Our children learn first and foremost by example — our example. The latest brain science reveals that the circuitry of children’s social brains wires up to mirror their parents’ social-emotional brain functioning. This begins in a very direct, biological manner in infancy, and continues through adolescence.

For this and many other reasons related to the potent teaching power of models, a fruitful question to ask yourself, ideally beginning even before you have a child, is “Am I worthy of my child’s unquestioning imitation?” Daunting, yes. But it’s best to realize early on that whether or not you can answer “Yes” to this question, what you see in the mirror is to a great extent what you will see in your child. And, most likely in your child as an adult.

But don’t despair: Nature seems to have built in a special mechanism that allows us to give our children a fighting chance to surpass us. If our children’s potential was constrained by the limitations of our own accomplishment, we’d be doomed! We’d have to wait until our sixties, seventies, eighties — or maybe never — before we’d feel prepared to be parents. Nature has brilliantly built into the system that our children most powerfully respond to our inner life, and especially to the mental force that results when we continually strive to be more connected, sane and centered.

This means that we have the opportunity to serve as their launching pad for surpassing us into higher realms of accomplishment, social intelligence, and joyous self-mastery. Here are three quick primers that will help you rise to the occasion:

Shifting to Peace from a Negative Mindset

Whatever you surround yourself with becomes a shaping force on your very being — an in turn, on your child’s newly shaping being.

What we put our attention on increases. When we focus on the positive — beauty, possibility, enjoyment — just as when we zero in on the negative — criticism, losses, everything that’s wrong—it’s like putting water and fertilizer on it, making either the positive or the negative flourish and multiply. This isn’t just fuzzy “power of attraction” stuff, this is also Brain Function 101: when we tune our attention in a certain way — either positively or negatively — we initiate a flow of biochemicals that carve brain pathways for more neurons to travel down that same pathway in the next minute, hour, day, year. Our attitude and focus also create a subconscious template of perception that filters the millions of incoming bits of life’s information and captures those bits that match our initial proposition.

There are many simple and effective ways to do a “pattern interrupt” on spiraling negativity, whether it’s sadness, stress, anger or whatever — and each time we make a choice to exit that negative brain pathway, we rewrite old operating programs we don’t want, and install healthier ones. Here are a few that are tried and true:

Parenting Peace via a Shift in Worldview

Parenting Peace through Confidence

When working with parents in a coaching context, what usually arises is the importance of the parents’ calm, loving authority: it allows children to relax and become less…”difficult.” This is frequently where the key work lies. An image that has developed over my years of navigating this territory with parents-in-progress is this: Grow Bigger Shoulders.

The post Parenting for Peace Primer 3-Pack (w/ videos) appeared first on Marcy Axness, PhD.

If there is chronic stress in pregnancy, if a pregnant mother’s thoughts and emotions are persistently negative, if she is experiencing unrelenting anxiety, the internal message — delivered to the developing baby — is, “It’s a dangerous world out there,” regardless of whether or not this is objectively true. The baby’s neural cells and nervous system development will actually mutate (adapt) to prepare for the unsafe environment it perceives it is going to be born into. {Read the rest of this post at mothering.com}

Images:
emilianohorcada under a Creative Commons license

The post The Function of Joy in Pregnancy appeared first on Marcy Axness, PhD.

Somewhere along the way it became generally assumed that praise builds self-esteem, leading to the daily parental litany of “Nice job!” and “Great throw!” and “Gorgeous painting!” and on and on ad nauseum. Pundits call it “affirmation” and “positive feedback.” B.F. Skinner called it “positive reinforcement.”

It is a dicey proposition to praise your child. If it came in a bottle it would require a label: Please note all possible side effects before administering to children. Years ago our R.I.E. teacher proposed to us the counterintuitive (and definitely counter-cultural) notion that praise — especially the kind that is routinely doled out to kids — can insidiously erode a child’s intrinsic motivation, pleasure, and self-satisfaction in a given task or activity.

Indeed, praise deflects a child’s focus away from her inner will to create, play and do, outward to our response to what she creates, plays and does. In his book Punished by Rewards Alfie Kohn points out that praise “sustains a dependence on our evaluations, our decisions about what is good and bad, rather than helping them begin to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will lead us to smile and offer the positive words they crave.”

Self-Esteem is an Inside Job

Their natural intrinsic motivation, delight, and sense of just-rightness wear away, and they become dependent on the illusory glow of pseudo-self-esteem coming from outside in. One of the most helpful things I ever heard Dr. Laura say on her radio show was that self-esteem is about whether you impress yourself through how you act. Or as the saying goes, “Self-esteem is an inside job.”

One morning many years ago, our two-year-old Eve called to me, “Come look, Mama!,” and when she let me open my eyes, there was her new puzzle, all put together. Rather than the standard, “Great job!” or “I’m so proud of you!”, I responded with “You finished that puzzle all by yourself.” I simply reflected what was so, with no judgment attached (except my big smile). My gratifying reward was Eve’s comment back to me: “I smart!”

Expressions of self-esteem don’t get more vivid or authentic than that. But the self-esteem and pride were Eve’s, given by herself to herself, and were based on her own appraisal of her own accomplishment. I had merely been an enthusiastic witness, and indeed, one of the most profound needs of the child is to be seen.

To See Rather than Praise Your Child

I shared my new insights with my husband, and he tried to bite his tongue before making comments like “I really like your painting, Ian.” He and I would joke over the sometimes-unnatural approaches suggested as alternatives to praise, such as “I notice you’ve used a lot of blue in your painting.” Meanwhile, I tried to use this new awareness to fashion ways of responding to our children that were both respectful and authentic.

I learned to make comments of encouragement and acknowledgment rather than to praise, but then read an article by in Mothering magazine that strongly discouraged those too! Author Naomi Aldort wrote, “Sensitive and smart, [our children] perceive that we have an agenda, that we are manipulating them toward some preferred or ‘improved’ end result. . . . Gradually, a shift occurs. . . . No longer do they trust in their actions, and no longer do they trust us, for we are not really on their side.”

So what about simply offering encouragement or demonstrating loving support by commenting on what a child is making, or drawing, or playing with? Aldort says, “Even when we intervene with casual commentary on our children’s imaginative play, doubts sneak in. What children are experiencing inwardly at these times is often so remote from our ‘educated’ guesses that bewilderment soon turns to self-denial and self-doubt.”

