that an entire genre of television programming has sprung up, seemingly for the sole purpose of manufacturing new celebrities.

The result of this lowering of the pop culture bar is best captured in two medium that would appear, at first blush, to be at opposite ends of the high-low culture spectrum: Chris Hedges’ brilliantly intellectual and articulate 2009 critique of our post-literate society, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, and the October 3, 2012 episode of Comedy Central’s South Park.  Of course, neither Hedges nor the South Park creators were the first to sound the alarm, but they are, each in their inimitable way, perhaps the most poignant on the subject in recent memory. And they are writing today, essentially after the bar has already been lowered beyond what could have been imagined even a generation ago. Of course, there were some particularly astute observers of human nature who warned of this but we didn’t pay heed. Aldous Huxley foresaw this future in the 1930s, albeit his vision involved a totalitarian dystopia where the citizenry had no free will, as opposed to our democratic system where we choose to squander our free will. But rereading Brave New World today one can’t help but be amazed at Huxley’s prescience vis-a-vis a populace driven by pleasure and entertainment to the exclusion of all else. Likewise, the historian Daniel Boorstin in his 1960s dissertation The Image, Warhol in the 70s,  and the sociologist Neil Postman in the 80s (Amusing Ourselves to Death) certainly warned about this long before we ever envisioned our popular culture could become so banal and vapid.

In Hedges’ book he explores how only a tiny minority of our society is truly literate, and how without realizing it, most Americans (and I would posit Canadians too) are so focused on trivial entertainments that they know nothing of, and pay no attention to, the real issues facing our society. A virtue has been made of not knowing. We are so desirous of constant spectacular stimulation from the entertainment industry that we are voluntarily and without concern giving up knowledge, rights and privileges. We are allowing the power elites to run things as they see fit because to actually be involved would require time away from being entertained and instead we would be compelled to think. To stop focusing on the banality of celebrity lives would force us to critically examine our own. Whether it is fear or laziness, the overwhelming majority simply don’t wish to do so. In his opening chapter, Hedges illustrates how the dangerous preoccupation with spectacle and celebrity has allowed the line between the real news and the entertainment storyline to be blurred beyond recognition.

In the recent South Park episode, the rotund fifth grader Eric Cartman, one of the 4 young protagonists in the cartoon series, is inadvertently turned into a reality tv star to rival the lowest form of the already low genre. The show uses as its jumping off point the highly rated new reality show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, about a 6 year old girl and her clearly uneducated, poor and proud of it, overbearing momma who is intent on making her a star. The adults’ language and diction in Honey Boo Boo is so difficult to comprehend that the producers found it necessary to have subtitles for them even though the family are white Americans whose first language is English. The saddest reality is that there is little difference between the real Honey Boo Boo on…wait for it…The Learning Channel (!!!) and the spoofed Honey Boo Boo on South Park. In the South Park episode Cartman is initially appalled and ashamed at being turned into the reality tv character Fatty Poo Poo, only to discover his real embarrassment is about having lost in the tv ratings war to Honey Boo Boo. There is much talk in the episode about shamelessness. Parker and Stone, South Park’s creators, have hit the nail on the head. It is clearly the absence of shame that is a prerequisite for anyone to seek to be this kind of celebrity. It is a similar shamelessness that causes one to eschew knowledge and literacy, and an understanding of the community around them, to devote themselves to paying attention to the goings on of these pseudo celebrities.

At risk of sounding like Chicken Little, the fact is that when I was growing up, and in generations previous, a desire for material success meant studying to get good grades, hard work, determination and years of effort. Even those who wanted fame and fortune as musical icons or tv and movie stars understood that at least a modicum of talent was necessary, and even then it would still take many years of hard work peppered with a lot of rejection if they ever hoped to break through.

The sad effect of our reality tv culture and the fetishization of fame and celebrity is that today’s generation of kids do not grasp the concept of paying their dues, hard work, or perseverance. They see knowledge and education as irrelevant to their quest for success and confuse fame with talent and entitlement. They expect that they will simply be discovered by talking their way onto a reality tv show, or failing that will easily develop a reality web series of their own. Look at how young people use Facebook to narcissistically turn the everyday minutiae of their life, every photo, every thought, into their own personal reality show focused on themselves. In fact, there are several recent studies in North America that show the thing preteens value above all else- including money, knowledge, sex, happiness and family- is fame.

