Listening Mothers facilitator, Gigi Wickwire and Fred Ingham, CMP blog contributor spoke with Bill Radke this past week on the ‘hot topic’ attachment parenting and what it means to them.  What does it mean to you?

Dr. Wendy Mogel, author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, spent 15 years as a child psychologist in Los Angeles.  The families she served were mostly well-educated and financially successful, with parents who were deeply concerned about their children’s well being and who made significant efforts to be involved and supportive.  Yet, despite all these advantages, the families were not functioning well.  The kids were anxious and fragile at best, and at worst, “petulant, obstinate, rigid, greedy, cowardly, lethargic, and imperious”.  Everyday life became unmanageable as children and parents argued about clothes, mealtimes, homework and bedtimes.  The kids withdrew and became non-compliant.  School and social life suffered.  All this misery, Mogel realized, was not the result of psychological pathologies in the children.  Rather, it seemed to arise as a response to an environment where parents were over-invested in their children’s “success” and “happiness”.

This is certainly counterintuitive.  Doesn’t every parent want their child to be happy and successful?  Should we want for them to be miserable failures instead?  Of course not.  But we can do them great harm if we think that our role as parents is to propel them into the Ivy League with a busy schedule of activities and tutors while at the same time being very concerned that they not suffer any discomfort along the way.

Mogel and the teachers she spoke with saw many parents with “Lake Wobegon syndrome” – if their child wasn’t above average in everything, it was perceived as a problem to be fixed with a pedagogic or therapeutic intervention.  Boys and girls today are also frequently burdened with unrealistic expectations regarding their innate differences – boys are sometimes expected to act like girls and girls like boys in situations where these behaviors might be difficult for them.  The challenges for the child (or any person) facing unrealistic expectations are many.  No one is above average in everything, even bright children from loving, stable, prosperous homes.  We all have varied talents and interests and competencies.  This is especially true for children, who are developing in so many different dimensions at different rates.  When a child (or any person) is burdened with unrealistic expectations, they often react by getting depressed and by adopting self-defeating coping strategies such as avoidance, self-sabotage, defiance, lack of effort, and cheating.

The solution for parents is to become more attuned to and accepting of each child as they really are.  We shouldn’t expect our three-year-old to read or ride a pedal bike, even if we know of three-year-olds that do.  We need to understand and appreciate their dominant temperament – cautious or bold, quiet or excitable.  By listening to their teachers and other parents whom we respect we can find out more about what expectations are reasonable.  Not everyone is destined for the Ivy League or the NBA or the Forbes 400.  Also, not everyone gets to those places on the same path.  By seeing and accepting our children’s uniqueness, we not only remove unrealistic pressure to succeed, we also can focus our energies on supporting the enjoyment and development of their one-of-a-kind talents and gifts.

With regard to wanting our children to be happy, Dr. Mogel of course is in favor of safe, happy kids.  However, she writes that she saw many parent-child relationships marked by “fearfulness in children and intense protectiveness in parents.”  She comes down particularly hard on parental worrying.  ”The parents I listen to worry a lot, and not just about the big scares like illness, abduction, or car accidents.  They are highly creative in coming up with things to worry about and loyal to the worries once they’ve birthed them.”  This constant worrying takes much of the joy out of parenting, and causes us as parents to take steps in the name of protecting our children that end up stunting their development, whether it’s doing their homework for them or not letting them climb trees.  The unhealthy lessons our kids learn from parental over-protectiveness include “the world is dangerous”, “I can’t do it on my own”, and “it’s not OK to make a mistake or be hurt or unhappy.”

As parents, the healthier path is for us to allow kids to develop their mental and physical capabilities by providing age-appropriate challenges, risks and decisions.  Mogel urges us to let them make “cheap” mistakes.  If they skin their knee falling off their bike, they’ll find out that skinned knees heal pretty quickly, and that learning any new skill includes encountering difficulties, and that these difficulties can usually be tolerated and overcome with patience and persistence.  If we as parents don’t know if our child is ready for a specific skill or situation, and we’re worried about it, before we simply let worry win the day and say “no”, Mogel again recommends checking in with other trusted parents and teachers.  We may find out that our fears are over-blown and that it is time to let our children take additional developmental steps on their own.  The payoff for everyone is that our children become more resilient, gaining greater mastery of themselves and their environment while learning to trust in their capacity to handle challenges.  We saw this play out recently with our 3 year-old son at a playground.  He wanted to slide down a pole, and asked my wife to physically help him get from the high platform to the pole.  Instead, she talked him through the process of reaching over with one hand, then two, then hold on tight while he stepped off and put his legs on the pole.  When he did it, he was thrilled, and he spoke excitedly and very proudly of doing it all by himself.

