Authentic Parenting: Who Are You As You Parent Your Children?
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Our children learn so much more from our actions than from our words. They do as we do, not as we say. The most effective way to teach our children to live according to our core values is to lead by example. I consider this to be Authentic Parenting because it is based on our true beliefs and choices. When we parent authentically there is real power in our words and actions. Consistency is natural when we know what we want to teach our children and have taken the time to decide how we intend to do so.
Think about your own core beliefs and values. What are the three most important values that you wish to pass on to future generations of your family? How can you manifest these values in your day to day life? How can you best teach them to your children?
Consider your children. Forget about the most recent parenting book that have read, and what your friends, neighbors, or people in the grocery store may think. Who is your child? What are his or her strengths, needs, and interests? How is your child wired? You know your child best. Project your family ten years into the future and consider the kind of life you hope your child will be living. Who does your child need you to be so that he can become his best self? What changes do you have to make to become that person?
Take back your true power. As parents we are the heads of our households and we have the obligation to teach our children well. Anger, frustration, and anxiety are obstacles to a peaceful family life, and they make the job of discipline unnecessarily difficult and unpleasant. Here are a few simple tools to use as you parent authentically, to help your children to recognize that you mean business while allowing you to express your love and acceptance:
Give commands to your child or children once and only once. Touch your child on the shoulder or bend down to make eye contact. Communicate with your tone that you know your child is absolutely capable of doing as told. Speak in a light, upbeat, and direct manner. Instructions are not punishment. When the task is completed successfully, thank your child sincerely, just as you might an assistant or a friend. Let your child know how happy you are with his or her behavior. State your command in the affirmative. You are not asking a question. For example, instead of saying “would you like to feed the cat, sweetheart?” say “I’d like you to please feed the cat now, sweetheart. He is really hungry.” If you face refusal, try collaborative problem solving. If the refusal continues, impose natural and fair consequences that you can confidently enforce.
Give warnings to help your children cope with transitions. Consider using a timer and set it for ten minutes before the activity will need to change. Let your child keep the timer and help them to reset it for a five minute warning. Instead of giving the warning yourself, simply let the timer do all the work. This will cut down on conflicts in your home and help your child to budget his or her time and function independently.
Clean-up is important and it is not our job to clean up after our children. Really!!! Three year-olds in pre-school clean up their toys before moving on to a new activity, and they can and should do some at home. Clean-up before transitioning on to a new activity should be non-negotiable but can still be fun. You can sing the clean-up song, set a timer and play “beat the clock.” You can help out if you like, but do not clean up for your child without his or her participation. This is an important activity on many levels. Good Luck!
One of the best ways to elicit good behavior choices in our children is to recognize it and praise our children for it specifically and sincerely as often as we can.
See the best in your child. This really works! If you are having a hard time with a particular child, take a few minutes to write down a list of what they are doing that is bothering you. Then write another list of all of their strengths and everything you love about them. If you are really angry you might not be able to come up with anything for a few minutes, but stay focused and suddenly you will be flooded with images of love and appreciation for your child. Now when you interact with your child again, keep their strengths in perspective and simply focus on calmly changing their behavior while loving and appreciating them as they are. You might even show your child the list you have made to let them know both how wonderful they are and to discuss the changes you would like to see them make.
Resist the urge to keep your children happy or satisfied all the time. Our children have the right to learn and grow through experience. For example, if you let your son win whenever you play board games because he doesn’t like to lose, your child may be denied the opportunity to learn good sportsmanship. While we have the best of intentions, we may actually prevent our own child from developing the necessary social skills for successful play dates or team sports experiences. In essence, we can create a sore loser, and set our child up for potentially painful social struggles simply because we didn’t allow him or her to experience disappointment when playing with us.
Remember who you want to be so that you can teach your child the life lessons that will lead him to become the person you want him to be in the future. We must respect ourselves and cannot allow people or situations to diminish our self-respect. Our children need to learn to respect us, which they will only do if we respect ourselves and our choices. Once we have our child’s respect, discipline becomes natural and easy. In addition, the ability to respect us allows our children to enjoy healthy relationships with authority figures for the rest of their lives. We can only command this respect if we truly believe we are deserving of it. Try to surround yourself with people who appreciate your strengths and who you truly enjoy being with. Take a good look at your life. Identify the people, activities, or situations that may be negatively impacting your self-confidence. Consider making changes accordingly. If you are really struggling, keep a daily log of your successes, using the definition of success as “accomplishing an intended task.” You will be amazed at how much you do in a day.
The key to changing our children’s behavior is to change our own attitude. Remain calm. Keep your emotions in check and stay true to your values and beliefs. Remember that you can be disappointed by your children’s actions but still love and accept them as people. Go slowly. Try not to put pressure on yourself or your child to be perfect. We don’t need to be perfect. We simply need to be our true selves.
