Category Archives: Everyday Parenting

Trust Your Children More; Teach Them Less

The more stories I hear from parents, the more I know that to trust our children’s capabilities and detours is the path to connected relationships and success. But to trust a child goes against our standards of good parenting. They have to trust us. It doesn’t go the other way.

Yet who are we to know what our children should do with their lives; who are we to know what they need in order to get there? Our job is to remove the obstacles in their way of reaching their potential and accept and support who they are so they will have a firm foundation on which to launch into their futures.

A parent in my group put trust to the test. Her son didn’t like to read. He figured out a loophole in the school’s point system for reading. If he performed poorly, he would be put in the achievement bracket that required fewer points to get by. “He basically was reading See Spot Run books,” his mother told us. Her husband, who does not read, was furious and Read more…

Empathy vs Sympathy

There is a fine line between sympathy and empathy. Learning the difference can make huge changes in your relationship with your child.

Sympathy directs attention to how you feel.
Empathy is about listening. It tells your child you are paying attention to how she feels.
Sympathy is about me. Empathy is about you.
Empathy has nothing to do with how you feel; it’s about understanding how the other feels given their circumstance.

Empathy and sympathy as metaphor:

Imagine a huge hole in the ground with Man A stuck at the bottom unable to escape. Man B walks nearby and hears Man A calling for help. Man B sees Man A at the bottom of the hole and jumps in to help. Now both are stuck at the bottom of the hole. Man C walks by and hears both A and C calling for help. Man C tells them he will be back soon. Later, Man C arrives with a ladder.

Man B acted out of sympathy for Man A and jumped in thinking he was helping Man A. Now Read more…

Evidence of our Culture of Punishment

While most readers of the viral blog, “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother” (http://is.gd/37Hw8n) were overcome with empathy for this mother of a reportedly mentally ill son and christened her a national heroine, I had a different take. I could not help but see it all from her son’s perspective.

The author, Liza Long, and mother of “Michael,” makes a strong case for mental health advocacy. Mental illness must be confronted. Policy change is long over due. These children need help. While I hope the Newtown tragedy heightens this conversation, I have a more complex bone to pick. If we are to lay blame for the Newtown tragedy, it needs to go to our parenting culture of punishment.

Long’s son undoubtedly has impulse problems, uncontrollable anger, a possible mental condition, and as she says, “The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael’s sensitivity to sensory stimuli…” He appears to be a highly volatile child who desperately needs sensitive care.

However what he received, as his mother writes, is threat after threat—the go-to technique to get children to obey, thanks to our Read more…

Mass Killings: When Do We Talk about Parenting?

Perhaps the only silver lining to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary is emerging conversations and, hopefully, policy changes for gun control and mental illness. Both are in dire need of a relook and a revision, even though neither is likely to eradicate mass shootings.

But what about emotional illness, which affects so many more of us? Children are not born with emotional problems, which are rooted in feeling isolated, unimportant, misunderstood, victimized, holier than thou, etc. Children with emotional problems are the victims of the influence of parents, teachers, peers—anyone who is critical in the daily life of the child. Most of these problems can be healed through parenting.

Parents, wounded themselves in their pasts, unknowingly pass on their unexamined wounds to their children—wounds that come from perceptions of a child’s mind (“I’m not good enough”, “I can’t ever be who my parents expect”, “Nobody likes me“, I’m a trouble-maker”, etc.). These thoughts grow into beliefs that influence behavior if not understood and addressed.

The culprit? The same child rearing techniques we have been using from time immemorial—punishments, threats, Read more…

Look for the Helpers

What should we say to our children in the wake of this horrific school shooting? How can we ease their fears and answer their questions, not to mention ours? We look for the right thing to say just as we look for the motive of the killer—to make it all make sense, fix what needs fixing, feel better and move on. This tragedy is the worst yet—mainly because I don’t think we can ever again promise our children that they will be safe and believe it in our hearts to be true.

There is an abundance of advice on the internet, but the most helpful I have seen is words from Mr. Rogers.