The subtitle of the book is “Using Jewish Wisdom to Raise Self-Reliant Children”.  In the first chapter Mogel discusses how she and her family moved from an entirely secular life-style toward one that embraced the traditions of her Jewish heritage.  Her transformation was driven in large part by the disillusionment brought on by the failure of her clinical training in psychology to help her family and the families of her clients thrive.  She found that the traditional wisdom and rituals of Judaism provided a framework for family life that directly addressed the problems she had been experiencing as a mother and a therapist.

The Ten Commandments are an important reference point in the book.  We must be consistent and clear about our parental authority (“Honor thy father and thy mother”).  We can reduce family stress and improve relationships by taking time out for rest and play (“The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shall not do any work…”).  Mogel also delves into centuries worth of Jewish teaching on human nature and relationships to cover areas such as the importance of gratitude, the value of work and ordinary chores, the multi-dimensional gifts of eating, and the critical skill of self-control.  She repeatedly emphasizes three ideas that Jewish traditions offer to build happy, successful lives and communities: moderation, celebration and sanctification.  She shows how putting these ideas into practice can reduce family stress while strengthening bonds of connection and respect.  She provides lots of practical examples for dealing with everything from the kindergartner who is defiant to the grade-schooler who is a picky eater to the teenager coping with homework stress and electronic distractions.

One chapter I found particularly helpful was the chapter on self-control.  The Jewish tradition identifies two complementary aspects of human nature, the yetzer hara (“evil inclination”) and the yetzer tov (“good inclination”).  The translation, however, is imperfect.  The yetzer hara is more complex than the word “evil” implies in English.  Yetzer hara is more accurately understood as the drive for excess selfish gratification.  It perverts our natural drives, such as those for sex, food, material comfort or pleasure, and tries to convince us to overindulge these desires.  Jewish tradition teaches that the yetzer hara is in fact a blessing, and without it the world would end because procreation would cease and no one would bother to work.  One of our key challenges as we develop as human beings is to learn to recognize and overcome our yetzer hara.  Can we savor a good meal without falling into gluttony?  Can we industriously pursue business success without becoming so focused on money that we resort to fraud?

Dr. Mogel advises us to re-vision some of our children’s “misbehavior” as a manifestation of their yetzer hara.  Our job is not to use shame or punishment to suppress their natural drives.  Our job is to strengthen the yetzer tov so that our children choose and act in ways that are moderate, healthy and appropriate.  Our primary tool for strengthening the yetzer tov when our children are young is through the practice of establishing and maintaining limits.  Importantly, these limits are not subject to negotiation.  We don’t need to rationalize and explain or “prove” to our kids that the limits we’re setting are perfectly constructed or “fair”.  That doesn’t mean we’re not open to considering information our children might provide about a limit we’ve set, but it is the nature of the yetzer hara to argue any point to get what it wants, and we must be firm on the items that are important to us.  Dr. Mogel makes an additional subtle point about the yetzer hara.  Some of the tools that the yetzer hara uses to get what it wants – persistence, cleverness, arguing, creativity, rationalizations, desire, and physical strength – can actually be positive traits if they are disciplined by the yetzer tov.  So when our children whine for an unhealthy snack, or persist in an activity that troubles us, we can appreciate that they are showing their capacity to yearn and to strive and to achieve and to influence others and that these are necessary skills for a good life when properly directed.

Dr. Mogel also offers good ideas for supporting our children’s spiritual development.  She points out that the common strategy of “pediatric religion”, where we send our kids to religious classes but don’t incorporate religious ideas into our home life, almost never succeeds.  The key, Mogel says, is for us as parents to work on our own spiritual life, and incorporate those rituals, habits and beliefs into the daily routines of our family.  Dr. Mogel gives helpful suggestions for talking to our kids about God in ways that are age-appropriate, including providing good answers to some of the questions that all people, including our children, are bound to have as they get exposed to spiritual concepts.

I should add here that, although Dr. Mogel has based her book on Jewish teachings, the concepts in the book are applicable to every family, regardless of faith (or lack thereof).  Ideas such as providing consistent discipline, making time for rest and play, channeling children’s energy, and fostering self-control are universal.  And although she bases her case for the benefits of a family spiritual life on her own experience of Judaism, the blessings of meaning, reverence, connection and celebration are not unique to any one religious tradition.  Dr. Mogel doesn’t appeal to religious authority as the basis for trying these ways of parenting.  It’s not “Here are some ideas; use them because they’re based on the Torah.”  She says, “Here are some ideas based on the Torah; use them because I’ve seen them work.”

