How Much Am I Screwing Up My Kids When I Don’t Handle Myself Well?

Date: 2011.10.25 | Category: Parenting | Response: 16

How well do you handle yourself when you’re upset with your kids?

Me?  Sometimes I respond extremely well, making myself proud of how loving and understanding and patient I remained.  At other times, I lower myself to my kids’ level and resort to the childishness that upset me in the first place.

My message to you today is that when you respond to your kids from a less-than-optimal place, take heart:  most likely, you’re still providing them with all kinds of valuable experiences.

For example, have you ever found yourself so frustrated with your kids that you call out, a good bit louder than you need to, “That’s it!  The next one who complains about where they’re sitting in the car, has to sit in that same seat for the rest of the year!”

Or maybe, when your eight-year-old pouts and complains all the way to school because you made her practice her piano, you say, with your parting words as she departs the mini-van, “I hope you have a great day, now that you’ve ruined the whole morning.”

Obviously, these aren’t examples of perfect parenting.  And if you’re like me, you beat yourself up for the times when you don’t handle things like you wish you had.

So here’s hope:  Those not-so-great parenting moments are not necessarily such bad things for our kids to have to go through.  In fact, they’re actually incredibly valuable.

Why?  Because these less-than-perfect parental responses Read the rest of this entry »

Proactive Parenting: Getting Ahead of the Discipline Curve

Date: 2011.10.10 | Category: Parenting | Response: 12

When your kids misbehave, your immediate reaction may be to offer consequences with both guns blazing.

You hit your sister? That’s a time out. 

You broke the book shelf while climbing to reach the matches?  You just lost your playdate this afternoon.

 Your kids act, and you react.

If you’ve heard me speak, or if you’ve read other pieces I’ve written about discipline, you know I’m a big believer in setting and enforcing boundaries.  At times, giving consequences may be the best response in order to teach lessons about appropriate behavior and observing boundaries.

But here I want to make the case for stepping in before things escalate, before you have to start thinking about consequences.  I’m talking about proactive parenting, as opposed to reactive parenting.

When we parent proactively, we watch for times when we can tell that misbehavior and/or a meltdown are in our kid’s near future, and we step in and try to guide them around that potential landmine.  Sometimes you can even Read the rest of this entry »

The Whole-Brain Child: The Opening Pages

Date: 2011.09.27 | Category: Parenting, The Brain | Response: 12

My new book with Dan Siegel, The Whole-Brain Child, comes out one week from today!  I hope you already pre-ordered your copy.    Below you can read the book’s opening pages.

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You’ve had those days, right?  When the sleep deprivation, the muddy cleats, the peanut butter on the new jacket, the homework battles, the play-dough in your computer keyboard, and the refrains of “She started it!” leave you counting the minutes until bedtime.  On these days, when you (again?!!) have to pry a raisin from a nostril, it seems like the most you can hope for is to survive.

However, when it comes to your children, you’re aiming a lot higher than mere survival.  Of course you want to get through those difficult tantrum-in-the-restaurant moments.  But whether you’re a parent, grandparent, or other committed caregiver in a child’s life, your ultimate goal is to raise kids in such a way that lets them thrive.  You want them to enjoy meaningful relationships, be caring and compassionate, do well in school, work hard and be responsible, and feel good about who they are.

Survive.  Thrive.

We’ve met with thousands of parents over the years.  When we ask them what matters most to them, versions of these two goals almost always top the list.  They want to survive difficult parenting moments, and they want their kids and their family to thrive.  As parents ourselves, we share these same goals for our own families.  In our nobler, calmer, saner moments, we care about nurturing our kids’ minds, increasing their sense of wonder, and helping them reach their potential in all aspects of life.  But in the more frantic, stressful, bribe-the-toddler-into-the-carseat-so-we-can-rush-to-the-soccer-game moments, sometimes all we can hope for is to avoid yelling or hearing someone say, “You’re so mean!”

Take a moment and ask yourself:  What do you really want for your children?  What qualities do you hope they develop and take into their adult lives?  Most likely, you want them to be happy, independent, and successful.   You want them to enjoy fulfilling relationships and live a life full of meaning and purpose.  Now think about what percentage of your time you spend intentionally developing these qualities in your children.  If you’re like most parents, you worry that you spend too much time just trying to get through the day (and sometimes the next five minutes!), and not enough time creating experiences that help your children thrive, both today and in the future.

