Family Matters

My client Meg came today very emotional and sad. She had been successfully working on her relationship with her husband for over 3 months but doubts had crept in after a serious argument.

Meg has been with her husband for over 10 years. When he started talking about having kids, she started talking about divorcing. “I do not know if we love each other anymore. We don’t have fun together, the sex is not what it used to be”, she thought and came to me for coaching to make the decision about staying or leaving.

“Fat” kids suffer a lot from problems associated with being overweight. Many grown ups carry feelings of self-loathing and self-disappointment following the negative treatment they got during their younger years.

Fat kids and low self-image almost go hand in hand. Kids who are overweight need a healthy, balanced eating plan without damaging their self-image that is already damaged.

It is important to remember that it is better to handle the problem when it is small. It is much easier to handle 2 extra kilos than 5 or, God forbid, 20.

It all started when our daughter Eden was a year and a half old. She had Pneumonia and high fever and she whizzed all day. After one dose of Antibiotics (by the way, 18 years ago, it was every 6 hours, even if it meant waking her up at night), we had about a week or two off and the whizzing started again. First kid, young parents, we went straight to see our baby specialist. He was the head of the Paediatric Ward at our local hospital and we went to his private clinic every time something happened.

Kids’ eating habits are very important for parents and it is very frustrating to prepare food and find out your kids do not like it.

If you look at this issue from an emotional point of view, it has to do with control. Your kids are exercising control over what and when they eat, while you try to keep that control. Once you look at it this way, though, the solution is simple.

Most of the parents in the world want their kids to have healthy eating habits. Nowadays, when there are so many temptations around, it makes it harder to eat only healthy food. Fortunately, the younger your kids are, the easier it is to help them establish healthy eating habits.

This is the second part of yesterday’s Be a Good Sport!, which includes the last 5 things we need to do as parents to make sure our kids take the positive out of sports rather than the negative.

On the weekend, when all the sport teams are on the field are kicking or passing a ball, it is easy to see that they are not the only ones sweating. From the bench, a group of anxious parents try to give instructions that can hardly be heard on the field. The quieter ones try using the power of their thoughts to push the ball to the left. It is funny to watch. Parents move their bodies as if they can help their kids move the ball straight into the basket or the goal.

Kids laugh a lot but not everything is funny for them. Watching them can teach us a lot about the complication required to understand humour. The younger the kids, the clumsier they are in telling jokes and many of them do not think jokes are funny at all.

Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is very trendy. If you search on Google, you will see that there are 34,800,000 hits for it (this is today, but I am sure tomorrow it there will be more, if only because I am adding this post…). It is amazing that as the years goes by, the percentage of kids and people with ADHD goes up. Do you have an explanation to this?

In this post, let me try to give you some explanation to this inflation in the diagnosis of ADHD.