The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, by Wendy Mogel Ph.D.  258 pages, not including notes and study guide.

It was a beautiful day yesterday – one of those precious days in the Northwest when spring seems to burst all at once with a blast of colors, sweet smells and a vast clear sky.  I went for a walk and listened with amazement to the birds singing so robustly that they even drowned out  the sound of the  traffic nearby.  As I was walking I saw a mom pushing a stroller walking toward me.  Twins, I realized as she came closer, but where were they?

If the scene was not so sad, it would have been really funny (I wish I had my camera with me).  One of the toddlers was hiding behind the big screen of an Ipad and the other, which I could tell was a little boy, was playing with the Iphone.

Wow!  Right in front of my eyes a new phenomena was unfolding.  More curious than watching the banana slug  I almost stepped on, these cute (I’m assuming they were cute, but can’t be sure because I couldn’t see their faces!) babies were fast  on their way into the future, where gadgets are going to be so attached to us –  almost as if we have grown a new limb.

But is it Good for us?

Just last Sunday, in the an article titles: “The flight from Conversation” MIT professor, Sherry Turkle, who has been researching our over use of technology and it’s impact on our lives,  laments, “I have learned that these little devises most of us carry around  are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.”

What she is most concerned about is how peole, especially the young generation, is  avoiding deeper, meaningful conversations and they are less engaged in intimate relationships which require building trust and risking ones own vulnerability.

They are spending more time “alone together” as she calls it, which is an illusion of “being with” while really constantly texting and focusing on anything but what or who is in front of them at the present movement.  Professor Turkle said in the article that we used to converse with others to learn to converse with ourselves, so flight from conversation means a diminished chance to learn self reflection as well as social skills.

A similar conclusion came from research at University of Wisconsin-Madison that emphasizes the importance of both physical touch and auditory cues to increase the level of Oxytocin, a hormone involved in the formation and maintenance of positive relationships as well as reduce Cortisol (the stress hormones).  Children who experience lack of physical touch and person interaction and who substitute  real contact with texting, emailing, facebooking etc. will suffer from increase of stress hormone and decrease of the mediating hormone, Oxytocin.

So what can we do about it?

Perhaps not what the  family I saw the other day in a restaurant did. They came in with their three year old child and his video player. For about two hours the couple had, what seemed like a pleasant adult conversation, while the boy watched a movie.  He ate mindlessly what was on the plate without looking up.  Every now and then his mom shoved something to his mouth as well.

We can’t blame parents who sometimes want to have quiet dinner and good conversation, for bringing along a “baby sitter gadget” or having their child watch TV at home for the similar reasons. It is indeed so available and so tempting but sadly, can be overused.

 How often do we substitute real interaction with an illusion of being together will determine the long-term affect.

More than what parents say, but who they really are, will have the most impact on the children. How we do we listen as parents to each other?  To our children?  How we pay attention,and  how often we get distracted by looking at our phone and other gadgets for messages,  will all  leave it’s imprint.

Professor Turkle suggests, “Make room for conversations…at home we can create sacred spaces, the kitchen, the dinning room, we can make our cars “devise free zone” we can demonstrate the value of conversation to our children… most of all we need to remember to listen to one another..”

I agree.  Do you?  If you do, please join us for our Listening Mothers or Reflective Parenting classes where we practice what we believe in; good conversation based on deep listening.  Also, friend us on facebook where our conversation continues with questions, discussions, links to interesting articles and more!

Photo by metaviews

A mindful post by Fred Ingham.  You can read more by Fred here.

I learned a long time ago that the best way to get good pictures of my 3 year old son was to take a lot and keep a few.  Like most little kids, he’s usually on the go and not very interested in posing for a camera.  But for several months around his third birthday, it got even harder than usual.  In many of the pictures from that period, he has an exaggerated, uneven squint, and his teeth are bared in a pained-looking grimace.

What caught my attention was that this new facial expression was not simply a product of the camera catching him mid-blink or distracted.  It seemed to be an intentional mug on his part.  After noticing it a few times, I had an insight into what was going on.  He was trying to smile.