You might even measure yourself against some sort of perfect parent who never struggles to survive, who seemingly spends every waking second helping her children thrive.  You know, the PTA president who cooks organic, fully balanced meals while reading to her kids in Latin about the importance of helping others, then escorts them to the art museum in the hybrid that plays classical music and mists lavender aromatherapy through the air-conditioning vents.  None of us can match up to this imaginary super-parent.  Especially when we feel like a large percentage of our days are spent in full-blown survival mode, where we find ourselves wild-eyed and red-faced at the end of a birthday party, shouting, “If there’s one more argument over that bow and arrow, nobody’s getting any presents!”

If any of this sounds familiar, we’ve got great news for you:  The moments you are just trying to survive are actually opportunities to help your child thrive.  At times you may feel that the loving, important moments (like having a meaningful conversation about compassion or character) are separate from the parenting challenges (like fighting another homework battle or dealing with another melt-down.)  But they are Read the rest of this entry »

Surfing the Waves of an Emotional Tsunami: When Your Kid’s Upset, Connect and Redirect

Date: 2011.09.20 | Category: Parenting, The Brain | Response: 13

[Two weeks from today (Oct 4), my new book with Dan Siegel, The Whole-Brain Child, comes out!  Below you’ll find the third in a four-part series where I post excerpts from the book.  I hope you enjoy it.]

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You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

–John Kabit Zinn

Here’s a conversation I recently had with my 7-year-old when he wasn’t at his logical best.

My son:  I can’t go to sleep.  I’m mad that you never leave me a note in the middle of the night. 

Me:  I didn’t know you wanted me to.  

My son:  You never do anything nice for me, you do things at night for Luke, and I’m mad because my birthday isn’t for ten more months, and I hate homework. 

Sound familiar?  An encounter like this can be frustrating, especially when you’re beginning to feel that your child is finally old enough to actually be reasonable and discuss things logically.  All of a sudden, though, you’re interacting with a being who becomes over-the-top upset about something completely ridiculous and illogical, and it seems that absolutely no amount of reasoning on your part will help.

This is one of those times when knowing a little bit about the brain can help us parent in more effective (and more empathic) ways.

You probably already know that your brain is divided into two hemispheres.  The left side of your brain is logical and verbal, while the right side is emotional and nonverbal.  That means that if we were ruled only by the left side of our brain, it would be as if we were living in an emotional drought, not paying attention to our feelings at all.  Or, in contrast, if we were completely “right-brained,” we’d be all about emotion and ignore the logical parts of ourselves.  Instead of an emotional drought, we’d be drowning in an emotional tsunami.

Clearly, we function best when the two hemispheres of our brain work together, so that our logic and our emotions are both valued as important parts of ourselves and we are emotionally balanced.  Then we can give words to our emotional experiences, and make sense of them logically.

Now, let’s apply that information to the interaction above.  My son was experiencing an emotional tidal wave.  When this occurs, one of the worst things I can do is jump right in trying to defend myself (“I do nice things for you!”), or to argue with him about his faulty logic (“That’s just not true, and your birthday is actually only nine months away”).  My verbal, logical response hits an unreceptive brick wall and creates a gulf between us:  he feels like I’m dismissing his feelings and that I don’t understand; I feel frustrated that he’s being so ridiculous and impossible.  It’s a lose-lose approach.

So I have to come to an important recognition:  Logic will do no good in a case like this until a child’s right brain is responded to.

How do we do that?  I suggest that we use the “Connect and Redirect” method. Read the rest of this entry »

Increase the Family Fun Factor: Making a Point to Enjoy One Another

Date: 2011.09.13 | Category: Parenting, The Brain | Response: 11

My new book with Dan Siegel, The Whole-Brain Child, comes out on October 4, three weeks from today!   Below you’ll find the second in a four-part series where I post excerpts from the book.  I hope you enjoy it.

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Do you ever feel like you’re spending most of your time disciplining your kids and carting them from one activity to the next, and not enough time just enjoying being with them?  If you do, you’re not alone; most of us feel this from time to time.  Sometimes it’s easy to forget to just have fun as a family. Yet we are hardwired for play and exploration as well as for joining with one another.  In fact, “playful parenting” is one of the best ways to prepare your children for relationships and encourage them to connect with others. That’s because it gives them positive experiences being with the people they spend the most time with:  their parents.

Of course children need structure and boundaries and to be held accountable for their behavior, but even as you maintain your authority, don’t forget to have fun with your kids.  Play games.  Tell jokes.  Be silly.  Take an interest in what they care about.  The more they enjoy the time they spend with you and the rest of the family, the more they’ll value relationships and desire more positive and healthy relational experiences in the future.