So what do we do?? We can bring awareness to our comments, and ask ourselves if what we say helps our child become more deeply involved in what he is doing, or if it (even subtly) turns the task or behavior into something he does to win our approval. This doesn’t mean we never say anything, or become unresponsive! The young child deeply needs to feel our mental and emotion embrace, and recognition of what they’re doing. They also crave authority, guidance, and protection from having to make final determinations of what is right.

There is a way to avoid the pitfalls of praise while also meeting the needs of the young child for the adult’s input, and it is a wonderful art for parents to cultivate. For example, as little Sarah is cutting carrots with her mother for the stew, Mom might comment from the point of view of the carrot! “That is just the way the carrots like to be cut up,” is a more nourishing response than the more standard “I like how you cut up those carrots.”

Another alternative, suggests Whole Child/Whole Parent author Polly Berrien Berends, is to offer celebration in place of praise:

“Enthusiasm, love, gratitude! ‘How happy that looks!’ we can say. ‘You must be so glad to see it turn out that way! Thank you for showing me.’ To the child, shared discovery and appreciation of what is beautiful is worth ten times more than personal praise and actually furthers creative growth where praise stunts it.”

Why the Constant Comment?

I began to wonder why we as parents feel this need, this near-compulsion, to constantly comment. Why do we have to say anything at all? The reasons for this are many. One is that nowhere in our society is something allowed to simply be, without commentary, blurbs, hype, or headlines. Never has this been truer than in today’s iTwitterFaceLinkInPod culture.

Alfie Kohn’s extensively researched and now classic book Punished By Rewards dissects the problems connected to praise, incentives, and even grades. Kohn highlights a basic but rarely noticed fact about praise: “… the most notable aspect of a positive judgment is not that it is positive but that it is a judgment. Just as every carrot contains a stick, so every verbal reward contains within it the seed of a verbal punishment.” Kohn points out:

Praise, at least as commonly practiced, is a way of using and perpetuating children’s dependence on us. It sustains a dependence on our evaluations, our decisions about what is good and bad, rather than helping them begin to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will lead us to smile and offer the positive words they crave.

We now have a generation of young adults whose addiction to the constant flow of external rewards and positive feedback has become an issue for employers. There are even companies who specialize in providing flashy workplace demonstrations of praise and acknowledgement for employees whose motivation and morale sags without such external bolstering! This is not a dependence that we want for Generation Peace; rather, we want them to feel an abiding sense of rightness, worthiness and “enoughness” from deep within.

Modeling Self-Esteem

Children learn and develop by imitating adults around them. They absorb and replicate our ways of moving and speaking and our very ways of perceiving and thinking about ourselves and the world. The most effective way to help our children develop a positive self-concept and a healthy attitude toward praise is to cultivate these attributes in ourselves. Our children are always watching. They download us!

And as they grow into young adults, we want them to be able to respect and value the opinions of others and be able to accept and enjoy sincere praise for their accomplishments. But we also want them to be full of positive feelings for themselves, able to celebrate their own ability to do something well, and calmly aware that the ultimate arbiter of their achievements lies within them.

For information about R.I.E., call 323 663-5330 or visit www.rie.org.

The post Will You Praise Your Child This Mother’s Day? appeared first on Marcy Axness, PhD.

When we distill the attachment and brain development research, it is remarkably consistent with the teachings of ancient spiritual traditions as well as modern humanist psychology: for a child to develop secure attachment (the basis for all future development), the child first and foremost needs regular doses of the undistracted, full presence of a primary attachment figure.  What the past decade of brain science has discovered is that a parent’s ability for this kind of presence goes hand in hand with the an important set of other right-hemisphere, social brain skills: empathy, autobiographical memory and an array of other social-emotional capabilities.

Presence: To Be With

It is only with the presence of a healthily developed right hemisphere that we are able to be with another — to be present in the full and complete way that is needed by a child.  (We all know that feeling of talking to someone who just isn’t quite fully with us — as in the classic party conversation with someone whose eyes are darting around the room looking for who might be more interesting!)

Gabor Maté in his extraordinary book Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It, traces the connection between being present and attending – which he proposes is a fundamental, active form of loving. To attend to a child is to be present for them, attuned and responsive to their emotional cues. It is through the weeks, months and years of these attuned, responsive relational encounters that a child’s self-regulating brain systems wire up: they wire up to mirror the relational style of the adult! Thus, suggests Maté, a child displaying the kinds of impaired self-regulating abilities that often lead to ADHD treatment, for example, has indeed suffered a deficit of attention when it was needed — in the early years.

Relationships with a selective few adults, not sensory flooding, are the most important form of experience for the growing mind. Adults who are sensitive to a child’s signals, who can offer consistent and predictable behaviors, and who care about the child’s internal experiences are those that are likely to foster a secure attachment.    — Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., UCLA Dept. of Psychiatry

How Attachment Styles Get “Passed Down”

Leading-edge research from the newly aligned fields of brain science and attachment theory has revealed an astonishing principle:  the factor that  most reliably predicts a child’s secure, healthy attachment is the ability of that child’s parent (or consistent caregiver) to make sense of his/her own early history.**  This autobiographical ability tends to go hand in hand with the ability to be present in the way that nourishes a child’s growing sense of self. This is a kind of counter-intuitive, puzzling connection: What does me being able to tell my childhood story have to do with how good a parent I am??!  Turns out that this has to do with some newly-discovered principles of brain development and function:

• The natural mode of brain functioning for the young child is governed primarily by the right hemisphere (as in the phrase, “right brain.”) This is the mode in which key lifelong brain capacities are wired, which lay a foundation for healthy social-emotional functioning and a strong sense of self.
• But when a child’s need for attachment is thwarted (what I call “malattachment”) through chronic emotional or physical stress or abuse – or even the more subtle emotional “non-presence” of a parent – the child’s adaptive survival response is to prematurely engage the left hemisphere of the brain, which has to do with facts, logic and thinking. You see, under conditions of malattachment, it is very painful for a child to continue to “live” in the relationship-seeking right hemisphere, which has to do with imagination, creativity, and feeling.
• When a child is prematurely “living in the left brain,” the development of key right brain area skills (including what we have come to call “emotional intelligence” or “E.Q.”) is dangerously undermined. One such skill is autobiographical memory. Thus, a child who has spent much of childhood engaging life through the rational, fact-based left brain is more likely to grow up to be an adult who is less likely to be able to tell the story of his or her childhood in a way that hangs together and makes sense. They will more likely have only disjointed fragments of memories — random pieces of a puzzle, but without a big picture that fits together reasonably well.
• And vice versa:  the ability to easily make sense of and relate one’s early story is good evidence for one’s own healthy attachment history. But can’t we simply determine to “do better” for our own child?  Why does our story make such a difference?