Click here to read full article

Photo by Scorpion1985x’s

JDS parent, Kara Moscovitz, a school psychologist, and Lynne Brazg, a certified school counselor, have teamed up to offer a class entitled Reflective Parenting: Discipline from the Heart.  Classes will run Tuesday mornings from 10-12 at the Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle in Bellevue, in the Development Conference Room.  On Tuesday, April 24^th a FREE introductory session will be offered (10 am – 12 noon).  This will be followed by a 5 week course starting May 1^st and ending May 29th.   The cost is $175 per person and $200 per couple.  There is a $25 discount if you register with a friend.

Please rsvp and or register for the full course by emailing Lynne Brazg at lynnebrazg@gmail.com.

This article has been reprinted, with permission, from herbivoracious

Today’s guest post is something very special to me. It is by my amazing wife, Sarina Behar Natkin. Sarina is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, and for the past few years has been devoting her professional energies to helping parents find more joy in the process of raising healthy, confident children. She’s written a wonderful, thoughtful article about the big picture of how to help your children have a healthy relationship to food for their whole lives. If you have kids, I’m sure you’ll find a lot of valuable thoughts here. Please pass it on to others who may benefit, and then go visit her website and parent coaching blog.

“What’s for dinner?” “Ugh, I hate green beans!” “Can I have dessert yet?” “I’m not hungry (but I will be as soon as you clear the table)”…the list of mealtime complaints can go on and on. Not to mention the mayhem that may ensue before your little one can even talk. Not many parents can forget the frustration of thrown food, the mess of the yogurt in the hair, or the game of “watch mommy pick up my bagel over and over again.”

Food is a huge part of human life and most parents I meet cannot wait to dive in to the world of food with their babies. As the wife of a food blogger and chef, we must have spent weeks talking about what our first food would be! Little did we know we were in store for a whole lot more than the idyllic family meals of The Cosby Show.

Clearly Americans seem to have a love/hate relationship with food. Scan the headlines in just about any newspaper and it’s filled with what to eat, what not to eat, who should eat less, who should eat more. It’s enough to drive an anxious parent to confiscate Halloween candy only to wallow in chocolate when no one is looking.

What if there was a different way? What if we step back and look at the big picture? Taking a long-term parenting perspective can help us let go of the power struggles and give our children the skills to develop a healthy relationship with food. I am not a nutritionist, so this will not be an article about nutritional content or what a healthy diet looks like. Instead, I offer a recipe for building healthy eating habits that last a lifetime.

Step 1 – Create Self Awareness

Children learn so much more from what we do than what we say. Given that we eat several times each day, your relationship with food is readily apparent to your children. They notice what you eat, how you talk about food, and how you talk about your own and other people’s bodies.

As a mother of two girls and someone who struggled with body image from about age 12, this was an area I thought about a great deal. As a matter of fact, for me, it was the one thing I hoped to get “right” with my daughters. If I could pick one area to be successful in as a parent, it would be for my children to know they are loved unconditionally for who they are on the inside, not what they look like on the outside. This meant being very aware of what my eating habits look like. Was I eating a healthy diet? Did I have a lot of variety on my plate even before they were eating table food?

It is critical that we think about not just what our children see now, but where our values and beliefs around food came from. Were mealtimes pleasant in your own childhood? Were you plagued with body image issues as many in our culture are? Even if you are one of those people who can live on donuts and nachos without gaining an ounce, that’s worth thinking about as well. Sometimes parents who have never had to give a thought to maintaining a healthy weight find it challenging to understand the body image issues that may come up for their teens and tweens.

Whatever our own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs on food may be, we need to be aware of them before we can really help our kids be clear on theirs. If we don’t, we risk sending mixed messages to our kids.

Step 2 – End Power Struggles

Nothing can strip kids of a healthy relationship with food faster than power struggles. Kids are smart. They know what they want. They also know their bodies are their own. The more we try to control, the more they will resist. Anyone who has spent some time with a toddler knows they can outwait us grown-ups every time.

I know most parents have heard this before, but at least once a day I want to slip a piece of paper stating it to a parent deep in the dance of wills with a child. So here it is: Your job is to put healthy food options on the table, their job is to choose whether or not to eat and how much to eat. Seems simple? It might be, if we really have worked at step one, examining our own relationship with food. Let me say it again: parents decide the what and when of eating, kids decide the how much.

Once upon a time, we too had an innate ability to listen to our bodies, know what it craved and know how much our bodies needed of it. From years of using food as rewards and comfort (and whatever else we believe has contributed to obesity in America) we have learned how to override our amazing self-regulating system. LETS NOT DO THIS TO OUR CHILDREN!