The media elites, driven by ratings and profit have long ago forgotten the public trust of the airwaves. Current events and issues of the day are now mere fodder for more entertainment. History is scoffed at as being irrelevant because it happened “before I was even alive”. Most middle class children today are growing up with a level of affluence and entitlement unprecedented in our history. They are bombarded daily with more input from more media than any generation before, and yet the content of this input is less substantive than ever. And the media through which it is filtered has given up any pretext of even trying to be educational and informative. The entirety of the media is more than ever given over to a focus on style over substance, entertainment over information. In the rare instances where information is given (i.e. politics) the source is most likely biased to such an extreme that any information gleaned will be one-sided or delivered in a way so as to surreptitiously sell that outlet’s particular bias. Or real events about real people are covered with such sensationalism that the true story gets lost in the mix.

We must stop looking to popular culture to manufacture false prophets.The religion of celebrity worship must be replaced with an atheism that instills in our children the ability to examine the celebrity culture gods with a skeptical eye, while at the same time developing in the children an understanding of true worth.

We cannot rely on the media gods to do the right thing. And it is too late to turn back the clock. But all hope is not lost. As individual citizens and as parents, we can take positive steps to ensure that our children understand why they should not look in the direction of celebrity for guidance and salvation. We need to teach them about role models truly worth emulating. For the coddled majority of my children’s generation, this learning is significant as it will provide some grounding in reality, and hopefully a sense of civic responsibility as well as a desire for substantive knowledge. To the children living in situations of poverty, abuse or neglect, shaping their understanding of who ought and not to be a hero and/or or role model will provide them with real hope as opposed to false illusions.We owe it to them, to ourselves, and to the future of our nation lest we awake in 20 years to find out that the the movie Idiocracy was not comedy but prophecy.

The Jewish New Year is upon us. As I write this we have just concluded Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. For those unfamiliar with this most sacred Jewish holy day, it is the annual day when we reflect on how we performed character-wise in the last year, considering those things which we could have done better and when we make a solemn promise to ourself, our God, our community and those close to us, that we will take real steps to be better people in the year that comes. With each passing year I realize that no matter how many strides I have made in recent years to become the best version of myself I have ever been, there is still a long way to go. The lyrics to a Dwight Yoakam song act as a succinct reminder of the way most of us, if we are being honest with ourselves, should feel upon such self-reflection:

I’ve got a long way to go before I get there
I’ve got a lot of field to hoe, the sun is so high
I’ve got a lot of miles to row
And the next few only show
That there’s still such a long way to go

It is an important reminder that I must always keep striving for a perfection of character I will surely never reach. I can always be better. This is not the same thing as the dog chasing his tail. Even if we never get to the end of the road, with each fresh step we make our lives and the lives of those around us infinitely better.

Another important reminder of this concept came in an unusual form.Rather than attend my own synagogue for Yom Kippur, I had the pleasure of attending the services at the synagogue of a Rabbi who is a friend of mine. This would turn out to be perhaps the most significant High Holiday service I have ever attended. My friend gave my son and I the honour of reading the sermon- a sermon written some 40 or 50 years ago by the late Rabbi Monson, one of the most renowned North American rabbis of the 20th century. The sermon related several stories which were an allegorical lesson of how most people focus their admiration on a person they deem to be “successful”, all the while forgetting that said person would not be successful were it not for a person or people sacrificing behind the scenes, toiling often in penury and obscurity to propel the wealth and fame of someone else. It was a reminder to any of us who have tasted career and financial success not to forget those who sacrificed to help us succeed.

It is very easy for those of us blessed to have a fortunate career, to receive the praise and the big pay cheque, to be the boss and make the rules, and to have people to do our bidding, to think it’s somehow deserved because we are entirely self-made. We forget that we didn’t do it alone. I always try to remember this, but the sermon drove home the point especially poignantly.