It is of key importance to understand that it isn’t so much what happened to you as a child that influences how you are as a parent, but how you come to make sense of what happened to you.

Feeding the Brain with Present Parenting

This finding from attachment theory should be at the top of a parent’s “To Do” list:  the most powerful factor determining whether a child will be able to develop a healthy, secure attachment, is the ability of the child’s parent to tell a coherent narrative about his or her own early life — in other words, his or her own attachment story! In plain and practical terms, it isn’t what parents do as much as who parents are!!

It has been striking to find in my coaching practice that there are so many parents who do indeed have difficulty “just being” with their children — which is of course all children want!  (“Mommy, I want you to play with me!”)  I myself struggled with this challenge, so have particular empathy and understanding of this somewhat “secret” dynamic at work in so many parents’ lives.

What research now reveals is that though history is past and cannot be changed…and “working through” one’s history in therapy can be a long, expensive process…it is possible to immediately begin developing the capacity for presence by working directly on “exercising” the right brain and facilitating greater levels of “whole brain” integration! This is done through myriad kinds of experiential approaches including meditation, guided imagery, hypnosis, mindfulness or mind-body exercises, narrative processes, art, movement, games, and even something called Brain Gym!

Magical Child author Joseph Chilton Pearce has said, “Our children can never be who we tell them to be, they can only be who we are.” I’ve come to believe that our children’s potential horizons aren’t limited by what we are, but are broadened by our striving. Our children’s healthy development calls on us to pursue our own development. Maté concludes his book by pointing out that “The origins of the word attend is the Latin tendere, ‘to stretch.’ Attend means to extend, to extend, to stretch toward.

“If we can actively love, there will be no attention deficit and no disorder.”

[** We’re talking about the ability to relate one’s story to another adult or counselor, not to one’s child!]

Join us for a 5-week shared journey into cultivating this kind of presence, and other ways to bring more ease, confidence, effectiveness & joy to your parenting! Some of what we’ll cover includes:
• The trouble with Time-Out — and healthier alternatives
• Easing life with the child who is “a handful”…difficult”… “strong-willed”
• Laying the foundation for your child’s lifelong success in the early years
• When things are falling apart (tantrum, whining, opposition/defiance), a two-step foolproof intervention
• Landmine: what about your OWN childhood are you projecting onto your child?
• What to do if your child doesn’t respect you
• Things to do now, to be sane & centered during the teen years More info / Join

Images by:
Corbis/Royalty-free
Ross Griff under Creative Commons license
Corbis/Royalty-free

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“5 Tools for Transforming from Stressed Out to Sane & Centered”

Wednesday, April 24 | 10am – 11:30am Pacific

I thank you ten times a day for the depth and richness
yet simplicity your work has introduced into our already
thriving little family. ~ Elizabeth Bolden, mother of two sons

It seems epidemic these days: an undercurrent of stress and anxiety thrums at the heart of parenting, even for the most “conscious” parents (and probably even more for the really conscious, attuned ones — ever more conscious and attuned to our shortcomings!)

How about you — do you feel this parenting stress? Do you perpetually feel like you’re a just a little behind the 8-ball, missing some crucial opportunity that’s going to put your child behind? Yikes, we didn’t play Mozart through speakers on our pregnant belly… we didn’t use the latest pre-reading iPad app… we didn’t get in on that whiz-bang college-prep (or high-school prep, or for that matter, pre-school prep) program!

Or if it’s not that, then it’s the “life-with-kids-as-a-series-of-tactical-maneuvers” form of parenting stress. I remember so much of the time feeling vaguely (or not so vaguely) uneasy and thrown back on my heels — just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for my son to start fussing, waiting for him to want something he couldn’t have. And so much of the time feeling like I wasn’t the mom I wanted him to have.

The “Child-Centered” Trap Awaits Well-Meaning Parents

That’s when we slip into the “happiness trap.” We fall all over ourselves keeping them happy. Keeping them placated. Keeping them entertained. We cajole, we tap-dance, we take on the role that reminds me of the audience warm-up guy who makes every little development sound like the most exciting thing since Barnum & Bailey.

We play five games of hide-and-seek when we had originally set the limit on two. We keep dinner warm twenty minutes past when it was ready. We buy the third American Girl doll even when the second one is still in the wrapper.

If this rings a bell, I feel nothing but compassion for you. We’ve all been conditioned to jump (or get jumpy) when the endless smorgasbord of choices glistens before us, beckoning with a glut of possibilities for that perfect something that will fill in the gaps of our parental insufficiency.

I had the privilege of becoming friendly with the late Jean Liedloff (author of The Continuum Concept) in the months before her passing. One of the many insights we’ll explore in our webinar time together is one that Jean articulated so well: that children should revolve around adults, not the other way around. In her time with the indigenous Yequana culture in South America, she noticed something missing from typical family life with children (something that has continued to get more extreme in the 20 years since her observations):

Where were the “terrible twos”? Where were the tantrums, the struggle to “get their own way,” the selfishness, the destructiveness and carelessness of their own safety that we call normal? Where was the nagging, the discipline, the “boundaries” needed to curb their contrariness? Where, indeed, was the adversarial relationship we take for granted between parent and child? Where was the blaming, the punishing, or for that matter, where was any sign of permissiveness?

The 5 Tools webinar will empower you to engage some of the Yequana “magic” without leaving civilization!