Here are some of the most common power struggles I see around food along with tools from Positive Discipline that can help avoid them from the start:

Behold The Power of Treats!

Kids want them. All of the time. Of course they do! We often have made it the source of all happiness and the forbidden fruit at the same time. All of life’s big events seem to have them. Birthday parties, holidays, celebrations have them. We use them as reward for big things and small. Pee pee in the potty? Yay, you get an M&M! Bad day? Lets go get cupcakes.

What if you decided on some clear rules around the role of treats in your family, shared those with your child, and then followed through with kindness and firmness at the same time?

Here’s an example of what this looks like in our home. First off, we took some time to talk about our own experiences with treats. We were both pretty clear that we love treats and think they are a normal part of life. We knew from our life experience that if we feel deprived of something, we just want it more. We all pick our battles based on our core values. For us, we felt that battling over treats was not going to be helpful to our children in developing a healthy relationship with food.

We decided when our first child was around 2 and started regularly asking for treats that a small treat each day was absolutely fine. Some days there are birthday parties or special events or some other opportunity for a bigger treat. If we know those are coming up, we make sure not to have bigger treats on the days around then. We very clearly explained this to our two year old, and have had virtually no struggles around treats in our house. We have gone through both children’s toddler and preschool years with a candy bowl in an open cabinet at their level. They know what a small treat is because we have taught them. It is one piece of candy, a few chocolate chips, or a few M&Ms, and they rarely ask for more. On occasion they will ask for something bigger. We take a moment, think about the days ahead and if they will be having any bigger treats in the next day or two and, we can decide together.

There’s another part of the treat power struggle that I see frequently. “You can have dessert when you finish dinner.” I often see this as an invitation for kids to either rush through dinner to get on to dessert or not eat enough dinner just so they can move on to dessert.

This was not a struggle I wanted to spend time on. I wanted meal times to be calm and focused on eating a well-balanced meal together as a family. Again, I also wanted my children to have a healthy relationship with treats. If it was such a big deal that they had to eat something else before getting to dessert, I would be making dessert into a forbidden fruit, and I might as well write a formal invitation for a power struggle. For this reason, our children often have their treats after school. If after school is not a good fit for your family, I would consider putting dessert on the table at the same time as dinner. If desserts are an appropriate size, it shouldn’t matter the order they eat it in.

Short-order Cooking

While I often see families put their foot down about finishing dinner before dessert or taking a required number of bites, I see them send the opposite message about mealtime when they make special food for their children. If you have prepared a meal for your family and your children immediately rejects it, how often do you make them something else? In our home, the answer is never.

Thanks to a friend with a child older than my first, we embraced a fantastic rule for addressing the inevitable rejection of what’s for dinner. If our children do not want is made, they are welcome to have fruit or yogurt. Now that our children are old enough, we took it a step further- they need to get it themselves. This means if the fruit they want is an uncut melon, that’s not going to fly. They need to pick something they are able to manage by themselves so that we may continue enjoying our dinner. Not only is this a lifesaver for power struggles, it is also an opportunity for kids to exercise the essential life skills of independence and self-sufficiency.

Forcing Foods

Children who are exposed to lots of different flavors will eventually eat a varied diet. They may reject foods many times before agreeing to try them, only to decide that they actually like it. Our second child rejected tofu, a staple in our vegetarian home, for a full two years! We just kept putting it on the table with no pressure to try it, knowing she would when she was ready. If we insisted on her eating a mandatory amount of bites, we likely would have pushed her away from tofu for much longer. Put the food that you make on the table, allow them to choose whether or not to eat it, and you go ahead and enjoy it. Remember how kids learn so much more from what we do than what we say? I think the quickest way to get a child to try a new food is for the parent to sit down and eat it and not even ask if they want to try it. Just the fact that you are enjoying it is enough to pique their interest!

I love vegetables. I loved that our first child ate any and every vegetable for the first four years. Then her adventurous palette went in to hiding, as is common of four year olds. If I forced her to eat vegetables that she doesn’t like, I would have likely sent that former veggie lover in to many years of hating vegetables. Instead I know that she gets almost as many nutrients from fruit, she takes a daily multivitamin, and she will eat the few vegetables she likes with glee. We continue to make a variety of vegetables and put them on the table, and I know that she will enjoy them when she is ready.