The reason is simple.  With every fun, enjoyable experience you give your children while they are with the family, you provide them with positive reinforcement about what it means to be in loving relationship with others.  One reason has to do with a chemical in your brain called dopamine.  Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, which means that it enables communication between brain cells.  Your brain cells receive what some people call “dopamine squirts” when something pleasurable happens to you, and it motivates you to want to do it again.  Scientists who study addiction point to these dopamine surges as factors that lead people to maintain a certain habit or addiction, even when they know it’s bad for them.  But we can also Read the rest of this entry »

Ten Bites of a Quesadilla: Transforming Moments through Creative Discipline

Date: 2011.09.06 | Category: Parenting, The Brain | Response: 14

Few experiences any of us undergo are as transformative as parenting.  By definition, parenting is about transformation.  One of our most important jobs as parents is to witness and influence the evolution of our children from wrinkly newborns with raw nervous systems into integrated, whole humans who know who they are and how to be in the world.  And parenting obviously transforms us as well.  There are smaller transformations—we learn to do most things “one-handed” while carrying a baby on our hip; we begin to eat at McDonalds; we memorize the names of dinosaurs; we learn to play video games again; we even buy a mini-van (which for some is a bigger transformation than for others).  And there are huge, life-changing transformations—we adjust our priorities; we make sacrifices that cost us greatly; we learn to live with worrying and “what ifs”; we forever expand our hearts.

Along the way, we become more creative than we ever knew possible.  I’m not talking about the creativity of artists, song-writers, or novelists.  I’m talking about the creativity that’s required for survival for anyone caring for children.  I knew I’d been forever transformed by my role as a parent when, in my attempt to get through to my non-compliant little streakers, creativity sprung forth from desperation and I made up a song with a chorus that began, “No naked butts on the furniture.”  (Unfortunately, it was so catchy that one day I actually Read the rest of this entry »

Five Reasons I’m Not a Fan of Time Outs

Date: 2011.08.23 | Category: Parenting, The Brain | Response: 17

More and more, I find myself questioning time outs as an effective discipline strategy.  I’ve written some about this already, but now I’d like to go into my reasons in a bit more depth.

I know lots of loving parents who use time outs as their primary discipline technique.  I’m not saying that time outs are completely unhelpful; more that I don’t think they’re the best alternative we have when it comes to discipline—the goal of which, remember, is to teach.

Reasons I’m Not a Fan of Time-Outs:

#1.  What we know about the brain. 

Because I know that brain connections are formed from repeated experiences, I don’t want my kids’ repeated experience to be isolation, which they may view as rejection, when they’ve made a mistake.

What I DO want them to repeatedly experience is doing things the right way.  So, instead of a time out, I’ll often Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Not Just the What but the How . . .

Date: 2011.08.17 | Category: Parenting | Response: 16

What we say to our kids is important, right?  The words we choose play a big role as children construct their beliefs about themselves, establish a foundation for their values, and decide how they see the world.  What we say matters.

That’s why we’re used to filtering what we say to or in front of our kids.  Sometimes we have an internal dialogue that might include phrases like, “You’re driving me crazy, kid!” or “Are you EVER going to stop crying?” or “I can’t wait until you go to sleep!”; but we know not to say these things out loud to our kids.  We’re also aware that we should avoid talking about inappropriate subjects in front of our kids, so we wait until they’re asleep before we tell our spouse about how our neighbor’s house was robbed or about the latest community scandal.

We pause and make a decision about what we say before we share things with our children. We do this because we know that what we say matters and has an impact on them.

But just as important as what we say is how we say it.  Imagine that your three-year-old isn’t getting into her carseat.  Here are a few different how’s for saying the exact same what:

Read the rest of this entry »

If I Could Tell You Only One Thing about Discipline

Date: 2011.08.09 | Category: Parenting, The Brain | Response: 15

Discipline is a complex and complicated subject.  I could write a whole book about it.  In fact, I’ve already started working on one.

But when we talk about effective discipline and how parents can achieve the results they want when they interact with their kids, it can actually be it pretty simple.  If it were a math formula, it would look like this:

WARMTH  +  AUTHORITY  =  EFFECTIVE DISCIPLINE

The research is really clear on this point.  Kids who achieve the best outcomes in life – emotionally, educationally, and relationally – have parents who raise them with a high degree of warmth and nurturing, or what I like to call emotional responsiveness, as well as a high degree of authority, where clear boundaries are communicated and enforced.  Their parents remain firm and consistent in their boundaries, while still interacting with them in a way that communicates love, respect, and compassion.  Warmth and authority are the two sides of the effective-discipline coin.

The first side of the discipline coin:  Warmth

When we nurture our children and attune to their internal world, we allow them to know and believe that they are seen, heard, loved, and approved of by their parents.  Then they’ll interact with the world around them based on that belief, so that their brains are wired to expect that their needs will be met in intimate relationships.  On the other hand, if a parent repeatedly Read the rest of this entry »