For anyone who becomes a mother within nine months of a major holiday season (and, taking into account all of the holidays within every faith and cultural tradition, that means almost everybody!) I have a radical idea for you: Simplify your idea of how the holidays will look this year. Better yet, let yourself let someone ELSE handle everything. That way, your holidays with a new baby can be marked by joy, connection and peace — just as they’re meant to be! (more…)
Archive for the ‘Parenting for Peace’ Category
Holidays With A New Baby (or, How to Keep the Thanks in Thanksgiving)
Angry Parents
No, Angry Parents isn’t the latest game application for your smartphone, it’s one of the biggest challenges we face when raising children! When we find ourselves as angry parents, it shifts the entire connection dynamic with our kids, and within ourselves. It isn’t a place we want to be, as totally understandable as it is. There are tools that can help us develop more mastery over our own anger, and create more ease and confidence in our parenting.
It is helpful to keep in mind that most of the time, anger is simply a disguise for another feeling. A somewhat overly simplified slogan is nevertheless instructive: mad is really sad. I would add that mad is very often hurt, or some variation. (more…)
Navigating Stress in Pregnancy
The brain development needed to equip an individual with the kinds of qualities needed for peace and prosperity — self-regulation, creative innovation, mental flexibility, robust will — begins during pregnancy, and it isn’t just diet and lifestyle choices that influence it. A pregnant woman’s thoughts and moods have a significant impact upon the brain development of her baby in the womb.
Stress in pregnancy is associated with a daunting list of bad outcomes, but some basic “perception hygiene” can help pregnant moms navigate this reality. While I’m confident that scientists will soon “prove” what so many wisdom traditions and cultures have long known about the role of joy in optimally prenatal development, what we do now know for sure is that a pregnant mother’s chronic stress has enduring negative effects upon the developing fetal brain. (more…)
Preventing Prematurity Early: The Stress Connection
It is good news that the rate of premature birth is down in the U.S. by about 1% from its 2006 high of 12.8%. It is bad news that one out of eight babies born in America (11.7%) is born too soon. With World Prematurity Awareness Day tomorrow, there is a flurry of coverage of the Lancet’s report about five proven strategies to reduce preterm birth. But nowhere is there mention of the solid research about preventing prematurity early in pregnancy! (more…)
Rethinking Adoption in the 21st Century
For generations, formal adoption in America consisted overwhelmingly of white babies who were born to white, unwed women and were parented by white, married couples. Our laws, policies, practices, attitudes and understanding were based on that reality – and yet adoption in the 21st century has changed quite radically. The demographics of adopted children – and the characteristics of expectant and prospective parents – no longer look anything like the ones for whom the institution was first created. (more…)
“Out of Everydayness”: How Adoption is Unique
Before getting my degree and writing Parenting for Peace, my previous body of work explored the psychological and social issues in adoption. Understanding how adoption is unique can help bring healing and wholeness to everyone involved. Last weekend, as I basked in Hawaii’s soothing trade winds and the wisdom being shared at the Mid-Pacific Conference on Birth & Primal Health Research, I was inspired by the uniquely Hawaiian concepts of hanai and ‘ohana. These have to do with family connections that expand and expand, without anyone losing one’s own history. (more…)
Talking About Adoption…Honestly
Mitchell, Lily & Cam, “Modern Family”‘s adoptive family
Talking about adoption honestly supports healthy emotional development for both children and parents. Yet it is not always the easy choice. False cheer and inaccurate platitudes often feel like the less challenging way to go. (As Mitchell discovered in a light-hearted treatment of this issue on a recent Modern Family. He found it easier to tell Lily her mother was a princess–until she became obsessed with princesses!)
The road to adoption is invariably a challenging one for many adoptive parents, marked by many losses— (more…)
How Early Life Influences Us: My Roots as an Adoptee
One of the most unique things about Parenting for Peace is it’s the only parenting book that collates, contextualizes, and includes guidelines around the latest research on how powerfully early life influences us.
My birth parents Bob & Liz, 3 months before my birth
In other words, how soon parenting begins.
For me, all of this is eminently personal: it grows from the ground of my own lifelong experience, beginning in the womb of a mother who knew she would not keep me. Who met a couple who had suffered some steep losses — the death of a baby, a near-fatal miscarriage — and decided she was carrying me for them. Who held me just once that first day in the hospital, and didn’t see me again for twenty-one years.
It grows from the ground of my first six days spent in a hospital nursery, followed by the months and years in a home that was not, shall we say, steeped in “relational intelligence.” Things were pretty chilly. A bit lonely. And it wasn’t that my parents didn’t mean well, or have good intentions. They were short on information and understanding. That’s what I try to do with my book, my private coaching, my speaking appearances — make sure there is lots of information and understanding available about early life influences, so that your best intentions can be realized in practical, effective ways! (more…)
7 Ways to Protect Your Family from EFT Effects
How often do you hold a cellphone to your ear, use a Bluetooth headset, or sit at a computer? How often do you do none of those things and instead just go about simple activities — but do so in a home or office or coffeehouse equipped with wireless? And are EFT effects on your mind? (more…)
What Impairs Attachment, and Who Repairs Attachment?
What Impairs Attachment?
A big pet peeve of mine is the label “attachment disorder.” This is a diagnosis given to kids who have typically experienced severe disruption in the natural order of what should have been the effortless, instinctual connection we’re designed to make from the very beginning. They were prepared at the level of their brains, their hormones and their entire sensing organism to connect, to be skin-to-skin with oxytocin flowing and weaving the powerful bonding foundations for healthy attachment. They expected to connect.
Many children with the most severe cases of “attachment disorder” had this expectation crushed in the most primal way. Can you think of a time when you were totally, ecstatically primed for a connection and it for whatever reason did not happen? Or it happened and then went away without warning or explanation? I’m speaking here of a romantic situation. Remember the disappointment, the deflation of your entire being? Now take that feeling and multiply it by an order of magnitude of a thousand. Ten thousand. As if there was nothing to you but that deflation, that floor pulled out from beneath you. As if the floor pulled out from beneath you was you. (more…)