I grew up in a family that lacked formal education and would be considered lower middle class, yet went on to become highly educated and develop a successful law practice that provided me a level of status and income before the age of 30 age that most people never achieve. I then had a fall from grace, mired in a cycle of addiction and depression in my late 30s, and at the same time went through divorce and financial collapse. As a young lawyer I had a brashness and arrogance at being a rising star, all self-made in my own mind. These days, having clawed my way back to and beyond my wildest professional dreams, I often feel a certain smugness, having triumphed over such adversity that would have kept a lesser man down to the mat for good.The sermon was a stark reminder that no matter how much ambition I had, no matter how smart I was, how hard I worked, how well I networked, none of my career success to date or in the future would be possible without parents who worked night and day and did without all the while raising me with the right values; without mentors who gave freely of their own time and attached their good names to me for my benefit exclusively; without dedicated staff working long hours for relatively (by comparison to my take) little pay and who tamp down their own ego and ambition to make sure I look good and come out on top; without friends who helped in innumerable ways, often at risk to their money or reputations, to give me a hand up. I know all of this intuitively, but it is important to be reminded.

So I write this article not just as such  a reminder to myself, and a thank you to the unnamed people referenced above (they know who they are), but to anyone reading this who has the good fortune to be successful in their business or profession. Human beings have a natural tendency to believe their own press. There is a perception, often not entirely wrong, that people who have achieved success resonate a certain arrogance or sense of self-entitlement. We must remember that to do so is an insult to all those people behind the scenes without whom we would have no success at all.  Those of us with any sort of profile in our profession, our community, our social circle, must lead by example to ensure in their milieu the concept of Tikkun Olam (leaving the world a better place than we found it). And we must ensure that every individual with whom we have contact is treated with dignity and respect. Money, fame, status, does not make one individual better than another. Perhaps with a bigger house or nicer car. But not better. So if you are at the top of the mountain looking down, you must never forget that you didn’t get there alone. And if you’re admiring the king of the jungle, don’t forget that there’s a queen or prince who helped to crown him.

My oldest son is almost 15. Last year when we were on a tour of Israel’s holiest sites with a group led by our Rabbi, my boy- a fiercely proud Zionist who wears a Hebrew Hammer-sized Star of David around his neck, has attended Hebrew School since he was two and a half, celebrated the Sabbath regularly in both his mom’s house and mine, and has participated in leading Saturday morning services at our synagogue- announced that he was an atheist. Upon further thought he modified his statement to “an agnostic leaning toward atheism”. This realization, which he came to at the age of 11 and voiced to me seriously for the first time when he was 13, prompted him to ask what I thought was a fairly deep question for a young teenager: Can I be both an atheist and a practising Jew? More recently, as we prepare for the upcoming Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement, he asked if he still had to attend synagogue with his siblings and I since he does not “believe in praying to God”. My answer to both of his questions was “Yes”. I am quite satisfied with the rationale I laid out for him to support my affirmative answers to his questions and I have decided to share my reasoning here. However, since my answers would apply equally if we were of a non-Jewish faith I will substitute in the first question reference to any or all religions for the words “practising Jew”. To the second question, I will refer to other houses of worship as opposed to solely the synagogue. Further, although the terms atheist and agnostic are not the same, I consider the discussion equally relevant to anyone on the agnostic-atheist continuum. And before my devoutly atheist friends jump on any of my points, this is not a column debating the merits of religion versus atheism, but rather an attempt to reconcile the involvement of religion in one’s life even if that person is dogmatic in their atheism.

The practise of one’s religious faith, while typically thought of as containing as its overriding tenet a belief in God or a supreme deity, does not necessarily have to contain that component. There are a great many benefits to being active in one’s church, mosque, synagogue, temple, or other religious community that simply put, do not require as a condition precedent the belief in an almighty. Studies show that teenagers active in religious youth organizations through their church, synagogue, or temple perform better in school. People who are active in their church are less likely to commit crime, more likely to help their neighbours and  to volunteer for community service. Other studies show that people who attend worship services regularly rate their level of happiness higher than those who do not belong to a religious structure. Further, the benefits of being part of a like minded religious community are particularly felt during life cycle events such as birth, death, marriage, divorce, as well as significant milestones in our children’s lives. This is to mention nothing about the sense of belonging to a community of people of like values who care about one another. Or of the intimate friendships, business relationships and romantic partnerships that arise through the social interactions which occur as a result of one’s involvement in a religious community.

