On the Joyous Edge: Parenting Today's Children

Enjoy Summer with Your Child

Every parent wants their child to be happy. It is one of the driving desires that affects the choices parents make regarding their child. Yet, how much do you know about what makes your child deeply happy and content?

Summer is the time that reveals the authentic aspects of your relationship with your child. Are you excited about the opportunity to spend more time with your child without the pressures and interruption of school activities and homework? Or are you a parent who dreads the long summer months, anticipating challenges and frustration?

Is summer a time to enroll your child in camps and activities she enjoys or needs? If so, how much free connective time are you sharing with her?

Sometimes parents simply feel ambivalent, both looking forward to a slower pace and less school pressures and activities, but wondering what the uninterrupted summer with their child will be like. Do you have a roller-coaster experience as a parent, sharing times of fun with your child with occasional or frequent times of conflict and difficulty?

Stop for a moment right now and explore how you feel as you think about the summer months ahead. What are your true thoughts and feelings about this time with your child?

Parents often act as if the secret to their child’s happiness lies in material possessions for both their children and themselves. They buy toys and designer clothes, only to find them tossed aside tomorrow or strung out over their bedroom floor.

Other times parents act as if saying nice, encouraging things paves the road to happiness for children. Parents often put a lot of energy and effort into saying the "right" things to keep their child happy.

Other times they act as if they believe activity is the key to happiness and joy for their children. They drive them to classes and play dates, without really noticing if their child is happy or not, and sometimes in spite of their child’s resistance.

You may think your child is happy even when she is struggling inside emotionally. What I've found is in our society we don't know a lot about Emotional Wholeness. Consequently, you may miss the cues your child gives you about how she really feels inside. Children pretend to be happy and smile even when that is not what they are feeling. They’ve learned to act as much of us do, putting on a smile, even when we’re hurting inside.

Your child's happiness doesn't depend on material possessions, kind words from your or others, or specific activities. His happiness comes from feeling certain and clear in who he is and making choices that reflect his personal integrity.

Happiness comes from knowing that she belongs, that she is deeply loved by the important people in her life. It comes from knowing she is respected and valued for who she is. In other words, your child's happiness depends on her Emotional Wholeness.

Children need love and respect from  within themselves more than they need love and respect from us. Happiness comes from inner love and respect.

So what's a parent to do?

1. Make your child's Emotional Wholeness one of your highest priorities. Emotional Wholeness is more important than managing her behavior and making sure she's doing the right things. It's emotional well-being that lays the foundation for wise choices and joyous, loving interactions.
When you nurture your child's Emotional Wholeness, he glows with joy and a feeling of certainty that is unmistakable to people around him. When you nurture your child's Emotional Wholeness, power struggles, tantrums, defiance, depression, anxiety, and a host of other behavioral challenges become things of the past.

When your child lives in a place of loving himself, he flourishes and shines brightly. He radiates enthusiasm, positive power, clarity, joy, and love from the inside out. This is where it counts!

2. Share authentic, loving, times with your child this summer. You matter so much to your child. This matters more than all the possessions you can buy. Slow down and make your actions consistent with your highest values.

3. With your child, plan fun special times together that you will both enjoy. Stretch your boundaries of what you believe you might enjoy and try something new your child suggests.

4. Reflect for a moment. Are your thoughts, words and actions consistent with the feelings you want to create?

A Sweet Love Unspoken

I call my 20-month-old grandson Sebastian from Las Vegas. I haven’t seen him for 4 days, and I long for a grandma connection. Shortly after Grandpa Doug, who is taking care of Sebastian, answeres the phone, I hear Sebastian, clearly expressing his desire to talk with his grandma.

What follows is magical. Sebastian is learning to talk so he has a small vocabulary for having a conversation. However, as soon as he is on the phone, I feel wrapped in love, an eager, reaching-out-to-connect desire that warms my heart. I tell him, “Hi, Sebastian! I love you so much!”

After a short silence on his end, I hear, “Shoe!” one of his favorite words. I ask him if he has his shoes. I tell him I am wearing mine.