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world.” Fred Rogers

You want to interact and make connection when your kids get home from school. Your kids do too but not in the way you might think.

You’ve missed them, you want to know what they did all day, how they got along, if they had any problems. But questions can feel like an interrogation.

How was school today?
What do you have for homework?
When are you going to do your homework?
What did you get on the test?
What did you learn today?

They have just spent a long hard day meeting (or not) expectations, doing things they might not want to do, following orders, coping for hours, and hopefully working hard and learning. Probably the last they want to do is go over their day with you. They need a break. They need to know here is the place where I can be myself. They need to chill.

Each of these 5 questions is filled with an expectation.

1. How was school?

What if school was terrible? Your child may or may not want to tell Read more…

Want to get your kids to cooperate? Set challenges.

kids with candy Young children LOVE being challenged. Give them a problem to solve, a way to compete against themselves and they will rise to your challenge every time—as long as your challenge is given with a light-hearted, fun and games attitude.

It’s so exhausting and draining to keep yelling at our kids, threatening them to get them to do what we want. So many parents complain, “I don’t have time to do all this listening and understanding stuff” but so much time is saved in the long run. Think of your new learning and hard work as an investment in you and your child’s future relationship. You will never regret it.

Here are a few ideas for motivating and setting challenges your kids will love:

I’m not sure you can pick that jacket up and get it on the hook. Isn’t that hook too high for you to reach?
How long do you think it would take you to run around the outside of the house? How about if I count and see what number I get to?
I wonder if you

The Pause that Refreshes

Your child reacts uncontrollably to something you have said. You either least expect it, highly disapprove of it, are hurt by it, or it reinforces what a terrible job you think you are doing in raising this brat. What’s your immediate reaction?

Let me guess. You react uncontrollably back. You yell, you blame, and you say and do things you swore you never would and regret it. Why do we do this when we know it doesn’t work? First because we’re human and human nature retaliates when confronted, afraid, and angry. The trick is not to feel confronted, afraid or angry—then you can respond in control of yourself.

This is where the Pause comes in. Stop yourself from doing anything. Breathe. Walk away, go for a walk, take a bath, sleep on it—take a break. This is the hardest step. “She can’t talk to me that way and get away with it! I’d be letting her know she won. She’s got to be taught a lesson or she’ll never learn!”

So let me try to convince you that none of Read more…

How Much is too Much: Are you a Toxic Parent?

Many of today’s parents fear that if they don’t give their children the right push out of the crib, they will not make it in this world of high-powered over-achievers. The fear is that anything less than a Harvard post-graduate degree will leave our children on the corner asking for spare change. The days of sending kids out to play to fend for themselves for hours on end are long gone. Instead we register our kids for music, French, math and gymnastics classes before they can walk trying to give them the edge.

Multiple research studies have shown that parents who hold firm but nurturing standards and let go enough to give their children autonomy raise children who do better academically, psychologically, and socially than either over-involved parents who push their children toward achievement or under-involved and permissive parents who set too few limits.

Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University studied children’s motivation by giving them simple puzzles they had no problem putting together. Some were told how smart and capable they were, others were not told anything. The ones Read more…

8 Ingredients to Set Your Child Up for School Success

We’re at the Start of a Fresh School Year

Which means it’s time to think about helping your children be as successful in school as they can be.

That includes resisting the temptation either to push children so much that they fear never meeting up to your expectations or to neglect staying involved so they feel unimportant. In other words it means meeting your children where they each are—be it deep in anxiety and school resistance or excited for new challenges.

Meeting our children in the present can be the toughest challenge of parenting. Fears keep us setting expectations for the child we want rather than the child we have. When our expectations get the better of us, school success becomes less likely.

Behavior is Your Clue

In my book, Confident Parents, Remarkable Kids: 8 Principles for Raising Kids You’ll Love to Live With, one principle states, “Behavior is your clue”. Behavior is what we have to tell us how our children are doing—whether or not they feel in balance with themselves and with their world. When a child Read more…