Ditch Perfection, Embrace Striving

In my year of traveling on the wings of my book Parenting for Peace, I’ve met many parents in many lands. The theme in my talks that has received the most enthusiastic embrace — sometimes even tearful relief! — is the idea that it is not perfection that nourishes our children, but rather our striving. And by striving I don’t mean it in that “pushing for perfection” sense…but in that sense of following the inner pull we all have toward our own most vibrant unfolding — like how a plant just naturally turns toward the sun, if allowed to. Here is a snippet of a conversation I had during a coaching call offered by myself and Kathy White, founder of Joyful Parents, about what that means — to “strive” as a parent: Striving-As-A-Parent-and-March-7th-workshop-details

There are cultural norms in our life — and especially in the realm of parenting and education — that don’t always allow us to turn toward the sun of our own instinctive and intuitive knowing. We’ll cover some of those in the webinar as well.

Let’s Figure This Out Together!

There is power in numbers. There is empowerment in community. That’s what we’ll ignite in this webinar. If you’re overwhelmed or feeling less than adequate as a parent, please know that you are NOT alone…and it’s NOT your fault!

One of the first things we’ll cover is why stressed-out is the new black: there are good reasons for it, and understanding those reasons will help you move past guilt and worry…and allow you to parent with more ease and joy — the way it’s meant to be!

My book Parenting for Peace is based on 7 principles — Presence, Awareness, Rhythm, Example, Nurturance, Trust, and Simplicity.  I’ve now developed and refined 5 user-friendly parenting tools that engage and harness all 7 principles — and you will learn all 5 in the course of this 60-75 min. webinar!

The best antidote for anxiety is action — particularly action that cultivates mastery. Participants in this webinar will emerge with practical tools to immediately begin transforming stressed-out into sane & centered — to bring more ease, confidence and joy to day-to-day parenting.

And this in turn fosters your child’s most vibrant thriving!

_____________________________

Related posts:
Easing Parenting Stress Through Mastery
How A Coach Helps
AuthoritaTIVE Parenting Not AuthoritaRIAN Parenting

The post From Supermom to Sane & Centered Mom appeared first on Marcy Axness, PhD.

While Burnett’s situation was extreme, her experience isn’t unusual. Scared, stressed-out parenting has become epidemic: many parents today feel overwhelmed and under-adequate. Always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Navigating life with kids as a series of crisis management incidents and tactical maneuvers. Not only is that an unpleasant way to live, research shows that parental stress reduces children’s wellbeing. A powerful antidote for stress is action, when it cultivates mastery.

Are You Suffering with This Epidemic?

• Do you find yourself feeling either vaguely or extremely anxious much of the time?
• Are you worried that you might be missing some crucial opportunity to optimize your child’s success?
• Are you afraid of alienating your child if you use discipline?
• Do you feel overstretched, overcommitted, overscheduled or overwrought?
• Do you harbor secret fears that you’re just not up to the task of parenting?

If you answer “Yes” to any of these questions, you’re not alone. And it’s not your fault — our culture actually encourages it! Parenting stress is everywhere, and it definitely gets in the way of being the parents we want and hope to be. So, why is stress the new black? Here’s the “stress trifecta” as I see it:

Too much information: The unrelenting stream of data (emails, tweets, posts, pings, chirps, etc.) that bombards most of us these days can actually enter the realm of trauma. (Trauma is, by definition, “overwhelming experience” — too much incoming stimuli, which the nervous system cannot process adequately.)

Too many choices: Bless our mothers and grandmothers for what they achieved in breaking glass ceilings everywhere with the women’s movement, but it can kind of bite us in the butt, so to speak. We’re now faced with a near-paralyzing array of choices. CAN we have it all? Should we want to? Endless choices whirl around us, their thrum generating an unnerving back-beat that can pound through our days.

Too little confidence: Our culture (particularly screened media) almost systematically erodes the confidence of mothers and fathers. (You’re not quite enough — but if you buy this gadget, employ this system, or dress them in this label, the just maybe you’ll fulfill your parental potential.) That, together with how our own early childhood material comes up when we’re parenting, too often results in parents lacking the inner calm, loving authority that our children so need us to have.

Grow Bigger Shoulders

In the course of working through these same issues with so many parents, I began inviting them to “grow bigger shoulders.” What do I mean by that? Here it is in 57 seconds:

By the way, this does not mean being a doormat. Boundaries are in place. Misbehavior is recognized as mistakes, and mistakes are noted and corrected. All with (most of the time) a tranquil heart, a gentle voice and relaxed face. <Insert needle-scratch here> WHAT???!!! How the heck does one do that, you may ask.

For one thing — to echo Carol Burnett’s epiphany — I invite you to heed psychologist John Breeding’s wise advice: “Make peace with disappointing your child or go crazy.” One of the challenges many parents meet in setting boundaries, redirecting unacceptable behavior, and denying dire requests (another term for whining, usually as you run the gauntlet of a toy store or any supermarket check-out, for example) is confronting their own guilt, insecurity and fear of disappointing their children. (This is one place our own history can get in the way: memories of having been disappointed by our own parents can be reawakened, which muddies up our clarity as a loving leader for our kids.)

Along with that is the discomfort many of us have — it’s cultural — regarding the value of emotional expression. When our children cry, scream or melt down, especially in public, it can push all our buttons. And the example you set by surmounting your inner struggles to attain the mastery to kindly but firmly say “Not this time,” despite a full court press, is one of the greatest gifts you can give your children. It won’t be many years before you will want them to be able to do the very same thing: say “no” in the face of conflicting feelings, high emotions and intense (peer) pressure!

Ease Parenting Stress Through Mastery

We cultivate mastery through practice, and usually with some guidance. This is true in any endeavor where art meets skill, whether it’s in sports, music, painting or parenting. My new favorite show (please don’t judge me) is Splash. I watch it with tears in my eyes for most of the hour, because I find it incredibly moving and inspiring to witness these famous, accomplished people push their edges and walk through the fire of their fears as they cultivate increasing levels of mastery of the scary sport of high-diving.

Key to mastery in anything is securing and learning to use the most helpful tools. Sometimes tools are tangible (how would those new divers ever learn flips without the trampoline, safety harness and pulleys??) and sometimes they are intangible. I loved hearing Greg Louganis tell Rory Bushfield — who couldn’t actually practice his flip into the water due to a ruptured eardrum — “Best thing you can do is stand on the end of the platform and visualize the dive.” Visualizing how they want to handle themselves in certain challenging parenting moments is a tool I use with parent clients all the time!