Then he clearly says, “Key!” his most loved word in the English language. I hear from Grandpa that they are trying to find his keys. They had disappeared yet again.

Sebastian laughs, reaching out to connect.

“Shoe!”

Our conversation is short on words and abundant in joy and love for one another. My heart fills to over-flowing. Tears fill my eyes. Sweetness! I walk back into the meeting room, knowing in a profound, unspoken way that I am loved more than words can possibly express. Life is beautiful!

 

 

 

How to Use Your Parenting Power Wisely

Do you ever feel locked in a power struggle with your child? Do you feel you have a lot of power as a parent or do you feel confused and powerless more frequently than you’d like?

Whenever I talk with parents about their relationship with their child, the discussion about power always comes up. Parents don’t like being in power struggles with their child and yet often find themselves engaged in a battle where both sides are trying to win and have their way. Sound familiar?

When you think about using your parenting power wisely, what does this mean to you? Does it mean to be more authoritarian and in control? This perspective believes a parent’s role is to maintain control over her child’s behavior and to insist her child do what his parents tell him.

Other times parents struggle with feeling powerless in conflicts with their child. They want to nurture their child’s joyous inner creativity and positive self-expression and don’t know how to set a limit without stifling this joyous creativity, innocence, and specialness.

Parents often tell me they feel intimidated by the intensity of their child’s power. Their child is so clear about what he wants, and parents feel insecure about confronting their child’s clarity and certainty about what she wants. Parents also dread the emotional meltdown when she doesn’t get her way.

It’s hard to know which way to choose in times of conflict with your child—give in to your child’s wishes and demands or use whatever strategy possible to alter your child’s behavior and attitudes to conform to what you want.

Parents usually fall into one of these two categories. In most couples, one parent is the disciplinarian and the other is the easy-going one who sets few or no boundaries. In your relationship, which one are you? Neither approach is beneficial to your child in the long run so it’s important to find a third approach that provides a more balanced approach.

Repeated power struggles are stressful and frustrating to you and your child. Even if you find a way to get through today’s conflicts relatively unbruised, you’re going to deal with them again tomorrow and next week.

So what can you do to reduce the number of power struggles you experience with your child and how can you get through them more easily? Here are four valuable insights to guide you on your parenting adventure.

1.    Remember that you are one of the very most important people in your child’s life. Parents forget this so often. It’s easy to take yourself for granted and to not realize the deep love your child feels for you and the importance you play in her life.
Because of your importance in your child’s life, everything you do and say or don’t do and say makes an impact. This can feel like a daunting and overwhelming responsibility. Yet to ignore your natural influence means you unconsciously make choices that powerfully impact your child in ways you never imagined possible.

2.    Wield the power you have with as much awareness as possible. Unconscious mis-steps are inevitable. When these mis-steps are repeated over and over again, your impact is magnified and becomes part of your child’s personality, her beliefs about life, and her feelings about herself.

3.    Welcome your child’s unique power. His power is essential to his joy, creativity and success in life. When you resist it or try to suppress it, you limit his capability and positive self-expression in life.

This is one of the problems with the psychotropic drugs we prescribe to children for so-called social – emotional disorders. These drugs try to mold a child’s behavior into a pattern that his parents and teachers desire instead of developing and implementing strategies that bring out his positive, innate gifts.

4.    Create a structure that gives her a solid emotional foundation from which to grow and become the person she yearns to be. Without an empowering structure, all children struggle with how to wield their power positively.

As a parent, you possess tremendous power to influence your child’s life and emotional wholeness. He needs for you to be aware of your impact in his life and to make choices that nurture his Emotional Wholeness.  Then your power struggles will dramatically diminish and your loving joy and ease will soar.

Meet Your Child’s Unique Needs

Everyone knows that every child is unique and that we need to relate to each child based on their uniqueness.