Elizabeth Pflaum lives with her husband and four children in Westchester, New York and provides individual parent coaching to clients and their families. She offers parenting classes and workshops throughout the tri-state area, is a frequent guest parenting expert on WABC’s Eyewitness News and other television shows and writes articles about all topics relating to parenting and childhood. For more information, visit her website at: http://www.aaapparentcoach.com
Carnival Time
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A rainy start on Saturday May 8th sent carnival planners scrambling at all five Scarsdale elementary schools, but by noon the sun was out, lighting up a wonderful day of fun.
Carnival planning always brings out parents creativity and this year was no exception. At Greenacres, the theme was Camp, Heathcote was “Out of this World” and Fox Meadow featured a Space Odyssey. Over at Quaker Ridge, the theme was Television and Edgewood Rocked. All of the carnivals featured inflatables, games, activities, music, prizes and fun.
Take a look at photos from all five schools:
Taking One for the Team
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I find men fascinating. This is not something my husband has to worry about. It isn’t that I want to meet more of them; I’m just interested in them kind of like Jane Goodall is interested in chimps. Unlike Jane, however, my study of the species is unscientific, unquantitative, and unobjective. Nonetheless, I have reached what I think is an irrefutable conclusion: Men are far superior to women in sustaining important emotional attachments.
Wha-at? Yes, indeed, and here is the evidence that proves my point.
Women have strict requirements when it comes to bestowing their affections, but none of these barriers gets in the way of men. Start, for example, with the biggest obstacle women impose on relationships – they seem to think it is important to fall in love with other human beings. Men are far more open-minded. They become passionate about abstractions. I’m not talking here about the founding fathers and abstractions like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I’m talking about the average guy who is head over heels in love with a Team. Pick any sport, pick any country, and it’s the same thing over and over again.
This all became clear recently when, for our grandson’s tenth birthday, my husband and I took him to see a baseball game. It was bobble-head day at the stadium, meaning that if one stood in a ridiculously long line, one could obtain a free bobble-head of the home team third baseman. As we walked past the thousands of (mostly) men inching their ways forward, I found myself hoping that there is a huge secondary market in bobble-heads, that these guys have customers lined up on EBay and Craig’s List to sell this junk to, and that by reselling bobble-heads they are at long last able to make their mortgage payments. In my (femaie) point of view, there would then be a purpose behind this otherwise nonsensical waste of time.
But, clearly, there can’t be enough secondary market bobble-head buyers to provide an economic rationale for this behavior. These guys were standing on the line not for profit, but for Team Love.
Team Love falls way outside the experience of most women. Team Love is abstract, unrequited, unidirectional, and impersonal in the extreme. Team Love is pure and selfless love.
And therein lives another obstacle that women face in forming relationships. Once the female of the species passes early adolescence and evolves beyond a one-way attachment to teen idols, she tends to require that the person she chooses to love actually knows that she exists. In a word, women make demands upon their loved ones. That just ain’t so with Team Love. Those who experience Team Love fall for other people who don’t have a clue that their would-be Lovers are alive. I grant you that guys on the diamond, the rink, the court, or the field, may feel energized by the roar of the crowd, but that doesn’t mean they know or care one whit about their Lovers. Who among us can know, much less love, 35,000 screaming lunatics? Who would even want to? Yet not being known to or loved back by the Team is absolutely irrelevant to the stomping, chanting Lover in the stands wearing a jersey with some other guy’s name on his back.
Here’s another restraint females adhere to in relationships. Putting aside hook ups and self-delusional crushes, women tend to think it is a good idea to have relationships with particular individuals with specific identifiable attributes. Some women like good bodies, some fall for big brains, some go for fat wallets.
The Team Lover, on the other hand, is able to uncouple his emotions from any human characteristics that his love object may possess. The archetypical fan – say a guy from Providence -- loves the Red Sox. He loves them in his teens, twenties, thirties, forties, etc, etc. The faces on the team are forever changing, but the lover’s passion is steady. Loving a team amounts to loving a concept.
I’m just not that open-minded. If a stranger showed up one day in my husband’s suit, I couldn’t transfer my affection to the new guy without missing a beat.
But, hey, not so the Team Lover, who feels emotion based entirely on clothing. Dress a complete unknown in the right jersey and the Team Lover is hopelessly devoted. On the other hand, however, when the once-adored goalie, center forward, shortstop, or right end changes his uniform, the guy becomes a traitor, a creep, and a bum.
There’s yet another way in which Team Love surpasses women’s love. Women can’t share and Team Lovers can. A woman will despise another person if the two of them happen to have a passion for the same love object. Team Love is the opposite. Lovers who love the Team also love each other. In fact, they feel a sense of community. There’s a reason they call it Red Sox Nation.