Here’s a silly little example of the helpfulness of tools — it occurred to me a little while ago as I made my protein shake. I include a raw egg yolk in my shakes (always pastured eggs!), and sometimes the date on my egg carton has passed by a week or even two. Wondering if that egg is still good or if it might make me sick could be a source of stress to me in that moment, if I didn’t know a nifty little fool-proof tool for judging the soundness of a raw egg: put it into a glass or bowl of water and if it sinks, it’s fine. If it floats, toss it. (And if it hovers sort of half-way…still toss it!) As with my egg dealings, having solid insights and reference points from which to make choices — for yourself, for your children — can greatly ease parenting stress.

With mastery comes confidence, and with confidence comes mastery — it’s a feed-forward loop of unfolding your potential. Find tools that bring you increased confidence, and your stress will diminish. As your stress diminishes you’ll make choices with more tranquility, and you’ll look back on parenting moments with your children with more pride. As your inner life is nourished through this unfolding, you will feel more serene and centered in the face of the daily avalanche of information that is part of life today.

And your shoulders will grow bigger.

The post Ease Parenting Stress Through Mastery appeared first on Marcy Axness, PhD.

Right at the moment when the child is overwhelmed by a flood of emotions he cannot manage, and he most needs the regulating presence — that is, close physical presence — of his attachment figure, he’s banished to his room or his “Naughty Chair” or his “Thinking Rug” or his [fill in the blank with any of a list of prettied-up names people have devised for this particular form of exile].

What a tantruming child (or, more helpful to think of him instead as a struggling child) most needs is time-in — that is, in secure, soothing arms, in the steadying, regulating sphere of your engaged presence. We have to outgrow this tired notion that a 3- or 4-year-old is manipulating us, and to hold him is a reward. NO!! At that age children truly don’t possess the neural equipment to construct such Machiavellian manipulations.

In fact, their tender neural equipment is in a period of sensitive development at this point and time-out is counter-productive in that regard: it deprives a child of regulation just when she needs it most! Isolation from you throws her system into protection mode, and erodes her trust in and relationship with her parent.

After all the fussing is over and order is restored, the memory trace etched in her social brain is, When I’m having trouble, I’m on my own. This is not the foundation we’re striving to offer Generation Peace. We wish for them the suite of healthy social and relational capacities of resilience — which includes being comfortable reaching out for help when needed. Let’s not extinguish that skill with our well-meaning attempts at positive discipline!

If Not Time-Out, then WHAT?

Consider using a time-out in the way it was originally conceived in sports: for a whole team, not just one struggling player (well, except for ice hockey, but you get the point). It’s about, “Let’s all take a pause to regroup, rethink our approach, and return refreshed.” Used in this “us-as-a-team” manner — “Let us take a time out” — it is a demonstration that while you’re not happy with the way things are going or the choices he has just made, you are on your child’s side in this challenging moment — and always.

You can find your own name and style for this regrouping process; in psychologist Lawrence Cohen’s family it’s “A Meeting on the Couch”:

Discipline is a chance to improve your connection with your children instead of forming another wall that separates you. The best way to make discipline more connecting is to think We have a problem instead of My kid is misbehaving. Sometimes just changing the scene and making reconnection a top priority can create a dramatic difference, and the tension is gone as soon as you get to the couch, so you might end up just goofing around and being silly together.

Indeed. In his wonderful book Playful Parenting, Cohen offers a roadmap for parents wanting to enrich their family life with more play — and that is a worthy goal for all of us. Parenting for peace is all about providing the most fertile ground possible for the blossoming of our children’s social and cognitive intelligence. Among the animal kingdom — in which we are supposedly the crowning achievement — it is a fact that the more intelligent the animal, the more it continues to play throughout adulthood.

Time-Out for Play? YES!

But somewhere along the way to adulthood the vast majority of us forgot how to play. Life became serious business — and parenting along with it. And especially for those of us who had less security in our childhood, who may have never really felt safe to enter that imaginary frolic zone, when invited by our children to play, we’re like deer in the headlights. Our own uneasiness seeds uneasiness in our children and this itself can evoke challenging behavior. The sad irony in this negative feedback loop is that these are the parents whose buttons are particularly sensitive, their own childhood “stuff” so ready, like a dry tinder box, to be set off by the sparks of a child’s unwanted behaviors. The beauty of Cohen’s approach is that it offers a playful way out of that contracting spiral that is helpful and healing to everyone: “As long as we are grown up enough to handle things like keeping them safe and getting dinner on the table, our children want and need us to loosen up.”

If I’d had the gift of this perspective the one time I spanked my son, I might have used one of Cohen’s many playful ideas to free us both out of that tight spot — such as pretending to be angry:

Okay, so let’s play the game of “Mommy pretends to be really angry at Ian” [making an
exaggerated lion face]: “I’m sooooooooo angry at Ian…I may have to steal his shoe!”

…at which point Ian would have felt drawn in by my silliness, rather than pushed away by my own lack of inner regulation and, of course, by my physically violent act. The fact is, parenting can actually be a whole lot more fun and light-hearted that we typically realize! We just need to get over our culturally imprinted worry that if we use humor to diffuse and redirect a disciplinary jam, we’re somehow failing our parental role by not taking it seriously enough… or rewarding/reinforcing “misbehavior” by not bringing the hammer down… or slipping down that slippery slope of being their friend rather than their parent.

Lead with a Light Touch & Warm Heart

Credible leaders don’t lose their composure, it’s as simple as that. When it’s necessary to reprimand your child, strive to do it without a raised voice or the look of disgust or cruelty in your eyes. Aside from the , the child will lose trust in you over time, and will look towards others as models. “He doesn’t respect me” will be your (accurate) complaint later, especially at an age when he most needs to be able to learn from his parents, such as during his teen years.

It is always more effective to focus on what the child may do, rather than issuing a “You may not…” prohibition. This approach also reduces the risk of putting the child into a disconnected neurobiological protection state. In fact, educator Barbara Patterson suggests that the very word “May” can have seemingly magical properties, as in, “You may put the forks on the table now”: it presents no question for the child to either answer or ignore, and it implies the notion of privilege to be doing what the adult is suggesting.

And indeed, a child enjoying a secure, connected relationship with her parents does find it a privilege and a joy to behave in harmony with their wishes. In this way, robust attachment is like the power steering of parenting!

