Discovery

As a parent, there are auto-habits that we develop in response to getting through the day. What starts as a firm voice to get the kids to do their homework leads to yelling and suddenly, oh snap, you’re a “yeller.” Or perhaps you controlled a little too much when your child was a toddler and now, oh crap, you’re a control freak. Or maybe you realized, darn it, I’m acting more like a friend than a parent but I just don’t know how to stop this cycle.

No matter who you are, you probably have one or two habits that you’ve thought to yourself, “gee, I’d really like to stop doing that” but every time the kids do X, Y or Z, I resort right back. It’s a hang up – a trip up- a screw up that you’ve seen play out over and over. If you’re ready to back away from the rope that’s strung between two trees, under the brush, just waiting for your foot to snag it and watch you fall on your face, start here. Learn to avoid those situations by following the next five blog posts!

Today, in order for you to even begin the process, you’ll need to know what trips you up. SO, take a moment think of you when you’re parenting from your best. Write down what makes you feel like you’re on the right track.

It could be anything like:

Then, think of you parenting from your worst. Write down the biggest doozies you find yourself resorting to. Here are some ideas to get your mind thinking:

Great. Now keep your list nearby. The next blog will be helpful in learning what exact tactics you employ when you start to get tripped up. So, keep thinking and stay tuned!

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“It is not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” –Unknown

The new year is a chance for parents to reflect on the successes and failures of the previous year, gather information that will help in making thoughtful and intentional change in the coming year and it can be a time of inspiration and excitement when we envision what we will do differently and the benefit to everyone in the family

Instead of worrying about slipping up and preparing to simply face each parenting dilemma as it comes why not keep your fresh mindset by setting yourself up for success. Here is what I do each January when it’s time for a serious inventory of where I’ve been, where I want to be and what it will take to get there in terms of my life as a mom (although I use this exercise in every aspect of my life).

Find 30 minutes of quiet
Bring a journal and pen
Instead of wasting time judging, criticizing or feeling guilty about your parenting slip-ups, identify the value you were stepping on when you treated your children in a way that left you feeling crappy inside and a bit ashamed of your behavior
Write down that value and think about how you go about living it in your daily life. Identify the roots of this value how it brings meaning to your life and helps you determine your decisions, actions and attitudes.
Now write down all the ways you may be inadvertently stomping on them and what the cost is to you, your kids and your family at large. Be really honest here. It can help you live your value with more integrity and thought which will have an impact on your every day living.

Here is an example: My number one value is Radical Faith. When one of my kids calls me with a situation that I think has the potential of ending badly I am at choice as to how I will respond. If I live into my value, then I may just listen, ask question, and be ready when the phone next rings with a story of how badly things turned out. If, on the other hand, I lose site of my value, it’s reasonable that I will lecture, coax, guide, micromanage, bully my kids into taking the “appropriate” action ensuring that the situation ends as I think it should.

Now here is the really crazy thing – when I stomp on my value and interfere, it isn’t long before I feel like a louse of a mom and feel the need to apologize to my kids by picking up the phone, sending them a text or a message through Skype and apologizing for my behavior. I remind them that I believe in them and trust that whatever they decide to do is preferable to anything I might have suggested (or forced on them). I am back to my value through the back door only after causing all of us some unneeded angst.

It takes time and training and a commitment to make living your value a part of daily life – and cleaning up your mess when you stomp on it – but the rewards are numerous.

Take some time this week, before everything is in full swing and it’s suddenly summer break and get a clear picture of what your top 3 or 4 values are, how they influence your life, how you might better live them, and how they might help you create a more peaceful, respectful and rewarding life with your kids.

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I recently read the article, “Dear Customer Who Stuck Up for His Little Brother” and while this scenario is a true act of courage, I realized that it plays out more often (and with far less intensity) everyday in families across the country. I wanted to take a minute to spotlight the parent’s role in this situation. For the child and his brother, it IS a mighty tale of courage, acceptance, love and the ability for one young person to stand up for another young person and for what is right – the freedom to be who you are. For the parent, it was an intense display of disapproval, and the over–reaction to something he was trying to change about his child.

