Posts Tagged ‘connecting emotionally’
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On Spanking: Hoping for a More Sophisticated Discussion
Last week Dr. Drew Pinsky asked me to come on his show “Life Changers” to discuss spanking as a discipline approach. I ended up getting to say only a minute fraction of what I wanted to say about this polarizing discipline strategy, so I decided to share some of my thoughts here.
The parents I’ve talked to about spanking are almost always very strong in their position, but they avoid talking about it with other parents, and when the discussion begins, it’s almost never a respectful, open conversation among people who really are willing to listen to the other side.
I feel compelled to really have those conversations, so I’ll be doing more of this in the coming months, both informally at the park and on the ballfield, and also publicly in various formats. In order to get the ball rolling, what you’ll see below are my answers to the questions Dr. Drew’s producer asked me in our pre-show correspondence.
WHERE DO YOU STAND ON THE DEBATE OF TO SPANK OR NOT TO SPANK?
Anyone who’s heard me speak knows that I am really big on boundaries and on parents being authority figures. And still, I am against spanking. I think that using physical force, particularly against a child, is wrong. The idea of inflicting physical (even minor) pain on a child is unsettling to me. Beyond that, I firmly believe that when you understand how the brain works, you see that spanking is often counter-productive when it comes to teaching our kids the lessons we want them to learn.
However, that being said, it’s not really all that simple. Two particular points make the whole question about spanking a complex one in my mind. The first is that there are really good, loving parents who spank. I have friends who spank calmly and with nurturing conversations with their children regarding their discipline. They are intentional about how and WHY they do it. I know these parents well, and I’ve seen how great their kids are turning out, and how loved those kids feel. So those of us who don’t spank need to avoid the temptation to caricature parents who use corporal punishment, seeing them as out-of-control child abusers whose kids will turn out to be violent monsters.
The second point that complicates matters is that there are plenty of non-spanking discipline approaches that can be more damaging than spanking. I know that I myself have been guilty of Read the rest of this entry »
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A Different Take on Spoiling
The other day a reporter asked me to respond to a few questions about spoiling, and what it means for our kids. With the holidays coming up, this seems like a pretty timely subject. Here’s how I answered the reporter’s questions about what spoiling is, and just as importantly, what it’s not.
WHAT IS SPOILING? DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH MONEY SPENT? TIME? NEVER SAYING NO? ALL OF THE ABOVE?
Let’s start with what spoiling is not: Spoiling is NOT about how much love and time and attention you give your kids. You can’t spoil your children by giving them too much of yourself. In the same way, you can’t spoil a baby by holding her too much or responding to her needs each time she expresses them.
SO HOW DO WE SPOIL OUR KIDS?
The dictionary definition is “to ruin or do harm to the character or attitude by overindulgence or excessive praise.” Spoiling can of course happen when we give our kids too much stuff or spend too much money or say yes all the time. But it’s more than that. It’s also about giving them the sense that the world and people around them will serve their whims.
Again, it’s impossible to spoil children with too much nurturing or love or attention or time. Nurturing your relationship with your child or giving them a sense that they are entitled to your love and affection (or holding them when they’re little) is exactly what we should be doing. In other words, we let them know that they can count on getting their NEEDS met.
Spoiling, on the other hand, occurs when parents (or other caregivers) create their child’s world in such a way that the child feels Read the rest of this entry »
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Beyond “How was your day?” – Getting Your Kids to Talk After School
It’s a classic parenting dilemma, isn’t it? How do we get our kids to talk to us?
The conversation itself is even more cliché:
–How was your day?
–Fine.
–Anything interesting happen?
–Not really.
A few years ago I found myself almost literally wincing as I heard myself ask my six-year-old the “How was your day?” question as he got into the car at the pick-up circle. It’s not that it’s a bad question, it’s just that I knew it wouldn’t encourage him to talk to me.
So why was I even asking the question? Wasn’t there something else I could do or say or ask that might get him to offer some of the mundane morsels I hungered for when I’d been away from him for six hours while he was at school?
I realized I needed to be more creative when it came to drawing out meaty details about my kids’ school lives. What I eventually came up with was Read the rest of this entry »
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How Much Am I Screwing Up My Kids When I Don’t Handle Myself Well?
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 »
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Surfing the Waves of an Emotional Tsunami: When Your Kid’s Upset, Connect and Redirect
[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 »
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Increase the Family Fun Factor: Making a Point to Enjoy One Another
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 »
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Ten Bites of a Quesadilla: Transforming Moments through Creative Discipline
My new book with Dan Siegel, The Whole-Brain Child, comes out on October 4, four weeks from today! So starting today, and for the next four Tuesdays, I’ll post an excerpt from the book, so you can get a sense of what you’ll find there. The story you’ll read below, about the ten bites of a quesadilla, appears in the new book (although there, Dan and I make a slightly different point from the one that appears here). This post’s main point, about viewing everyday parenting challenges as opportunities, is one of the principles central to The Whole-Brain Child. I hope you enjoy reading it.
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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 »
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Five Reasons I’m Not a Fan of Time Outs
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 »
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It’s Not Just the What but the How . . .
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:
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