Finally, the aspirational models of monogamy and family impose constrictions upon women’s love. Societal norms press women into having one love object at a time, with a few children thrown in for good measure. Team Lovers are omniamorous. They are able to love more than one Team at a time, when they are lucky enough that post-season play extends into the next Team’s pre-season schedule. They love their Teams, fellow Team Lovers, and non-Team Lovers, so long as the latter group is merely neutral and not aligned with some other Team.
And this all describes my husband, which is why I am so sure of my conclusions. Unlike me, he loves selflessly and purely, never making a demand, asking for notice, or wavering in his devotion. He is loyal under the most adverse circumstances, and cares little about human foibles in his loved ones. He is openhearted and forgiving. He never gives up on his love, no matter how little evidence there is that it is deserved.
He is the perfect Red Sox fan.
Stacey Brodsky has practiced law, been a stay-at-home mother, and taught middle school English over the course of the 17 years she has lived in Scarsdale with her husband, daughters, and a succession of dogs.
Mandarin for Preschoolers at HB
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Hoff-Barthelson Music School invites parents of three and four year-olds who are interested in having their children speak Chinese in Music Classes to attend an Open House for its 2010-2011 Mandarin Chinese Music and Movement classes on Wednesday, May 26, 1:15 – 2:30 pm at the Music School, 25 School Lane, Scarsdale. There will be a demonstration class and a discussion period. This is an excellent opportunity to meet with Hoff-Barthelson’s extraordinary Mandarin Chinese Music Class teacher, Mimi Hsu, and to watch her conduct her current music class in Chinese. Participation in the Mandarin Chinese classes is designed for three-year-olds with a parent or caregiver in attendance. Four’s attend a drop-off class.
Parenting in the Digital Era
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A full auditorium of Scarsdale parents gathered on April 19 to hear Rachel Dretzin, producer of Growing up Online and Digital Nation, speak about the profound effects of technology on the human experience. Dretzin said the parents in the audience would be the last generation to remember what it was like to live without computers. In fact, technology is changing so rapidly that Dretzin could chronicle changes in parents concerns from 2007 to 2010. She noted the evolution of parents’ reaction to the Internet and new technologies, saying that in 2007, parents’ main concerns were digital predators. But today, most children are well aware of the dangers of meeting people online and the majority will avoid contact, by email, phone or in-person with those they meet online. Though there are still children at risk, she noted that most kids who get themselves into trouble on the Internet tend to be children who have problems in other areas of their lives. Dretzin argued that the Internet only amplifies issues already at play.
She then turned to the “daily bread” of growing up online for the majority of children. The Internet is changing the way children learn, process information and engage with others. She has found that science is in its infancy when evaluating the effects of technology on the way we learn and act. But one thing is for sure – everyone is more distracted by phones, blackberries, instant messaging and email. As a result, she feels it is important that parents carve out time where screens are put away to foster human contact. A recent study found that children complain about their own parents’ preoccupation with computers and phones and Dretzin suggests that as parents we set an example by focusing on children when they speak and looking kids straight in the face.
What is the impact of our myriad distractions? Are we successful at multi-tasking and juggling? Dretzin went to MIT to find out, where she spoke with professors and students about the effect of laptops in the lecture hall and the change in student study habits. Professors were vying for student attention in class, competing with instant messaging, and Google searches. According to Sherry Turkle, clinical psychologist and Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, kids need more and more stimulation due to the overload of information that surrounds them. In order to capture the audience in a class, professors have to come up with dazzling presentations that can outshine the laptop on the student’s desk.
A study of multi tasking was done at Stanford University, which showed that students were significantly slower at completing tasks when juggling several tasks at once. Though people think they can effectively multi-task, in reality they are not giving their undivided attention to any one area. When jumping from one task to the next, they had a sense of accomplishment but much fell through the cracks. Clifford Nass, who lead the study said, "It turns out that multi-taskers are terrible at every aspect of multi-tasking. They're terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they're terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they're terrible at switching from one task to another." He added, "we worry that it (multi-tasking) may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.”
To combat distraction, Dretzin suggested that parents designate times where all technology is put away to give children time to reflect and relate. She bans all screens at mealtime and is attempting to extend the ban on technology to the Sabbath. She also recommended sitting with children who are composing or answering emails to point out how their words might be interpreted. Without feedback from the respondent, children may not realize the impact of their messages.
However, she cautioned against assuming that all technology is bad. The internet has extraordinary potential; information and answers are readily available and technology facilitates collaborative work. Even video games can be educational and we should not let our generational bias prevent us from embracing new advances. Are books necessarily better that information read online? New teaching and learning methodologies will develop in the 21st century and though we have lost some things in this massive shift, we have clearly gained as well.
As a mother of three school age children, Dretzin was able to develop an immediate rapport with Scarsdale parents and offer keen insights on parenting in a time of rapid change. You can watch the documentary Digital Nation which is streamed online here.
The program was sponsored by the Scarsdale PT Council