In the scenario, the father is blatantly telling the young boy he’s not acting in accordance with his gender – in other words “man up kid”. Based on the response to this post, many agree this is not only a harsh attitude, it completely belittles the child’s identity. I shudder to think what daily life must be like for this young boy. He doesn’t need to go to school to experience bullying, it’s happening at home.

Here’s where the thought connects to parents everywhere. What if the child were uncoordinated and not interested in sports? Or the child was bossy and had difficulty navigating social situations? Or a writer not willing to put down the pen? Or a child who spends time building with Legos(R) vs. playing with his peers?

The words, “just suck it up and play on the team” or “stop bossing those kids around” or “would you put that damn book down and do something else?” or “it’s good for you to play with other people” sound exactly the same as “you can’t have a purple controller” –they all say the same thing – be different because who you are – isn’t good enough.

In short, let this purple controller be a reminder for US to control our need to interject and “steer” and manipulate our kids lives. Accept kids for who they are and we’ll see amazing things in the future.

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It’s that time of year again when everyone is ready to start fresh, clean the slate and feel passionately inspired to change their lives. People everywhere, big and small & young and old, are determined to “get it right” and lose the weight, find the time, stop the madness, make amends, be kinder, and so on. Folks are ready to conquer their fears, live their bliss and identify what keeps tripping them up in life, so they can find a new way that leads to happiness.

Usually this fire in the belly attitude is nothing more than a fresh motivation pumped into previous perception. There’s 100% genuine intent – people are committed, no doubt. But then, just as inevitably as the resolutions are made, they start to crumble. I’m not saying resolutions don’t happen – that change doesn’t come to those who try, but when change does happen, there’s something far more powerful than motivation, inspiration and drive leading the way—the change is fueled by NEW THINKING.

This year, try changing your thinking first and watch as your actions follow you in a new direction. Here is how I do it. In order for me to experience significant change (I am not going to yell at the kids any more!), I first have to identify what I’m doing that isn’t working (yelling doesn’t really work all that well or for all that long) and accept that I did the best I could (no beating myself up) and then challenge myself to look at my actions in a new way. First I identify what trips me up: I yell when I am at my wits end and I don’t think anyone is listening to me and well – in all honesty – my feelings are hurt. Yes, under all the manufactured anger, I feel hurt. Then, if I had any doubts at all, I would look at whether my yelling actually worked. It doesn’t. It never did and it never will. Oh sure, I can get my kids to hop to it when I reach 10 decibles, but that’s not the same as saying “yelling works”. It doesn’t. So if I want to change, and I know the yelling isn’t working – what’s tripping me up? Why can’t I just “let it go”?

Because somewhere in my feeble little mind, I still believe that
• I have the right to yell when I want to
• That if I keep yelling, one day it will work
• That my kids are deaf and I must yell
• That things will get worse if I start talking to them like I talk to…

Hey, wait a minute. What would happen if I started to talk to my kids the way I talk to my friends and my co-workers? What if I absolutely could not, under any circumstances start screeching at my kids any more than I could at my co-workers?

Bingo – I have begun the journey to a new way of thinking. If I spend another 24 hours thinking about this, I find that I like the idea. I’m drawn to it. It provides an improvement in my life. I haven’t done anything yet. I’ve just let my brain absorb this new way of thinking. I kick it around to make sure it can stand the test. I try out scenarios and I notice that I am open to the possibility that this might actually work. After all, I would be more inclined to cooperate with people who spoke to me respectfully, than those that yelled at me. Maybe the same is true for my kids (I know this of course, but I am letting the new thinking grab hold and sniff out anything that might get in way when I put it into action).