In his important book on key dynamics in attachment, Hold On To Your Child, Gordon Neufeld cautions that this “power assisted” aspect of the parent-child relationship requires “careful nurturance and trust”:

It is a violation of the relationship not to believe in the child’s desire [to behave well] when it actually exists, for example to accuse the child of harboring ill intentions when we disapprove of her behavior. Such accusations can easily trigger defenses in the child, harm the relationship, and make her feel like being bad. …It’s a vicious circle. External motivators for behavior such as reward and punishments may destroy the precious internal motivation to be good, making leverage by such artificial means necessary by default. As an investment in easy parenting, trusting in a child’s desire to be good for us is one of the best.

Keeping this sacred trust in mind, and basic principles regarding the significance of your example, and the importance of relationship and play; of clear messages and limited choices; of healthy rhythms; remember that the single most pivotal ingredient in harmonious, joyful parenting is you — your confidence, conviction, and trust in yourself and in your child.

Images by:
timatymusic through Creative Commons license
Guillaume Paumier through Creative Commons license
omninate through Creative Commons license

The post The Trouble with Time-Out appeared first on Marcy Axness, PhD.

Oh, there are plenty of other reasons to not embrace TVM (or as Camille Paglia calls it, “the perversion of feminism that Ensler represents”), but I’m focusing on this one. Period. A woman’s attitude toward her menstrual period impacts how she lives, labors and births. Let’s outgrow the tired cultural perversions about our creative power as women!

I was inspired to revisit my period passion by Dr. Oz’s extraordinary segments last week, in which he boldly went where few men (or women) are ever willing to go — particularly in the benign waters of daytime network television: to the flow. And true to Dr. Oz’s style, he didn’t pussyfoot around (no pun intended): he invited women’s health and hormonal specialist Alisa Vitti to help women decode the bloody display they see in the toilet or on the pad for important information.

As thrilled as I was to see this happening in such a mainstream forum, I was equally saddened to hear what some women had to say about just looking at their own menstrual flow: “Ew.” “It grossed me out.” “It was just so disgusting.”

Let’s remember that what they are talking about is the nutrient-rich uterine lining that is lavishly prepared by our amazing bodies each and every month — in case a wee, potential human should happen along (in the form of a fertilized ovum) and need to embed itself there to begin growing. No fertilization, no need, and so we shed that source of nourishment as our monthly flow.

What Mothers Convey About Period Power

What was your mother’s attitude toward her period? This sets the tone for how we embrace, or subtly (and not-so-subtly) reject, our awesome but culturally taboo creative powers as women. I invite women to reconsider this intimate ecology, an ecology that was central to the late birth and environmental activist Jeannine Parvati Baker‘s work. In her landmark book Conscious Conception (written with Frederick Baker and Tamara Slayton) Jeannine invited women toward “an increased sense of trust and appreciation of their reproductive cycles — an invitation to reflect upon these cycles as a means of soul-making and spiritual development that will vibrantly color all aspects of our lives.”

And all aspects of our daughters’ lives! Whether our daughters are teens, grown (like mine), or just wee babies, it is in their interest as future fertile and well-birthing women that we as mothers do some womanly self-inquiry, and perhaps heal an intergenerational passage of attitudes: Are our bodies a locus of integrity, honor, power, or are they reservoirs of “unfresh” odors that need to be tamed with FDS? Are we empowered by the life-giving energies of our miraculous, mysterious bodies, or are we diminished by the onslaught of cultural messages that casually characterize those energies as “the curse”? By commercials that counsel young women about the best product to medicate away the entire experience, cheerfully pronouncing “your period is more than a pain (it’s bloating as well!)”?

(And don’t even get me going on the subject of the contraceptive pill that gets rid of the whole nasty business of menstruation altogether — yikes!  Sistahs, don’t fall for it!)  And, saddest of all, aren’t we all too familiar with apologetic monologues in which uncomfortable mothers hastily explain to their embarrassed daughters about “that time of the month” in terms that engender disgust and shame (or at the very least, apprehension) rather than a sense of the sacred privilege and power of fertility unfolding within them?

True, privilege and power aren’t usually associated with our “visit from Aunt Flo”! But Jeannine Parvati urged us to reconsider the true meaning of our monthly moon time: “Menstruation is the red flag that salutes the hard work of the preparation for another conception. Modern women suffer premenstrually because they do not fully comprehend the magnitude of the psychic and nutritional preparation that is required to build a healthy lining for an embryo. Your body has not slackened off from its commitment to reproduction and pulls from every cell to fulfill this mandate.”

In other words, our bodies and psyches work hard to create conditions for new life and our obliviousness to that fact (for many) brings suffering. In traditional cultures who abide by natural cycles of many kinds, menstruating (and likely pre-menstruating) women typically withdraw from many of their regular duties and activities, to have time and space for contemplation and self-nurturing. To me it makes sense that the modern multi-tasking woman might become irritable or snappish as something primitive in her may be urging her toward solitude but her culture has raised her to be machine-like: an unpausing, linear automaton rather than a cyclical, sacredly fertile woman!

Embracing the Power of Cycles

Jeannine dedicated her life to raising (or more accurately, restoring) women’s — and men’s — awareness of their connection to the earth and its cycles, and of the innate wisdom and power that resides in each of us. Dr. Jackie Guiliano, a professor of environmental studies, points out that early people knew they had to understand nature’s cycles and work with them, particularly the cycles of the moon. The new moon heralds the sowing of seed or the harvesting of crops. During the waxing moon, all things that need to grow must be tended to.

He reminds us that a woman’s menstrual cycle is indeed a powerful force that intimately connects women to the Earth and the moon. The average menstrual cycle is 29.5 days, the same as the cycle of the moon. Before the era of artificial light or chemical contraception, women may have ovulated and menstruated throughout the world at about the same time because of the moon’s influence! (Many women today have experienced the synchronization of menstrual cycles among woman who are living or working together. Do we pause to consider how amazing this is??)

Period Power, for Living, for Birthing

Women, our attitude toward our period — our very generativity! — in turn impacts how we live, how we labor and how we birth. In her writing and worldwide teaching Jeannine Parvati decried our modern alienation from our own bodies, from our knowledge of them and our trust in them. Not only is this bodily knowledge and trust fundamental to healthy birthing, it extends beyond individuals to our collective mother, our planet Earth. Jeannine believed that the “lack of attention to the care and maintaining of this planet is sharply reflected in the way we have ignored the messages from our own bodies.” Womb ecology, world ecology.