Along the same lines as forcing food, another common issue I see in my practice are parents spoon-feeding kids way too old to be fed. From the time your child starts solid foods, they are old enough to practice feeding themselves. Yes, it may be messier, but they cannot develop the skills without practice. I understand that it may be longer before toddlers can use a spoon with runny foods, but by all means, they need to be feeding themselves everything else! I often see parents feeding two and three year olds. This is only going to hasten the process of your child tuning out their own body signals around what they need to eat and how much. Put the spoon down, and trust your child will get enough to eat.

Parental fears and guilt plays a huge role in this one. There is the dreaded fear that if they don’t get enough to eat, they will wake us up at night. This is a self-correcting problem if we let it be. Mealtimes and snack times are when we eat. If we don’t eat when meals and snacks are offered, we may be hungry. What happens if you miss a meal? Missing one meal will not have any long-term impact. But what about the long-term impact of saying: “This is when our family eats” instead of rescuing our children from the choices they make? If we rescue them from discomfort and frustration, they will believe they are not able to handle those emotions. What happens then when we are not there to fix their world for them? Will they believe in their own ability to make healthy choices for themselves? Will they have the resilience to deal with life’s challenges? Your child will survive if they miss dinner one night. Believe in their resilience and they will believe in themselves.

Then there’s the guilt. Food represents so much more than enjoying taste and sustaining our bodies. It represents care. I feed you, I care for you. If I deprive you of a snack when you didn’t eat dinner and you are supposed to be sleeping, I must not care for you. Is that really the truth though? How about I love you enough to believe you will survive this night. I love you enough to know that if I resist the urge to say “I told you so”, I will be giving you the space to evaluate for yourself if you want to make a different choice tomorrow. If we let guilt run the show, we may do all sorts of things that deprive our children of critical life skills. As parents, we owe it to our children to sit with our own feelings instead of always rescuing, so our children learn to sit with theirs.

Step 3 – Involve Kids in the Process

Many of us fondly remember cooking with our parents. For my husband, it was the inspiration for a lifetime of cooking. He lost his mother to breast cancer at a young age, yet cooking with her and then for her as she fought cancer shaped him profoundly. He now has an amazing blog and cookbook to show for it. The connection he had with his mom, through cooking with her as a child, is still what keeps him connected to her today.

When people feel connected and valued for their role, they are much more likely to be an active participant. This is true for adults and kids alike. How much better does food taste when you worked hard to create it? How much more do you appreciate what went into creating something when you saw the process? Involving kids in meal preparation not only helps them feel needed, but also helps them appreciate the meal that follows.

Children can join in with meal preparation at a very young age. Our first child was experimenting with modernist cuisine at the age of three by making asparagus sphereswith dad! No, they may not julienne the carrots perfectly, but there is much even an 18 month old can do to feel a part of making the meal.

Involving kids can start before the actual cooking. Families who involve their children in meal planning and shopping are giving their kids even more opportunities to feel connected. The learning opportunities are overflowing when we teach them about planning ahead, selecting ingredients, weighing produce, learning about money, and all of the steps that bring food from farm to table. They develop a sense of pride from contributing to the family work right up through setting the table. The biggest bonus- when they are involved throughout the entire process, they are more likely to eat it!

Step 4 – Bon Appetit!

When we step back and take a long-term parenting perspective on the role of food in the lives of our children, we quickly realize that controlling and rescuing are not going to give our children a healthy relationship with food. If we want our children to find joy in food and love their bodies, we must let go and put an end to power struggles around food.

I know I am not the first to suggest our culture’s love/hate relationship with food is literally killing us. I also know that we want a better world for our children. We want them to be healthy; we want them to love themselves unconditionally. All of this is possible when we widen our parenting lens and start with ourselves. When we are able to develop a healthy relationship with food as adults, we will let go of the guilt and fear that clouds our parenting choices. Only then can our children truly develop a healthy relationship with food.

This article is reprinted from Christine Carter’sblog about raising happy kids, which can be found on the Greater Good Magazine website.

Is there too much stress in your life?

To find out, take this quiz, adapted from a scale developed by Peter Lovibond at the University of New South Wales.

For the first 16 questions, please indicate how much each statement applied to you over the past week. Answer the questions as honestly as possible; there are no right or wrong answers.

The last five questions are about you, and they’ll be used by our research team to better understand how stress relates to factors like marriage and employment. We’ll report next month on what the scores suggest about the Greater Goodcommunity.

When you’re done, you’ll get your score, along with resources for combating stress.

Click here for full article and quiz

A mindful post by Fred Ingham.  You can read more by Fred here and here

There is a new way of looking at parenting that is being developed at the University of Washington.  It’s so new, there isn’t even a book you can buy.  There’s no cottage industry of trainers and web-experts.  The parenting ideas are still being fleshed out by professors, graduate students and like-minded mental health practitioners who have found a compelling, evidence based approach to creating happier, healthier kids and families.