While my son does not accept the literal teachings of the Hebrew Bible that he has studied in Sunday school lo these many years, he has very clearly grown into a fine, well behaved young man who is tolerant and understanding. He tries to live a “Jewish life”, meaning an existence based on certain moral and ethical paradigms and a desire to not only succeed but to help others. In an era when we are inundated with materialism, consumerism, celebrity obsession and a culture of entitlement, it is often only through religion that our children develop a sense that there is a vastness to the universe and that said universe does not revolve around them. It is through religion that they are instilled with values that involve making the community richer for all.

It is almost trite to say religion provides a moral compass by which to live our lives. And I concede it can be argued that morality does not necessarily need to come from religion. We all know very decent atheists who adhere to a strict moral code and live to serve. Conversely, we can all think of individuals whose conduct runs contrary to their religious posture.  But the exceptions would seem to prove the rule. It is simply easier for communally beneficial values and morality to take hold early in life, and remain dear to us as we age, when we are not trying to figure it out on our own. Much better to develop as a member of a larger community with supportive friends, teachers and role models to help guide us.

My son has accepted my assertions as above and feels perfectly confident continuing to live and practise culturally, and (at least tangentially) religiously as a Jew, but still wants to know why he has to attend synagogue. He argues in his defence that he finds it difficult to pray to a God he does not believe in, but goes on to point out if he did chose to pray he could just as easily do so at home. Which leads us to the second question he posed.

I took this opportunity to ask him to consider that if he went through the liturgy and took out the references to God, what would be left? How about a series of affirmations, meditations, and reflections about being thankful for what he has; remembering not to take his health, material objects, happiness, friends or family for granted;  a sense of the vastness of the world; an introspective look at his dreams, joys, fears, and regrets; a reminder to try every day to live a better life by being a better person. It is one of the few times, if not the only time in our perma-wired society, that he will be away from his smartphone, detached from his ipod, disconnected from his computer and unplugged from all technology. It is only during synagogue services that he is in a place where there are  none of these outside distractions. It is only in this instance, I reminded him, that he can truly engage in even a brief period of genuine, deep and profound self-reflection. Those moments, even absent a belief in God, will serve to make him a better person.

So to my son I say: I am proud of you for being able to think for yourself, for your pride in your heritage, for your courage to ask difficult questions, for your desire to figure out the difficult answers; and for living a Jewish life. I have no issue with you being an atheist and no intention to change your mind. But for all the reasons discussed above, you still have to go to synagogue next week.

I thought for sure when I made the decision several years ago to never, ever again take another divorce case no matter how desperately my law practice needed the business that I was free of the emotional stress of The Bad Divorce. After all, I had by that time been through not one but two failed marriages, the aftermath of  which, in both cases, fell squarely into the category of The Good Divorce. No court battles, no arguments over time with the kids, no disputes over money, open lines of communication, joint attendances at school events and major extracurricular activities, as well as extended families that all continued to get along. As such, the only involvement I had in The Bad Divorce was purely professional. But that was enough to make me crazy (literally). I was giddy at the prospect of forever leaving behind The Bad Divorce and turning my professional attention to an area of litigation where I could use my skills to do what I did best without wanting to seriously harm my opposing counsel, my own clients, or myself. The song says rock and roll is a vicious game, but it can’t possibly be as vicious as family law. I thought with The Good Divorce x2 in my personal life and no more of The Bad Divorce in my professional life that I had set sail to a fantasy land where The Bad Divorce didn’t exist.