At any moment we choose, without renouncing our status as “modern women,” we can begin to reclaim our native connection to the earth, the moon and our own sacred, cyclical, powerful nature. I invite you to embrace this deep knowledge, in some really practical ways:

• Take note of the moon’s cycle, and begin to notice how much more successfully, for example, big projects and important events tend to flourish and attract lots of people and attention when scheduled during a waxing moon… and how much more intimately we can “go deep” with a small number of friends, or lovers, children — and most of all, ourselves — during a waning moon.
• And vice versa: if you’re hoping to attract a big audience to an event during a waning moon, you may be disappointed; but your small audience will want depth! The moon influences us all, whether or not we take notice.)

We can take some healing cues from Jeannine Parvati’s stories about the evolution of her own “menstrual consciousness” in her classic Hygeia: A Woman’s Herbal. In one, she came to recognize the grief inherent in menstruation:

I intuited that there was no need to create a dramatic upheaval in my home, in order to get my mate to ‘make me cry’… I could re-own those feelings myself, and have a good cry, letting go of the egg, the hope, with my tears. Then the blood flowed easier and more pleasurably.

And (stay with me here), we can return our monthly flow to the earth, which — as “out there” as it sounds to us “civilized” gals — isn’t that hard and is surprisingly satisfying. In my last years of flowing, I would drop my organic cotton tampon into a cup or so of warm water in a pitcher dedicated to this purpose…let it soak a bit…then squeeze it out completely. (Yes, gals, I actually touched it!)

It’s an awesome fertilizer for your garden. But more importantly, points out Jeannine, it’s a good way to “get in touch” with your period: “Handling your … blood helps to discharge lots of our self-disgust, so inculcated by media, myths and poor health.  …The handling of our own secretions will prepare you for the sometimes bloody experiences of childbirth, and other crises. Blood will cease to ‘freak you out.’”

In other words, it will help reconnect you to your period power!

Images:
Top two royalty-free/Corbis
Birth from WiseWomanChildbirthblogspot.com

The post I Got My Period…I Got My POWER! appeared first on Marcy Axness, PhD.

Yes, that’s really Ian!

Yes, I spanked my son. It was almost twenty years ago but I still remember it vividly. Ian was six or seven and was stubbornly, defiantly ignoring me right to my face. (About what? Now that I cannot recall!) Something primitive inside me uncoiled and I was suddenly spanking him. I regretted it immediately and ever since — not just for the obvious reason of having been violent with him, but also for the sliver of his respect I lost in that moment.

We lose the admiration of our children when we “lose it.” It’s a mammalian thing: all animal behaviorists know that our ability to have authority over — and thus the ability to train — a dog or a horse is severely eroded if the animal sees or feels us get angry. Credible leaders don’t lose their composure, it’s as simple as that. Of course children aren’t dogs, but we can learn so much from understanding the mammalian similarities! Our children’s respect and admiration are among the most potent tools in our parenting toolbox, and if we do things to erode them, we set ourselves up for trouble down the line.

There is also the approach to spanking in which the parent is not “out of control” but rather very much in control. They deliver the spanking in an almost matter-of-fact way that makes clear it is merely a consequence for the child’s behavior. It isn’t drenched in the parent’s anger or upset. This style is almost chilling in its use of force: rather than an act of passion (which even in a court of law will reduce an offender’s charge), it is a premeditated act (which in that same court can get you life).

Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child

This is a quote that is often mistaken as having come from the bible (which it doesn’t — it is a paraphrase of Proverbs 13:24). The most effective interpretation of this admonition is one in which the shepherd’s rod is used not to hit but to guide errant sheep in the right direction when they stray off the path. Just as sheep aren’t plotting to annoy the shepherd when they stray, the young child’s brain simply isn’t equipped to marshal the kind of complex planning and detailed motivational linkages that would enable her to systematically drive you crazy (much as it may sometimes seem like it).

Children need guidance and instruction, not punishment. And it is often far more effective to simply use a gentle, redirecting arm around the shoulder of a young one heading towards trouble — while perhaps also singing a soothing little melody, like the Pied Piper — than to deploy a string of words to reason with or explain (“…for the umpteenth time!”) the prohibition to the errant child.

What truly will spoil the child — that is, inhibit healthy brain development — is any kind of “disciplinary” measure that elicits a cascade of stress hormones in the child’s nervous system. Even just the threat of some of our conventional measures — a spanking, a time-out, even a parent’s disgusted look — can instantly shift a child’s biochemistry out of flourishing growth mode and into protection mode. Every time a child receives a punitive rebuke or scolding, it’s like a small shock to her system. (I mean, imagine yourself, today, receiving sternly delivered negative feedback about something you did. It is the rare person who can hear that without feeling a tightening in the stomach or a flush in the cheeks — and we’re adults, supposedly possessed of all our state-regulation neural software!)

Self-Regulation and Success

One of the keys to an individual’s success in any area of life — in school, in relationships, in business — is their ability to regulate their own internal states. This includes things like appetite, attention, emotions, thoughts, and everything else related to one’s inner life. Scientists have found that the prefrontal cortex area that governs self-regulation depends on the quality of our early relationships for its healthy development. That usually means relationship with parents, first and foremost.

A child’s self-regulation capacities wire up to match the relationship experiences she encounters. When her “misbehavior” is repeatedly met with forms of punishment that engage her stress system over months and years, her response to these kinds of “relational concussions,” is to erect protective inner barriers that become increasingly difficult for parents (or anyone) to broach. How many times have we heard the parental lament, “I just can’t seem to get through to her!”?

“Misbehavior” is a trap of a concept in the first place — a term only appropriate for situations in which someone truly understands the alternatives and consciously chooses to engage in bad behavior. But for the young child, this is simply not the case. The young child is a scientist figuring out the world, gathering data and conducting experiments. Her behaviors that don’t please us are more helpfully considered as “mistakes” rather than misbehavior. Do we punish people for mistakes? Not if we want improvement, excellence and growth!