The two important questions are:

1. How do you do that?
2. How far are you as a parent willing to go?

I recently read an online newspaper article that brought the message home loud and clear to me. Perhaps you’ve already seen it. It’s a story about a piglet who was afraid of the mud and how her owners responded to her unique needs as a piglet.

I can’t resist sharing it here for several reasons:

1. I grew up on a farm in Iowa where my father raised this adorable Hampshire pigs.
2. It is just too cute not to pass on.
3. It exemplifies my point about responding to your child’s unique needs perfectly.

Here is the article.

And here is a photo.

Be creative and have fun nurturing your child's unique personality!

Your Patience is Not the Problem

What kind of parent do you really want to be? A parent who is always happy, smiling, and relaxed? A parent who never gets angry or says or does unkind things to their child? The Father Knows Best or Donna Reed of parenting?

Most parents struggle to meet their own expectations when it comes to being patient and understanding with their child. Most parents I talk with share stories about not handling a situation as they would have liked and then feeling guilty when they didn’t meet their own standards. They promise themselves to try harder and do better next time. This is sounds like a lot of pressure to me.

Many people will tell you that losing your temper and yelling at your child is a normal part of parenting. But, just because almost every parent yells or strikes their child more or less frequently doesn’t mean that it is healthy or desirable or even necessary. It simply means they struggle, like most parents, to understand themselves and their child emotionally.

What I’ve found is when parents are more aware of their own emotions and their emotional connection with their child, interactions become easier, and power struggles and emotional upsets dramatically decrease. In fact, when you’re connected with your own inner natural ability to create a joyous relationship with your child, trying to be patient becomes virtually a thing of the past.

When parents talk about losing their patience with their child, they often say, “It was such a little thing. Why did I get so upset? I hated to see how much I hurt my child.” These are extremely painful experiences and realizations for parents.

It is usually a little thing that triggers your upset, but it is the accumulation of many seemingly insignificant upsets that is the actual cause. Without noticing what’s happening, several frustrating events, thoughts, and interactions occur that begin to gather in your emotional awareness. It is the accumulation of several of these unexplored beliefs, perspectives, and feelings throughout your day that lead to your so-called impatience.

Your stress is often caused by misinformation, unreasonable and misguided expectations, and self-doubt. When you more clearly understand your inner emotional experience and explore your beliefs and fears as a parent, you stop trying to control your temper. You simply respond to each situation as it occurs.

In order to be more naturally patient, you must begin with you. Within you lies the source of your upset. You cannot blame your child for your anger and frustration. This is all about you.

Here are some places you can explore—

1. Pay more attention to what you’re feeling as you go through your day. Just being more aware of your emotional well-being can make a profound difference in your perspectives and your actions.

2. Explore your beliefs, expectations, and fears as a parent. These are the source of your unconscious reactions that result in anger and yelling at your child. When you understand these more clearly, you will naturally and easily become more clear and relaxed.

3. Find or create one special experience for yourself every day. Creating good things for yourself are essential to relate with your child from joy.

When you stop trying to be patient and focus on keeping yourself happy, then your patience becomes a non-issue. Then you simply enjoy being a parent.

When you have more awareness of your inner emotional experience combined with greater clarity about your child and your role as a parent, your natural ability to create a joyous, loving relationship will shine forth. Then you feel the loving joy you always wanted as a parent, and you delight in seeing your child’s magnificence shine brightly.

Crisis in Kindergarten

The Alliance for Childhood recently announced their new major report Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School, sounding the alarm bell on education in our schools. This is a must-read.

Their findings are profoundly alarming and need to be recognized by parents of young children and all of us who care about children. Here are some of the findings from their research.

Playtime in kindergarten is increasingly rare. Most of the teachers surveyed said they spend 2 to 3 hours per day teaching and testing children in literacy and math skills. Standardized testing and test prep, practices that most child development experts reject as inappropriate and harmful, are daily activities in most of the classrooms studied.

Teachers in Los Angeles mainly use curricula that require them to follow scripts for hours each day, despite research showing poor long-term results for this approach. In general, this type of early education is much less effective than play-based methods. Yet the academic drills and tests are winning out.

