Helping Your Child with His Friendships – Most Common Parenting Mistake

September 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment

If you’re like many parents, you worry about your child’s friendships and interactions with his peers. The most common mistake parents make in this area is finding the balance between being too involved or not involved enough.

When you’re too involved, you tell your child how to handle these interactions rather than empowering him to find his own solutions.

If you’re not involved enough, you unintentionally ignore your child’s cues about how he is doing emotionally.

The most powerful antidote to your child’s struggles and poor choices in friendship is empowering your child to develop inner-driven self-confidence and guiding him to find his own powerful, wise answers to his friendship challenges.

Are you struggling or concerned about a school-related issue? If you’d like some new ideas and strategies that will help you resolve these challenges, check out my new teleclass series : “The Fast Track to Solving the Day-to-Day Challenges of Helping Your Child Succeed in School.”

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A Mother’s Success with Her Daughter’s Tantrums

July 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been telling you that tantrums and emotional upsets with your child of any age can be resolved, and they are not a normal or necessary part of childhood.

I want to share a quick story about a mom whom I’ll call Mary, mother of two girls one a young teen and the other 6, to share with you what’s possible.

Mary and her husband struggled with their younger daughter’s frequent ‘screaming fits,’ which they reported, “could last for hours.” In addition, these emotional upsets occurred several times every day, whenever they had to tell their daughter, “No.”

As you can imagine, this affected the entire family on a daily, constant basis. Everyone, including the older daughter, tiptoed around this young girl, afraid of setting her off. They saw her as fragile and tried to keep her happy.

Mary was exhausted and distracted by the attention and time she gave to her youngest daughter, feeling she was neglecting her older daughter, and having frequent fights with her husband about their daughter’s tantrums.

Then there were the times she was at the end of her rope, when she became an angry, yelling, upset, out-of-control mom, which she always regretted afterward.

Her young daughter was creating chaos for everyone, and she knew she had to do something.

She came to me for coaching, clear that, “My girls need a better mom.”

After getting some coaching, Mary learned how to calmly and consistently respond to her daughter’s tantrums, to not be afraid or overwhelmed by them. Things began to change immediately. [Read more…]

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What Kind of Tantrum is Your Child Having Now?

July 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Children of all ages have tantrums and emotional upsets. Interestingly, the steps to respond to tantrums are the same, whether your child is 2 or 25. Even if you have an older or even grown child, this info applies to your child also.

Thanks to my work with children and parents, I’ve discovered there is more than one kind of tantrum. Many people believe tantrums are only about a crying, upset child who doesn’t get his way, and there is one way to respond to all tantrums.

Yet if you treat all tantrums as if they are the same, you miss the deeper communication your child is giving you.

Yes, a tantrum – whether it is loud, screaming and crying or silent and withdrawn – is a communication from your child. Your child is telling you something important.

It is not just a manipulation or an act of defiance. Your child is not testing you, even though it may feel like that.

For various possible reasons, your child has chosen this method to communicate with you.

So far, I’ve discovered 6 different kinds of tantrums with 6 different messages. Some of them are somewhat similar and yet each requires that you respond in a unique way. I’d like to share a couple of them with you.

First is the kind everyone generally thinks of when they hear the word ‘tantrum.” Johnny wants something, and you say, “No,” which prompts a screaming, crying scene. What makes this unique is that it’s part of a repetitive pattern your child has learned over time.

His communication sounds something like this, “I want something and you’re not giving it to me. I’ve used screaming and crying before and it’s worked so I will keep this up until you give in and give me what I want just to get me to stop.”

Some parents have told me their child can go on for hours. This is exhausting and no-fun for you or your child.

This child doesn’t know or trust the power of his words to have an impact with you so his default is crying as a communication. [Read more…]

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How is Technology Affecting Your Child?

July 2, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Parents often share with me their concern about their child’s frequent use of technology, their seeming ‘addiction’ to all things virtual – texting, video games, instant messaging, cell phones, game boys in addition to TV and movies.

Recently I came across an article about children and technology by child psychologist and author David Elkind of Tufts University. I’ve always had great respect, affinity and admiration for his ideas and teachings.

In his article, Elkind reflects on the many changes a child experiences because of our technological society…the focus on speed in making things happen, general cultural changes of feeling busier and more rushed to get things done.

Cell phones and IM that feed into the divide between children and their parents because they have easy and immediate access to friends 24 / 7.

Before the digital culture, there was a language and lore of childhood – games, songs, rhymes, stories passed down verbally from generation to generation. Remember “The Itsy, Bitsy Spider?” Now young people have access to information from all over the world with little need or time for such ‘silly games.’

One of the things that most concerns me is the loss of 8 – 12 hours per week of unstructured play and outdoor pastimes. Elkind reminds us “spontaneous play allows children to use their imagination, make and break rules, socialize with each other…nurtures their autonomy and originality.”

These are hugely essential developmental experiences and skills that naturally develop problem-solving skills, social skills, self-expression, deep connection to one’s self, and creativity. If we limit these in our children, we “dumb them down” as author-educator John Taylor Gatto would say, and advance a mindless lack of awareness of self, others, and the realities of life. [Read more…]

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