Why Spanking Doesn’t Work

Not only am I devoted to parenting with peace in mind, I am a pragmatist. I’m a fan of doing what works, and not doing what doesn’t work. Spanking doesn’t work.^[1] Any perceived effectiveness of swatting, slapping or spanking is nothing more than short-term compliance rooted in a child’s fear of the parent. This is a hallmark of the authoritarian style of parenting — in which children’s unquestioning obedience is the goal — rather than authoritative parenting — marked by the parents’ decisive yet respectful leadership role and an ever-deepening bond of loving trust between them and their children.

Rather than internalizing any moral message or noble value by being spanked, a child grows resentful and avoidant of the parent. This, together with such inner contortions of denial and dissociation that the child performs, exacts a steep, enduring toll on the child’s lifelong wellbeing. Spanked toddlers are less likely to listen, are less compliant and have more poorly developed motor skills; spanked adolescents are more likely to suffer depression, alcohol addiction and suicidal thoughts. Children who are hit are more likely as adults to hit their partners and their own children — and so it goes, the transgenerational-go-round of violence, which ripples outward from family to community to society. In Parenting for a Peaceful World, Robin Grille writes,

The school bully or juvenile delinquent is an emotionally injured individual trying to compensate for an inner feeling of powerlessness. The same is true for those who grow up to become autocrats, dictators and bullies in business. …Bullies are not a fact of life but an artifact of history.^[2]

Spanking Alternatives That Do Work

Even the most suspiciously flagrant “mistake” of a young child reflects an unmet need. Figuring out what that need is, rather than focusing on the inexperienced way the child expressed the need, or ineffective strategy he used to meet his need, is central to parenting success and peace in the home.For example, “stealing” a piece of your jewelry or some other precious item — yes, even your money — can be a child’s way to get close to you, to “keep you with him.”

Hitting or teasing another child is also sometimes a young, inexperienced human’s misguided strategy to connect. And yet that same behavior — hitting, or even biting — will be used by another child (or the same child in a different circumstance) as an attempted strategy for meeting an entirely different need, such as the need to feel less fearful, embarrassed, isolated, or envious.

Waldorf kindergarten teacher Barbara Patterson^[3] shares some wonderfully unexpected, lovely and effective healing approaches to such things as hitting and biting — which can evoke strong feelings, and sometimes (as in my incident with Ian) result in reactive, unmindful responses by parents. Having some creative responses at the ready can help us maintain the calm, loving authority children so need from us. Here are some healing actions for unacceptable behavior:

The post I Was a Spanking Mother appeared first on Marcy Axness, PhD.

The ways our culture makes breastfeeding ever more difficult range from the insidiously subtle (hospitals’ goody-bag full of formula) to the outrageously overt (Bill Maher’s infamous rant equating breastfeeding — “a private thing” — with “farting or masturbating or pissing”).

Intro to Bottled Up!, an upcoming film from The Milky Way (including the aforementioned Maher rant)

And even when there is no baby-to-breast, roadblocks abound. Using a breast pump to express milk to take home to a baby is a far more complicated maneuver than nursing a baby, and does indeed require privacy. It was startling and eye-opening to read of political reporter Rachel Rose Hartman’s unsavory struggle to find a suitable place to pump her breast milk while working at…wait for it…the White House. Yes indeed, Hartman was reduced to months of hiding in an unsanitary unisex bathroom in the very place where was born the federal law requiring private, non-bathroom lactation rooms at workplaces!

A Culture of Hypocrisy

Breastfeeding in our culture is hard enough without such policies and attitudes lacing our admittedly two-faced position on breastfeeding: Breast is best, but not in my line of sight.

Don’t you find it odd that in today’s culture of boob worship everywhere we look — online, TV, billboards, every possible form of media — that breastfeeding can still manage to rattle our chains around modesty and propriety? This hypocrisy is vividly captured in the societal microcosm (or is it by now its own macrocosm??) of Facebook, where you can find myriad boob photos (and more), but where breastfeeding mothers have faced capricious, arbitrary harassment for years.

I have often wondered if maybe it isn’t an issue of our fairly coarse sensibilities about revealing the body…but an issue of something deeper?

Rather than the amount of bare breast revealed (usually not much), I propose that it’s the startling intimacy of breastfeeding that can stir discomfort when a mother nurses in public (even when that “public” is family and friends within a home!). Mother and baby respond to each other physically, emotionally, hormonally, while in direct skin-to-skin contact. In the minds of many, this is unconsciously associated with sexual activity — something that should indeed happen in private.

A Delicate Balance

This is touchy territory indeed. It is ground where beliefs, fears, neuroses, love and ideals collide. Raise this topic at The View table and you’re guaranteed to get a rant from Whoopie, who consistently equates support of breastfeeding with bullying women and making them feel like failures if they can’t or don’t do it.

Blogger “MamaEve” eloquently traces this delicate line we must walk when peeling back various layers of the tender issue of advocating for breastfeeding:

We are all individuals. We all have different needs, different personalities, and different babies. There isn’t an all-encompassing government recommendation that will work for all of us, and there isn’t an all-encompassing solution that will make it all better, either.

If we want to help women breastfeed, we need to understand the two levels of advocacy — the macro level where it absolutely is best for society if the majority of mothers breastfeed exclusively for six months, and the individual level where we have no idea if that’s the case or not.

At the macro level, there is so much work to do — protecting the rights of mothers who want to breastfeed or pump at work, providing longer maternity leaves, and enacting policies in hospitals that support breastfeeding initiation.

On the micro level, there is also so much work to do — recognizing that “best for baby” and “best for mother” are not mutually exclusive, understanding that a multitude of factors impact a mother’s breastfeeding success, and removing stigmas attached to both breastfeeding and formula feeding so new moms don’t feel the added performance pressure attached to one or the other.

Nursing Peace

Of course there are circumstances in which nursing isn’t available to the new mother and baby — adoption, medical conditions contraindicating breastfeeding, and cases in which certain obstacles just cannot be overcome. In such cases, it is important that mothers process the feelings that go along with this, if it represents a loss — often including guilt, anger, grief — so that they can bring the same depth of uncomplicated presence to bottle feeding as they had hoped to bring to breastfeeding.

The peace-nourishing elements are not just in the flow of milk, but in the flow of connectedness.

________________
Images (in order):
Mothering Touch used under its Creative Commons license
Mel // Left of Centre used under its Creative Commons license
dailycloudt used under its Creative Commons license

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