Can you see that what I am doing is deconstructing the way I looked at the yelling? Nothing complicated. After 24 hours, I am ready to “try” it – just once, to see how I feel when I do it. I’m not basing my decision on how the kids respond, but on how I feel about myself when I choose NOT to yell. Oh, I like this. It means that I am in control. I like control. So I pick a time or a situation, where I am usually reduced to yelling. I am aware. I have my brain on and I’m not parenting from auto-pilot. And just this small shift changes everything. Because I am thinking, because I know that I am in control, because I have allowed the thinking a chance to grow small roots in my otherwise barren brain, I am excited about doing something different. And so I do. I do something different.

What I do isn’t nearly as important as what happened before the doing. Most parents find themselves spending too much time on the “doing” and not enough time on the “change my thinking”. If you know me, you know that I am, by nature, lazy. And I do not like to waste my time on crap that doesn’t work. If this didn’t work, do you think I would be using it? Fat chance. I would continue to yell and screech.

So this year, let your thinking be your guide. Don’t like where you are headed, cop a squat, breathe a bit, and then challenge your thinking. By the time you stand up, you’ll have a new path to travel and you just might find your bliss on the road to “screech free parenting”.

Happy New Year!

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“All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” ~Havelock Ellis

Are you dragging behind you, that burden-stuffed backpack filled with every bad parenting decision you’ve made? Every missed opportunity for training your kids or each blown chance at teaching a valuable lesson? Are all those years (months perhaps if you’re a new parent) of parenting imperfection affecting your ability to become the parent you’d like to be?

If you said yes, you’re not alone. Too often parents want to change the course of their family’s experience but they feel, Ah, well I’ve already done it this way for so long, there’s no turning the ship around at this point. And they carry that feeling of holding on, despite total misery. There’s guilt and regret, hopelessness and thoughts of failure that stay shoved in that backpack until one day it leaves us exhausted and ready to collapse in a pile of tears.

I’d like to take a moment to say (shout it out actually, while waiving my hands in the air) that anyone can change and, that change happens over time. If you keep saying, gee, I’d like to raise independent kids but I can’t because I’ve already done everything for them for 8 years, then sure enough you’ll never change. But if you recognize that the person you are today is based solely on the decisions you made in the past, you’ll realize the future YOU will be affected by the choices you make today. (Stop and think about it, it takes a second).

This isn’t one of those simple positive thinking pep talks. Change truly happens over time. You’ll fall off the wagon, and you’ll face the choice: get on or sit in the dirt. Try to choose to get back on, no matter how many times you end up in the dirt (sometimes on the ground for longer than is enjoyable). Trust it, keep getting on and you’ll see progress. In that progress, comes, (here’s the tie in) BALANCE.

In this blog entry, 6 Tips to Live in Peace and Balance: What to Let Go, the author discusses the ways to let go and to find balance. I looked at it through the parenting lens and found the tips can be applied to helping us find balance in parenting as well as in other areas of their lives.

1. Physical Clutter – Learning to let go of the stuff has a positive effect on everyone in the family. How many times have you bought something for your kids and then expected them to take care of it which ended in power struggles and battle lines? And being tied to our stuff keeps us checked out of the relationships most important to us – the one with our selves, our partner and our kids.

2. Dreams and Goals - Let go of the dreams and goals you had when your kids were small if you, I mean they, never reached them. Don’t carry them around. Face who your children are right now and build for tomorrow from where you, I mean they, are TODAY (not from back when you dreamed you’d raise a perfect-mannered-trilingual-world-traveling-model-Gerber-baby-cherub-who-would-read-by-age-2-and-sing-professionally-by-6 munchkin).

3. Expectations - Many parents expect that parenting will be easy. HA! They expect that their kids will never get into trouble. HA! And they feel like failures as they try to live up to the expectations of society. DOWN RIGHT DUMB! Parents think they have a shot at being “perfect” and can learn the “right way” to raise a “perfect” kid. But the truth is KIDS ARE MESSY! So look around. Toss the expectations out the window of your swagger wagon. (After all, you never expected to be rocking a mini van now did you? It is what it is: a crumb-filled, kinda like life).

