Healthy Attachment is the First Best Anti-Bullying Program

Healthy Attachment is the First Best Anti-Bullying ProgramHow perfect that October is Bullying Prevention Month and Attachment Parenting month — since healthy attachment is the first best anti-bullying program! Healthy attachment is the wellspring optimal brain development, especially the social brain circuitry that governs such anti-bullying capacities as self-regulation, empathy, trust, emotional and cognitive flexibility, and imagination.

As I’ve written about in a prior post about the origins of empathy, my opinion (in agreement with many others) is that even the very best school-based anti-bullying or conflict resolution program puts the change lever in the wrong place — that is, way too far down a child’s developmental timeline: Read the rest of this entry »

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A 3-Way Toolkit to Ease the Stress of Mothering

I’m going to try and keep this post short and to-the-point. A handy toolkit to ease the stress of mothering, regardless of the “brand” of mothering (working, stay-at-home, by fathers, you name it). This is a summary of the gems that emerged from my appearance this week with Mallika Chopra and Sarah Ripard at the California Women’s Conference. The audience loved what we shared, so I wanted to share it more widely.

Mom stressFirst, why do so many of us tend towards feeling overwhelmed with the stress of mothering these days? Since humans are by nature meaning-making creatures, it helps a great deal to shine a light of context on any problem. In this case it helps us to not feel crazy, or incompetent, or alone in our suffering!

Here are The Big Three as I call them: overarching reasons for what seems like an epidemic of anxiety that thrums at the heart of parenting: Read the rest of this entry »

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AuthoritaTIVE Parenting, Not AuthoritaRIAN Parenting

I talk a lot in my lectures and coaching sessions about the child’s need for our calm, loving authority as parents. Let me clarify loud and clear that I mean authoritative parenting, not authoritarian parenting! In the authoritarian style of parenting, children’s unquestioning obedience is the goal — a short-sighted approach on every level, including optimally healthy development of the child’s social brain, which is the polestar of parenting for peace.

Geese familyAuthoritative parenting takes a longer view and is marked by the parents’ decisive yet respectful leadership role and their focus on connection, and builds an ever-deepening bond of loving trust between them and their children. It features the parent as a calm, loving authority figure who is grounded in his or her life, which is not balanced on the child as its fulcrum. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Hands That Rock the Cradle Can Change the World

Parenting for Peace

Mothers can change the worldMake no mistake: mothers can change the world. And now is the time for us to realize it. Through recognizing our true nature and innate power, together with the shaping impact of how we bring children to life and to maturity, we can wield timely and imperative healing change.

The Dalai Lama said at the Vancouver Peace Summit that the world will be saved be the western woman. In the midst of our global human, economic and environmental crises, we have been overlooking a powerful — perhaps the most powerful — means of changing the world toward more peace and prosperity: the consciousness with which we bring our children to life and shepherd them into adulthood. Read the rest of this entry »

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Supermom Has Too Many Choices!

From Supermom to Sane, Centered MomI’m picking up the thread from my last post, about how too much information and too many choices contribute to Supermom feeling overwhelmed rather than sane and centered. In an era when the world generates more information in 48 hours than it did through all of human history up until 2003 (!!), I’d like us to consider the possibility that our sophisticated technology and information-gathering prowess might have had a direct evolutionary purpose — and I’m not referring to us evolving into 24/7 extensions of our iTwitterFaceLinkInPod cyber-screens. (In fact, that is a direct contributor to our stress…but that’s another post. Keep an eye out for that, coming soon!)

Putting This SuperPickle Into Perspective
It’s no wonder we haven’t yet gotten this parenting thing right as a human race. Read the rest of this entry »

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From “Supermom” to Sane & Centered Mom

From Supermom to Sane, Centered MomIt seems epidemic these days: an undercurrent of anxiety thrums at the heart of parenting. 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!

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 insufficiency. Read the rest of this entry »

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Talking to Children About Tragic Events: The Help of Temperaments

Talking to children about tragic eventsWhen talking to children about tragic events, understanding individual temperament can be a great help. In my earlier 9/11 post, I focused mainly on two important aspects for the parent:

  • the fundamental need for some measure of self-possession and calm amidst outer events
  • a level of honesty and clarity in speaking to the child about the events that is not the norm in our culture

Especially related to that second point — honesty and clarity for the child — I want to dive a bit deeper and look at the importance of knowing your individual child, and letting that understanding guide you with more specificity and nuance when navigating the delicate territory of tragedy with them. {Read the rest of this post at mothering.com}

Image by:
obbino (Flickr / Creative Commons)

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Raising Secure Kids in a Scary World: Talking to Children About Tragedy

Eleven years since 9/11.

Eleven years ago last night, our daughter Eve — then ten years old — was so excited that the next morning she was going to wake up by herself for the very first time, using the radio alarm clock we had given her for the occasion. She chose the station carefully (classical was it? maybe soft pop?), but when the radio clicked on at six a.m. in her Los Angeles bedroom it wasn’t music that woke her up. The second plane had just hit its target. Nobody yet had clarity on what was happening, let alone the news media. A fragmented noise skein of unfathomable facts, disbelief, sorrow, and fear came out of the radio that morning. {Read the rest of this post at mothering.com}

Image:
slgckgc under its Creative Commons license

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Parent-for-Peace Spotlight: “I’m A Recovering Perfectionist”

Embracing the Flow
by Stephanie Evans Hanson

  •  Hello.  My name is Stephanie, and I am a “Present Past Perfectionist.”  Admission is the first step, right?  Left unchecked, this is how my brain typically works:  I wake up each morning with a to do list in my head, constantly thinking about the next item I need to complete.  I move through the day accomplishing one task after the other, trying to keep up with the daily chores that I have to do, as well as the projects that I invent for myself. Read the rest of this entry »

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5 Out-of-the-Box Ways to Make Your Child…”LISTEN!!!”

One of the most frequent questions I get is, How do I get my child to listen to me? What lingers in the roots just beneath this question is, How do I get her to respect me? The two are intimately entwined. As so often happens with Life’s sticky questions, sometimes we can unstick things a bit by turning the question around: rather than How can I get my child to listen to me, we can get far more traction with How can I make myself more “listenable”?

The fact is, you can never “make” your child do or be anything! Oh sure, we’re lulled into the comforting illusion that we can during the very early years, when their sheer existence and protection depends upon us in very basic ways (not to mention we’re way bigger than them!). Read the rest of this entry »

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