So here I am three years later, still part of The Good Divorce, and not involved with family law cases in my practice. Yet, I am still regularly dealing with The Bad Divorce. While I am fortunate to have a very wide and varied circle of friends, unfortunately, it seems at any given time several of them are going through The Bad Divorce. Either because of my 17 years as a family lawyer, or because of all my years as a good friend who offers sound advice, or possibly both, I am typically one of the ‘ears” or “shoulders” that my friends lean upon when going through The Bad Divorce. I don’t begrudge this and consider it my duty as a friend to help them through a tough time even if it’s just by listening. But it does make me think about the question I get quite often, which is: “How do you guys do it?”, referring to my exes and I and The Good Divorces to which we are parties. My friends inevitably end the conversation by imploring me to write a book about The Good Divorce.

I’ve thought about it alot. The Good Divorce. A very marketable title. I could write about the emotional and financial cost of going to court; the ability to recognize which issues are important and which are not; paying your support on time; understanding that the money you pay benefits your kids and is not a penalty;  recognizing that the other person is the parent of your child and no matter how much you may dislike/disagree with/hate that person, your children should not be deprived of regular contact with one of their parents. I could write about the values you pass onto your kids when they see you get along and work out your differences around the dining room table versus the emotional scars you inflict upon them by battling to be the champion in the court room. I could devote an entire chapter to how you shouldn’t badmouth the other parent or undermine their authority when they make a decision that is for your child’s own good. I could write all of this and so much  more. But truth be told, that book would be a long, boring read, and sadly, the very people who need it most wouldn’t buy it.

I have decided instead to write my book here in my blog in the hopes that it attracts enough attention to get the secret out about how not to have The Bad Divorce. Feel free to share, re-post, retweet, copy, or forward this article. I am deliberately waiving any copyright claim over it as the message is too important.

The Good Divorce by Darryl Singer

In dealing with your ex, always put the interests of your kids first.
Don’t be an asshole.

The End

We live at the greatest time in terms of technology. Unlike my children, who were essentially born wired, I am middle-aged enough to remember asking for my first date by actually telephoning the girl and having to sit in the kitchen, no more than 3 feet from the wall, talking to her while watching one of the 5 channels on the old black and white. As a lawyer, I have been in the game long enough to remember when being out of the office meant I really was unreachable unless I called in for messages. I recall dreading the return to the office after several days in court because there would no doubt be a stack of pink slips with names and numbers written on them, every one of them expecting to hear from me. I recall when needing to review case law meant a trip to the nearest courthouse or law school law library.

Coming of age at a time when even this generation’s oldest, slowest technology would have seemed positively Jetsonian, I am absolutely in love with the new technology. Using these new tools efficiently and ensuring I maintain control over the technology, as opposed to allowing it to control me, means that I need not spend as many hours in the office tied to my desk as in past years yet can accomplish significantly more without sacrificing quality. It means being able to take a month long vacation in the summer (as I did in 2010 and 2011) or a series of week long vacations throughout the year (as I am doing this year) without returning to reams of correspondence and hours of calls.Being connected briefly first thing in the morning or right before bed while on an extended holiday literally anywhere in the world allows me to stay on top of anything urgent and quickly dispose of the daily minutiae. This guarantees my relaxation for the rest of the day in order to get the most out of my holiday, all the while knowing that no emergencies or mountains of paper will greet me upon my return. Similarly, my smartphone allows me to leave the office early or come in late so I do not have to miss my kids’ 10am school assemblies, their important mid-day doctor appointments or early evening extracurriculars. My less than 3lb laptop has the same files and resources as if I were in the office, thus allowing me to be productive without the pre-tech advancement concerns for either geography or time of day.. The ability to connect even when I’m on the go means, quite simply, more balance in my life rather than less.

My just turned 8 year old daughter is engaged in what is supposed to be competitive dance. This was her choice after 4 years of recreational dance, and she devotes a tremendous amount of her time and effort (not to mention of Daddy’s time and money) to this endeavor. At the last competition in May, which featured hundreds of dancers representing dozens of dance schools, the tag line on the oversize banner behind the stage proclaimed: “Where every dancer is a star”. I was apparently not made aware that we were coddling our children in their competitions, and ran afoul of some unwritten rule when I announced loudly that “if they’re all stars, then none of them are stars”. It brought back memories of when my teenaged son played soccer when he was 5. Although there were rules and referees, there was no score keeping. Boys being boys, the little kids kept score anyway.