4. Bad Habits – This one really gets us as parents! We CONTINUE to do what doesn’t work because we’ve gotten in the habit of our bad habits with no real idea how to replace them with something, anything more suitable. No matter how much we hate YELLING (or punishing or time outing or whatever) we end up going back to it because we feel we have to do “something” to get the kids to behave. Let it go. Identify and replace the bad habits (including the habits that you might include parenting on autopilot, reminding, lecturing, guilting, etc). Get NEW thinking about your habits and they will change.

5. Memories and Experiences – In the blog entry it says, “Our brain is hard-wired into noticing and holding on to negative events five times more effectively than positive ones.” So this means, in essence we have to train ourselves to stop focusing on the times we screw up, the times our kids misbehave and all the other crappy memories we just loooove to hang on to! Tell yourself to let the little things go- will it matter in 5 years? 5 minutes? It’s so much to hold on to when it really truly doesn’t matter.

6. People. As parents, we tend to get sucked into circles that may negatively affect our parenting. Whether it’s a boss, a friend you can never be good enough for, a relative you’re letting run your life, or a circle of gossipy, complaining, blaming playground moms and dads. These people affect the time and energy we give to our children. If there’s someone bringing the toxic vibes to you, it is most likely, spilling into your family. Cut it loose and you’ll find some secure ground. In the end, after all, it’s about who you are right now and you must let go and make the best decisions for tomorrow by knowing how to let go of what holds you back today.

Good luck and enjoy the swagger wagon!

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You’ve probably noticed, that with each new age and stage, your child’s behavior looks freakishly familiar yet, it’s loaded with a shiny new set of operating tools. He’s bigger. She’s smarter. They’re louder. The behavior is beefier. More mature. Less “cute”. (Face it, a tantrum at two is far more tolerable than a full blown hissyfit by an 8 year old).

As your child grows “into” more advanced versions of their discipline issues (whining, excuses, arguing, controlling, sassing, etc), you’re faced with the same problem, different year.

When this happens, tribes of parents head out to find the NEW most age appropriate response, punishment, discipline tactic to fight the aging beast (the behavior, not the kid). Because lo and behold, the strategy for a tantrum at two would never work for a 13 year old, right? I can see it now, the emo hipster wanna be with her head down in the naughty chair. It’s not pretty and it’s clearly not effective. So why do this to a two year old if we know it’s

Probably because it makes us feel in control. It’s a logical response to an undesired behavior. However, if we don’t realize the behaviors we see at two will be the behaviors (only upgraded) at 6, 8, 10 and so forth, then we stand to make it waaay harder on ourselves – and the kids – than it has to be.

The question is, how do we curb behaviors without having to run out and find a new strategy every 1-2 years?

The answer: we focus on the relationship. We study our children. We recognize the problem areas and we let the rest go. We don’t try to steer them through a perfect childhood without pain, failure or real world ups and downs. We train them to take care of themselves and be a meaningful participant within the community. Inviting a child to help at two will work the same as inviting a child to help at thirteen- and it will get more of what you want from them.

Sending a kid to the naughty corner at two and to her room at thirteen will not rid her from flailing and stomping when she doesn’t get her way. And you can bet it’ll come back when she’s in the dorms and doesn’t get the classes she wanted. Or the engagement ring she saw in the magazine. Or the car all the other moms drive. And bam. Will she live with it? Sure. Could she spare to do better without that habit? Definitely.

(Look around, you know any adults who still throws hissy fits? Exactly).

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If letting go is the key to happiness, why be miserable hanging on?

Letting go doesn’t mean we don’t care.
Letting go doesn’t mean we shut down.
Letting go means we stop trying to force outcomes and make people behave.
It means we give up resistance to the way things are, for the moment.
It means we stop trying to do the impossible–controlling that which we cannot–and instead, focus on what is possible–which usually means taking care of ourselves.
And we do this in gentleness, kindness, and love, as much as possible.
-Melody Beattie

As parents, many of us choose “to do things for our kids, that they could do for themselves”. We have a hard time “letting go”. Why? Because we love them? No! That’s the easy answer. It’s because it’s easier to do things for them, it’s quicker, it’s less fuss AND, we get things done the way we like them. Kitchens are cleaner, backpacks are neater, & snacks are healthier. We do things for our kids because we want to guarantee their day goes well, and that our days are not unnecessarily disrupted. Being in this “hold on to the reins” position, has little to do with real parental love.

