Family Matters

In one of my parenting workshops, I had a discussion with one of the fathers about the use of negative words and we talked about the slogan “Australia says ‘no’ to violence against children”. I explained that the brain records “Australia says to violence against children”, omits the “no” and focuses on “Australia”, “violence” and “children”. Paul thought it was a great slogan (and he did not work for the copywriting company who came up with the slogan).

At that stage, all the other participants already understood that “no smoking” only promoted smoking by focusing on the smoking, so pretty quickly, there was a lively group interaction going on.
This week, I got a video made by a great organisation, which presented the answer we were looking for in our discussion at that parenting workshop. What would you want people to focus on? We want them to focus on creating a child-friendly environment for our kids. We want them to be happy, to feel safe and to have good relationships with others.

The answer to (the pink elephant) “Australia says no to violence against children” is now “Australia says yes to a child-friendly environment for our children” and I love this new focus.

Single-sex schools originated during the 18th century, when rich families sent their sons to “special” schools. Only later, in the 19th century, when the awareness of the value of education increased, were girls also sent to study. Single-sex schools were very popular in England and now also in Australia.

Today, the single-sex schools are popular among religious populations and even more during high school.

In Israel, there is a form of communal living called “Kibutz”, where children live in a room with other kids almost from birth and are being cared for by a carer. In that arrangement, parents came to spend time with their kids before and after work, met them for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the communal dining hall but the kids spent most of their life with their carers and friends and hardly ever slept at “home”. A research over 40 years found the most amazing thing - although those kids spent fairly little time together with their parents, all of them declared that their parents had the biggest influence on their life.

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.

Parenting (especially teenage parenting) is undoubtedly the most challenging adventure in a person’s life. Remember the first hours of being a mother or a father? The unconditional love you had for this tiny new creature that did nothing but eat, sleep and cry, coupled with the enormous load of the new responsibility, from which there was no escape. A bit overwhelming, wasn’t it? For some parents, even a bit scary sometimes. Who can you turn to for parenting advice?

Here is a question I was asked by a writer from a famous women’s magazine, who wanted my opinion as a life coach.

My girl friend is getting married soon and I feel a bit left out. I feel she is moving on without me. What is the best way to ensure our friendship stays the same, now that we are on different life paths?

As we prepared to hug the homeless, I happened to read about hugging and found a post where Carl Munson expressed his uncomfortable feelings about hugging. Here is my response.

I read a lot about success and attend personal development and wealth creation seminars. It is very inspiring. Unfortunately, the more I do this, the more I hear about people who are making it big time overnight.

The overnight success factor works very well on people who are not successful. It really helps sell stuff. Look at some of the best overnight success promotions:

- Lose 14 kilos in 14 days!

- How to make $250,000 from property without using your own money!

- Use this drink and be blond and beautiful in just 4 days! (OK, so I made this one up myself ;))

I bet overnight success was invented by unsuccessful people to help them feel better about their lack of success.

Does it happen to you that a movie you have seen keeps occupying your mind long after you have watched it?
It happened to me last week after I watched Water, a movie about widows in India. It was such a hard movie to watch. Hard but real. So real it was painful.
In the movie, set [...]

Applying for a parenting career requires no interviews and no application forms, though it is one of the most demanding and rewarding careers. Without the benefit of selection criteria, we discover that to be good parents, we need many skills and abilities that we do not learn at school. Some people hope that these skills will show up in the delivery room together with their first born. Others say you either have them or you don’t. I believe that the magic of pregnancy and childbirth is not enough to make us parents and we can and should develop these skills over time.