Now I am the farthest thing from a sideline or stage parent. I allow my kids to participate in what they wish, or nothing at all. When they play a sport or engage in an activity (and often I will coach or assist), I support the development of skills and good sportsmanship. I have taught them that it doesn’t matter if they lose, as long as they have done their best and had fun. But I do not want them to get ribbons and trophies for mere participation. Participation in these activities, along with the skills, friendships and enjoyment gained, is its own reward. We do our children no favours by bestowing on them false praise and unearned awards. At some point our children will be teenagers and eventually adults. None of us have made it through our teens (especially our teens), 20s, 30s and 40s, without experiencing disappointments, failures, sadness and hurt feelings. To provide our children with only emotional peaks while insulating them from these important emotional valleys only serves to render them ill equipped to handle real life, which will intrude upon them sooner rather than later. Moreover, if one is rewarded for mediocrity, or even failure, where is the incentive to make a greater effort? This sort of emotional protectionism sows the seeds of self-entitlement.

If we want our children to grow up to be self-starters, have a strong work ethic, value real achievement, and most importantly to mature into kind human beings who treat their fellow citizens with dignity and respect and of whom we can be proud, we must stop giving them awards, rewards, and praise just for showing up.

I am writing this post from poolside at a five star resort in Mexico as my children frolic about in the pool. I have the good fortune to be able to take regular vacations of this nature with my children. Every time I do so I am reminded of how lucky my kids are to be raised in Canada, and by affluent parents at that. For children raised in such an environment, we cannot always blame them when they take their material comforts for granted. But far too many adults in our own country take such materialism for granted. We ought not to be so smug.

Those of us in our own country who are middle class or above must stop turning a blind eye to the daily poverty and hunger in our own cities. Yes, poverty exists in every country in the world, but when my son’s school raises money for African aid every year and refuses to sanction a clothing drive for the disadvantaged in their municipality, it is a stunning example of the blind eye of which I speak. I am not suggesting that aid to other countries is not important, but when schools in good neighbourhoods indoctrinate our children with the belief that poverty, disease, illness, drugs and crime are afflictions of faraway lands, it only ensures here at home the perpetuation of the cycle of apathy amongst the “haves” and poverty amongst the “have nots”

Much has been written in the Toronto media of late about guns, gangs and violence, but nobody in the mainstream daily media has mentioned the root cause of most of the problems. Poverty and hunger. And those who complacently think these problems don’t affect them couldn’t be more wrong. It affects all of us. Until we ensure no child goes to school hungry, that they have mentors and role models to show them the benefits of study and hard work,  that we pay those who want to work a living wage, and have an abundance of affordable housing, crime will continue to increase as economic prospects of the marginalized decrease. It is an affront to the dignity of our Canada. Admittedly, it is also much easier to write about than to actually effect large scale change.

But what can be changed by each and every one of us immediately is the way we view our place in society and the arrogance with which we behave when it comes to our everyday lives. Think about the daily minutiae of your life. Do you treat each and every person you deal with throughout the day with dignity and respect? I don’t just mean the people you are forced to such as your clients or your boss, or those you consider to be worthy of your respect, but also the person who serves you your morning coffee at Tim Horton’s, the gas station attendant, the restaurant server, your nanny (I know families who make the nanny cook and eat a separate meal from the family- imagine the contempt for human beings those kids will develop!)  Do you shell out hundreds of dollars a month for a car lease so you can drive a luxury automobile but balk when a colleague hits you up for a $20 charitable donation? Do you constantly get upset about things you have no control over- a delayed airline flight, a traffic jam on the highway? And has your frustration ever changed the situation? Remember that our children learn not by what we tell them, but by watching how we behave. Most of my teacher friends tell me they know long before the first parent-teacher conference of the year what each child’s parents will be like just from observing how a child treats those around her.