Of course our intentions are to be “fabulously wonderful” parents, but often we don’t even realize that: we’re parenting from a place that is focused on controlling the outcome VS. encouraging the unfolding of life. Letting life unfold in front of our children takes mental muscle and plenty of practice. It also requires that we have faith that our kids won’t crash and burn if we loosen the reins. And finally, there’s the pesky voice in our heads that suggests that if we really cared about our kids, well, we would make life easier for them.

Our children are going to say and do things that embarrass us, that hurt others, that look bad to the outside world and could be categorized as lousy decisions. (Gasp, because as adults, we don’t experience this, at all, right?). And isn’t this what we really want? Kids who show up for their lives, ready to take risks, to dive deep into all that life has to offer?

If we learn to let go of our desire to control the outcome – of trying to “get them” to move in the direction we have chosen for them, we can focus more on loving them unconditionally and build on our relationship with them.

So, as this guy puts it: Learn to let go. That is the key to happiness. – Buddha

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A recent post on Alfie Kohn’s website. requires parents and educators alike to stop and consider everything they believed to be true. Kohn shares a perspective that could hit many squarely between the eyes.

Here are some excerpts to convey the point. Read full article here.

…”The point, of course, is to remind us adults how little we really know our kids and what they’re capable of doing”…

…”And why wasn’t she engaged in the classroom [life]? Well, people tend to become more enthusiastic and proficient when they’re in charge of what they’re doing”…

…”It was particularly disconcerting for me to realize that when the priorities of adults and kids diverge, we simply assume that ours ought to displace theirs… We tell more than we ask; we direct more than we listen; we use our power to pressure or even punish students [children] whose interests don’t align with ours. This has any number of unfortunate results, including loss of both self-confidence and interest in learning. But let’s not forget to number among the sad consequences the fact that many students [children] quite understandably choose to keep the important parts of themselves hidden from us. That’s a shame in its own right, and it also prevents us from being the best teachers [and parents] we can be.”

It’s comforting to know that Parenting On Track has a program, as a result of Dr. Alfred Adler and Dr. Rudolph Drykurs, that shows parents HOW to become more encouraging, engaged, accepting parents to our children.

When you finish reading Kohn’s article, you will be left with a choice – you may choose to say “WOW – that was powerful”, set the article aside and go back to doing exactly what you always do, or you will consider what Kohn is saying and take the first step in changing the relationship you have with your kids.

The choice – as always – is ours to make.

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I just started another six week live class in Williston, VT and another 30 families are in the midst of the Do Nothing Say Nothing (DNSN) Assignment. When I told the class about this homework, it was like every other first night of class, fielding questions about;Technology, School, Sugar, Personal Hygiene & Food. I reassured everyone that this week is an essential part in the journey and only lasts 7 days. I am not suggesting that we hand control of the house over to our children. I am however, suggesting that we get out of the way and discover who our kids really are and what they are capable of doing, this in-turn opens up the space for them to become the masters of their lives, and all starts by DNSN.

Don’t believe me? Read on.

Flockmother purchased my home program in April of 2009 and decided to chronicle her journey, for the benefit of others. If you read her first blog post the first day of her DNSN week, you will see that the girls in fact did not go to school. That, my friends, is just where this journey begins.

Once again, Flockmother inspires us.

Her way

These days, I practice do-nothing-say-nothing 95% of the time during our before-school morning routine. We each get up and get busy taking care of ourselves and then converge in the car at the agreed-upon time. Smooth sailing almost every morning! I’m still amazed by our transformation when I think back to the way it was two years ago–the fighting, the frustration, the lateness. It’s all a distant memory now.

During the last few months, Charlotte has taken full advantage of her relatively new autonomy to invent and fine-tune her own morning routine: