Archive for the ‘Parenting for Peace’ Category
Along with breakfast in bed and maybe some flowers or candy…if you have a young child, you’ll invariably be presented with a handmade present — of course, the best kind. And you won’t care if the colors clash, if the popsicle sticks aren’t straight, if the pasta is coming unglued; your heart will expand, almost painfully, with a gush of love and tenderness unique to the moment. These truly are the most precious gifts! And this is one instance where it is impossible (and unnatural!) not to praise your child. But what about every other day…? When you praise your child, do you really build self-esteem, as many people assume? Or do you unwittingly erode intrinsic motivation, pleasure and self-satisfaction?
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.” (more…)
Tags: parenting, positive reinforcement, praise, self-esteem
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We tend to throw around the word “attachment” a lot when talking about kids and parenting, so let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same thing: attachment is a measure of the security of relationship between a child and those one or two or three adults with whom that child is in consistent contact. We now recognize that healthy (secure) attachment is a fundamental form of nourishment for a child’s growing brain. In particular, attachment fosters rich circuitry in the area of the brain that mediates social and emotional functioning. A parent’s ability to be present for a child is fundamental to fostering this brain circuitry needed to regulate attention — therefore, basic ADHD treatment. Mounting research suggests that the social brain is the basis for the child’s lifelong success — in school, at home, and out in the world! (more…)
Tags: ADD, adhd, attachment, brain development, Dan Siegel, Gabor Mate, presence, social brain
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*** This post is your invitation to an empowering FREE webinar next Wednesday ***
“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! (more…)
Tags: Jean Liedloff, parent confidence, parental anxiety, parenting stress, stress
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“I had to love her enough to let her hate me.” It was a stunning and very wise thing that Carol Burnett said to the ladies on The View. Burnett said she was scared of her daughter — of saying the wrong thing, making her angry, pushing her away. (She was talking about her late daughter Carrie’s three-year struggle with addiction when she was a teen.)
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. (more…)
Tags: authoritative parenting, Carol Burnett, discipline, parent confidence, parent stress
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So there you are one afternoon, at the end of your rope with an out-of-control three-year-old. You know you won’t spank him, and you have become mindful of avoiding shame-based measures, so what’s left? Is “Time Out” the answer? At risk of bringing on the wrath of parents everywhere, my answer is no. Time-outs were conceived as a more humane alternative to spanking, but the problem is, they land a blow to the brain and psyche rather than to the bottom.
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]. (more…)
Tags: attachment, brain development, discipline, Gordon Neufeld, shame, social brain, spanking, time-out
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Okay, I’ll come out with it, finally, after all these years: I was desperately disappointed with The Vagina Monologues! I’m only now fessing up and lodging my opinion that the empress Eve Ensler has no new clothes on. In her supposedly ground-breaking play…two hours of dialogue and monologue dedicated (supposedly) to the sexual dimension of a woman’s psycho-anatomical makeup…there is not one single mention of <gasp> menstruation. No period, period.
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! (more…)
Tags: Alisa Vitti, camille paglia, Dr. Oz, eve ensler, Jackie Guiliano, Jeannine Parvati Baker, menstruation, natural childbirth, period power, PMS, vagina monologues
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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. (more…)
Tags: brain development, imitation, spanking
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Author Ray Bradbury pointed out, chillingly, “You don’t need to burn books to destroy a culture — just get people to stop reading them.” Similarly, you don’t need to actually ban nursing to decrease the incidence of breastfeeding — just make it more and more difficult to do.
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”).
Bottled Up! from The Milky Way on Vimeo. (Includes the aforementioned Maher rant)
Image:
Mothering Touch used under its Creative Commons license
Tags: Andrea Potos, Bill-Maher, breast pumping, breastfeeding, cultural discourse, Facebook, Mama Eve, nursing, The View, Whoopie Goldberg
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Along with a good supply of onesies, I routinely counsel expectant parents to stock up on trust. Parenting is a daunting safari into the unknown, and trust is the anxiety antidote when life outruns the reach of our techno-savvy that has us convinced we can figure out and control everything in our lives.
I define trust as “calm reliance upon processes outside of your immediate perception and control,” and it is one of the seven principles that weave through my book Parenting for Peace. For those of us weaned on the information revolution, trust is probably the most subversive P4P principle of them all. When it isn’t overwhelming us, our instant access to infinite amounts of data on any topic has us convinced that by virtue of our techno-savvy, we can indeed figure out and be in charge of every aspect of our lives.
But Life will always manage to outrun your techno-management, trust me. (more…)
Tags: information overwhelm, Robbie Davis-Floyd, technology, teens, trust, ultrasound
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No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. Long dry blog spell is due to my recent 3-week teaching trip to Brazil, from which I just returned. It was wonderful… people SO receptive to the Parenting for Peace message… not to mention the gorgeous country and wonderful folks.
…at a health promotion conference for nursing students, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora
With colleague / interpreter Laura Uplinger…
Now I’m in the “re-entry” mode that happens for me after travel. Not just jet lag…but life lag. Listening to the bodymind’s call for a pause — in the interest of living and working with sustainability.
I’ll soon get back into a blogging rhythm, and in the meantime, I invite you to use the tag cloud on my homepage to search for topics of your interest… and if you’d like to see some posts / photos from the Brazil trip, they are on my Facebook profile (as opposed to FB Parenting for Peace page). If you’re patient and scroll way down you’ll even see my taste of carnaval!
Tags: Brazil, rhythm, sustainability
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