Until each of us adjusts our attitude in our daily lives and stops living with a sense of entitlement, the bigger issues our society faces cannot begin to be solved. And even if those larger issues will not be resolved in our lifetime, our own lives will be so much happier and more meaningful if we awake each day with a view to treat one another with dignity and respect. Until then, we risk our children growing up self-entitled and becoming the next generation that continues to look the other way at the less fortunate in our country.

In any given year, according to StatsCan, approximately 5% of the population will experience a major episode of depression. Almost 10% of us will suffer from such an illness at some point in our lives. Depression is the fastest rising medical diagnosis in Canada and accounts for over 11 million doctor visits a year. Add to this burden on our system the lost work productivity and it is clear depression is an issue that needs to be addressed as a society at the macro level. However, on a micro level, the legal profession is even worse off. It is estimated by some studies that lawyers will suffer depression at 3 times the rate of the population at large, yet are far less likely to seek treatment for it.

As lawyers, we are entrusted with our clients’ most significant assets, from their liberty, their access to their children, their finances, and their businesses. Their problems become our problems. There are the expectations (often of others in our lives) of a particular lifestyle, the very real pressures of billing, long hours away from family and friends, the increasing expectation with technological advances that we must always be available and that everything needs to be done yesterday. Not to mention for litigators an increasing lack of civility on more and more files. As such, the most surprising thing about the recent statistics is that the numbers are not higher.

The potential to cause costly and often irreparable harm when our own mental health issues prevent us from dealing with our clients’ matters and our law practices timely and appropriately cannot be overstated. Yet the fear of “coming out” as someone suffering from depression is terrifying to most lawyers. I remember thinking when I was suffering some years ago, “These people are trusting me to solve their problems and I can’t even handle my own life. What will everyone think of me? My clients, my colleagues, my sources of referral. Will they all turn against me, blacklist me, be afraid to deal with me? Will the Law Society get involved?” This is what is going through the minds of hundreds of lawyers at this very moment.

As a profession we need to recognize this problem and deal with it in terms of education, understanding and a change in mindset about how we view ourselves as lawyers. This has to start with the law schools, the Law Society, the large firms, and the most senior and successful members of the Bar. We need to pay more than lip service to the concept of work/life balance, accept new economic realities, and learn to see our jobs as an integral part of our lives, but not our defining trait.  Most importantly, the stigma of depression needs to be lifted. It is time for all those of us who have suffered, overcome our difficulties, and thrived,  to come out for the benefit of those still suffering in silence. It needs to be seen as strength of character to say “I need help” as opposed to weakness of will.

In the legal profession, as in many other professions, the art of mentoring is being slowly replaced by practicums, co-op placements, and a form of articling where the focus is on billing as opposed to learning. I know of very few firms anymore that will pay a decent salary to allow a student-at-law, in return for for shlepping volumes of materials, the privilege of sitting and observing a day or two of a serious trial or complicated motion. And I do mean observe. Not take notes or chase down some last minute research, but just sit and take it all in. I dare say I learned more in 2 days in the gallery of a courtroom at the old 145 Queen Street West family court observing an acrimonious divorce trial (are there any other kind?), where the wealthy but estranged spouses were represented on one side by my mentor, the late (all too soon, sadly) H. Douglas Stewart, Q.C.  and the esteemed Malcolm Kronby, than I did in 3 years of law school. I was afforded the opportunity to witness: the style and substance of oral advocacy at its finest; the art of simple but effective cross-examination; the obvious and not so obvious benefits of knowing your case inside-out and backward; as well as a perfect interplay of fearless advocacy and courtroom decorum; not to mention the civility with which the each litigator treated his adversary and his adversary’s client.If what I see of young lawyers in court and at discoveries lately is any indication, I can infer that all too often this sort of mentoring is not part of most firms’ articling programmes. True, being an effective mentor comes at a short term financial cost. It takes you away from otherwise billable hours. It means there are times where you could have your student, junior, law clerk or paralegal at their desk producing but instead you take them to court with you. However, in the long run this will pay high dividenends to your firm, your clients, and you personally, not to mention the profession at large. And we all owe that to each other and the public who place their trust in our hands. After all, good mentoring, not unlike good parenting, is more about leading by example rather than by lecture.