The approach doesn’t even have a catchy name, though on March 17th at Kane Hall on the UW campus, 4 researchers and practitioners gave presentations at a symposium called “Life Skills Parenting”.  The approach builds on the ground-breaking work of UW Professor Dr. Marsha Linehan, creator of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT).  DBT, an outgrowth of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, was developed by Dr. Linehan when she realized that certain classes of patients (she was focused on those at high risk for suicide), did not respond well to Cognitive Behavioral approaches.  In particular, those patients resented and resisted her attempts to “fix” them.  At the same time, when she tried to simply be empathetic and accepting, the patients grew frustrated that she wasn’t doing anything to help them.  The word “dialectical” in DBT represents how her approach synthesizes “radical acceptance” of the patient as he or she is with the presentation of practical skills to help him or her be more effective and happier.

So what does a mental health treatment protocol developed for suicidally depressed people have to do with parenting?  Quite a bit, it turns out.  Dr. Linehan explained that one of the key ideas behind DBT is that patients are usually suffering a skills deficit (perhaps in addition to issues with brain chemistry and other environmental conditions).  By teaching the patients certain life skills, the patients’ outcomes were greatly improved.  The key skills that Linehan identified are: emotional regulation, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and mindfulness.

In families, we often struggle with these same issues.  Do family members stay calm when things aren’t going their way?  Do we purposefully respond to situations, or instinctively react?  Do our emotions spin out of control, damaging relationships and undermining our effectiveness?  Practicing the four DBT life skills can help.

One important idea presented at the symposium was that the ability of an individual to regulate their own emotions seems to have some genetic basis.  Research indicates that some of us come to the world with better emotional balance than others.  It isn’t necessarily anyone’s “fault” that an individual, whether parent or child, is emotionally sensitive and prone to experiencing emotional extremes.  However, untreated, these emotionally sensitive people may create a lot of stress for themselves and their loved ones.

The good news is that everyone can improve their emotional regulation and other life skills with effective practice.  In addition, the improvements are beneficial no matter who in the family is doing the work.  If any member of the family becomes better at the skills, their changes will likely have a positive influence on other family members.  In the best case, everyone is practicing to improve.

So what do “Life Skills” have to do with parenting?

At the seminar, three other speakers were featured in addition to Dr. Linehan: Dr. Liliana Lengua, director of the UW’s Center for Child and Family Well-Being; Dr. Laura Kastner, Associate Professor at the UW, and author of several book on the adolescent years; and Tony DuBose, Psy.D., president of Evidence Based Treatment Centers in Seattle, who has focused on the use of DBT with adolescents.  It is beyond the scope of this article to review everything they covered in the seminar, but there are a few key ideas that I took away from the sessions.

The first take-away for me is that DBT is a set of “meta-skills” when it comes to parenting.  The fours skills, in and of themselves, don’t contain any prescriptions about particular parenting dilemmas.  Whether we choose to pursue a “love and logic” approach, or “attachment parenting”, or “positive discipline”, or “emotion coaching”, or any other particular blend of strategies, DBT will be helpful because it will improve the likelihood that we’ll be able to execute those strategies in any given moment.  Everyone knows it’s easy to stay calm and be attentive and foster positive emotions when everything is going well.  But what about when we’re tired and stressed, and our kids are willfully breaking rules, and company is coming in 10 minutes?  DBT, with its emphasis on mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation and interpersonal effectiveness will help keep us on track with our intentions in all types of situations.

One line we heard repeatedly at the seminar was “You may be right, but are you effective?”  This means that it’s not enough for us to be “in the right” to get our kids to change their behavior.  Being “right” is also not a license to be verbally or physically abusive or psychologically controlling.  These approaches may be expedient, but they’re also destructive.  Instead, when faced with a challenging situation, we can use our DBT skills to cool down, assess the situation, and make a plan that is more likely to be effective in the short and long run.

Pay attention to attention

The idea of paying attention to our attention also popped up in numerous contexts.  At it’s most basic, “mindfulness” can be defined as “non-judgmental awareness”.  It means simply paying attention to what is before us without labeling and evaluating.  By being fully present to what is really happening, instead of getting caught up in our thoughts and feelings about it, we are more free to respond effectively.  This is one of the core skills of DBT.