At the same time, kindergarten retention and serious behavioral problems are increasing, not to mention the dramatic increase in social and emotional challenges in children of all ages. Our children need for us to move in a play-based, whole-child direction!!

As parents, you may feel powerless to do anything to change your child’s kindergarten or preschool. This belief is exactly what allows something that is hurtful to your child to continue. As parents and as people who love children, we must boldly demand, yes demand, what we want for our children. An important part of being a parent is to be an advocate for your child. It’s in your job description. (Read the fine print.)

Your other options are to find a program that is in alignment with your values and the kind of learning environment that is best for your child or to start your own alternative.

Your first step is to go to the Alliance for Childhood website, and read their 8-page summary or the full report. Then choose your next step. My first step is to share this with you.

Choosing to do nothing is not an option when you care about the healthy emotional and intellectual development of your child. Share this information with others. Partner with people who share your views and priorities and create together. Then let me know what you’re doing so I can share this with others.

Fun at the Park!

Here are some fun photos from the park on Saturday. Enjoy!

Your Child is Watching

As I've been watching my 18-month-old grandson Sebastian, I marvel at his observation skills of the people around him. Here are a couple of examples.

Sebastian is mastering the art of opening and closing doors, which he finds quite fascinating. I noticed that when he closes the door behind him, he reaches his hand back through the door to the door knob. When I mentioned this to Nichola, my daughter-in-heart, she said that’s what she does to lock the door when she pulls the door closed as she leaves the house.

Another story. Blueberries are one of Sebastian’s favorite foods, and he can just about clean you out of them. One evening my wonderful husband Doug was giving Sebastian blueberries. He washed them and then shook his hand a couple of times to shake off the water. So what did Sebastian do when Doug handed him the blueberries? Shook them a time or two!

I can’t resist telling you a third story to drive home the point. Doug and our son Orion, Sebastian’s daddy, were lifting and planting two large trees in 24’ boxes in our yard. They were both wearing leather gloves to protect their hands. Sebastian watched them very carefully, but didn’t show much interest in the trees after that. About 10 minutes later, I happened to hand him the gloves, which I had been holding. He confidently took the gloves, tried to put them on his hands, and walked over to the nearest tree, ready to go to work.

Your child watches everything about you, even the most seemingly unimportant details. She watches not only your actions. She also watches your facial and hand expressions, your tone of voice, your feelings, your way of interacting with people, the choices you make, the lies or truth you tell. You got it—EVERYTHING!!

So, as one of the people he spends the most time with, especially when he’s young, you are hugely influential and have a big impact on his life, who he is and who he becomes.

Are you being the person you want your child to watch?

 

Enjoy your Child’s Gifts--Freshness

Ever notice as you age, you tend to dig a rut for yourself and put yourself in it. Sometimes it seems like part of the aging process. We have so many responsibilities and pressures we place on ourselves that we believe we have to do. Then the joy diminishes over time and we lose that sparkle of living each moment to its fullest. We begin to take life too seriously. We forget to play.

Enter your child: interested in new things, seeing the world differently, discovering new experiences, people, and perceptions. Your child has fewer internal rules, beliefs and structures. Your child is moving toward a future you cannot imagine and perhaps not understand.

Let your child remind you and teach you flexibility, courage, curiosity, exploration and discovery. Let your child give you a fresh perspective, a fresh approach to living, and fresh ways of doing things. It is one of their greatest gifts to us.

A Child’s Drive for Self-Expression-Vitus

11-year-old Vitus, in the coming-of-age movie of the same name, is a child prodigy who listens to his own inner drummer. Played by Teo Gheorghiu, Vitus, an amazing talented classical pianist, yearns for a life that he loves. A life that brings him joy and fulfillment.

Along the way, he encounters obstacles and resistance from both his parents and his teachers. He struggles to have his life the way he wants. His biggest ally is his grandfather, who loves and accepts Vitus on his own terms.

I loved this movie, and I think you will, too. It explores what our children most need from us and how we can get ourselves out of their way.