Archive for the ‘Parenting for Peace’ Category
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…)
Tags: adoptee, adoption, adoptive parents, infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth
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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…)
Tags: adoption, conception, early life influences, open adoption, parenting
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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…)
Tags: bluetooth, cancer, cell membrane permeability, cell phones, electromagnetic radiation, EMFs, leukemia, smart meter, tinnitus, WiFi, wireless
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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…)
Tags: attachment, attachment disorder, Gordon Neufeld, NICU, parent confidence, trust
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I write a lot about the central role of healthy attachment for child wellbeing. But what IS attachment and how do you get it?? It can be easy for someone like me who is steeped daily in the topic to take it for granted that people know what we mean when we say “attachment.” And as developmental psychologist author Gordon Neufeld has pointed out, attachment is not an intuitive word — in other words a word whose meaning is naturally and easily understood.
Author of an excellent book on attachment, Hold On to Your Kids, Neufeld points out that the word attachment was invented as a way to have a term to unify a science around. (The scientific study of attachment began in the 1950s with John Bowlby’s landmark work.) To further complicate our popular understanding of the concept, the term “attachment parenting” was copyrighted by William Sears. “So,” notes Neufeld, “now people know it as associated with a particular organization and particular strategies.” (Neufeld avoids using the term.) (more…)
Tags: attachment, attachment neurobiology, attachment parenting, Gordon Neufeld, interpersonal neurobiology, Mary Ainsworth, relationship
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How 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: (more…)
Tags: attachment, attachment neurobiology, Attachment Parenting Month, brain development, Bruce Perry, Bullying Prevention Month, empathy, Jamie Lynne Grumet, pleasure, sociopathy, violence
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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.
First, 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: (more…)
Tags: anxiety, California Women's Conference, discipline, information overload, parent confidence, stress
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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.
Authoritative 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. (more…)
Tags: authoritarian parenting, authoritative parenting, child-centered, discipline, negotiating, shame, social brain
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Parenting for Peace
Make 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. (more…)
Tags: brain development, imagination, intellegence, interpersonal neurobiology, parenting for peace, peace, self-regulation
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