However, our attention is also a powerful influence on our kids.  They need our attention, and we get to decide whether to give it to them in situations that are likely to foster positive emotions, or whether we end up having our kids demand our attention in ways that are less pleasant (such as night waking, defiance, whining, dawdling, and worse).  One simple idea from Dr. Lengua was to institute regular “child-led” activities.  This is when the parent engages in the child’s play without distractions (PUT DOWN THAT IPHONE!) and without coaching or correcting or directing.  We just get down on our hands and knees, observe and participate.  By making daily time for child-led play, we can build trust and rapport with our kids, while potentially heading off disruptive attention seeking.  For parents who believe that they don’t have time to do child-led play, the obvious counter-question is to ask how much time they have for coping with negative attention-seeking behavior?  If 15 minutes of child-led play can head-off one attention-seeking disruption, everyone comes out ahead.

The other thing that was said about attention is that it is ALWAYS reinforcing.  So, when we pay attention to things our kids are doing that we don’t like, we’re actually subtly reinforcing that behavior.  So how does one provide discipline when presented with this paradox?  The recommendation was to ignore negative behavior as much as possible (which may require us parents to practice our distress tolerance skills!), while praising and giving attention to positive behavior.  With regard to consequences, the recommended strategy was to rely on “natural consequences” when practical. In situations where natural consequences aren’t appropriate, we need to take some time to ensure that parentally-imposed consequences are carefully constructed to logically reflect and respond to the specific nature of the infraction.  Finally, discipline works best in the context of a positive relationship.  If the parent-child relationship is stressed by external factors or a difficult history, it will be harder for that parent to discipline effectively.  This last fact is another reason to make sure we’re building in lots of time with our kids where we’re fully attentive and supportive and building trust.  From that relationship foundation, displine will be easier and more effective.

Radical acceptance

Another major idea that ran through presentations by different speakers was the idea of “radical” acceptance.  This means not only mindfully observing a situation, but actually embracing the idea that things really couldn’t be otherwise at this moment.  The speakers emphasized that acceptance is not the same thing as approval.  Acceptance is simply a more effective mental state for us to be in when considering a response to our child’s behavior than a state of condemnation, judgment or resistence.

Behind the idea of radical acceptance is the notion that all thoughts, feelings and behaviors are outgrowths of an individual doing the best they can to meet the needs that are important to them in that particular moment.  A child’s temper tantrum, for example, is often an attempt to motivate an adult to change something the child doesn’t like.  The fact that there might be more effective strategies (“Use your words!”), or that things just aren’t going to change (“The zoo is closed, sweetie, we have to go!”) doesn’t matter when the child is flooded with emotion and when the temper tantrum may have worked in past situations.  Radical acceptance sees the temper tantrum not as misbehavior, with the child in the “wrong”, but simply as the way things are, with the child doing the best they can given the tools and experience they have.

By practicing radical acceptance, parents can let go of the need to punish or judge their kids and focus instead on what might be underneath the behavior – the legitimate needs that are being expressed (so that we can respond with that in mind), and also what age appropriate skill deficiencies the child might have with regard to their difficult behaviors.  By accepting the child as he or she is, we can leave shame and blame out of the relationship, which helps maintain the connection that the child needs to thrive, and also allows us to teach them from a position of respect and authority, as opposed to using shame or coercion.

Radical acceptance also extends to ourselves, as parents.  Nobody does parenting “perfectly”.  In acceptance, we can let go of both defensiveness AND self-criticism.  The opportunity we have is to reflect on where we are, accept that we’re doing the best we know how, and then consider whether we’re as effective as we could be and how we might do better.  By practicing and improving our own skills of mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation and interpersonal effectiveness (especially with the support of like-minded peers), we can keep moving toward becoming the kind of parent (and person) we want to be.

Photo by Chris Blakely

Ever noticed how scientific opinions swing from one extreme to the other? Take the importance of mothers in the development of children. In the early days of psychiatry almost every mental illness, from depression to schizophrenia to autism was blamed on bad mothering. Then in the 1960’s and 70’s the discovery of medications that helped these illnesses allowed psychiatry to reframe them as biological conditions, no different from cancer or heart disease. Parents were fully absolved for the mental illnesses of their children, except to the degree that they passed along bad genes that caused chemical imbalances in the brain.

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photo by jmtimages

Dr. Seuss has demonstrated time and time again that, when it comes to teaching abstract concepts to children, it’s OK to set the bar high. Tomorrow marks his 108th birthday and his books have informed my work in ways that I doubt he could have imagined.

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photo by ladybugbgt