Family Matters

This typically happens to parents with their children as they grow up. When babies are born, they can sleep for hours, make a mess, not answer your questions, look away when you talk, pee on you and cry loudly, no matter what you are trying to do at the time. And that is OK. In fact, whatever they do is great.

But if a toddler cries in the middle of the supermarket, the pressure is on. “I want you to stop crying right now! You’re embarrassing me in front of all these people. Just sit in the trolley and be quiet”.

About 10 years later, it becomes “Why won’t you talk to me? Why won’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”

Last year, my 21-year-old daughter Eden started studying Psychology. She said she wanted to study Psychology since she was 10 years old. Having a mother and an aunt in Special Education, another aunt in psychology and Social Work and being inspired by our amazing psychologist friend probably all contributed to her desires to learn about the human mind.

Whenever I talk about Eden and her desire to study Psychology (by the way, at this stage, she still just wants to study and being a psychologist is not on her radar yet), it takes me back to a research project I did during my own studies, titled “Why do people choose to study Special Education?”

Besides finding out why people chose Special Education, I also discovered some interesting relationships between teachers, Special Education teachers, social workers and psychologists, which I now use as models for parenting styles.

Last year, I wrote a post about the 8 worst ways to treat your kids. I get comments on my posts – some of them support my views, while some of them disagree or challenge the ideas I write about – and this post was no different. You probably know that bloggers love comments, but it may be surprising to you that bloggers absolutely love the challenging ones, because they create even more opportunities to write their opinions.

Recently, I received a comment from Sandie, a mother who thought my top 8 tips were “out of line”.

I started writing back, but then I realized it probably needed a bit more attention, so here is Sandie’s comment and my reply. Enjoy!

Dogs are really simple creatures. Whatever they do, they give it EVERYTHING.

If you have ever seen a dog happy, you know they are happy with their whole body – they wag their tail like crazy, they jump around, the breath excitedly, lick every part of you they can reach and even yelp with joy. If you have a dog, just take its leash and stand by the door and you will see what I mean.

People, on the other hand, think too much. Particularly, people care about what others will think of them. So instead of being true to what goes on inside them and expressing it to the best of their ability, they aim for a response out of the people around them and behave in a way that will get them this response.

But that is being manipulative, really.

It is also far less likely to succeed than being honest.

Kids start out like dogs – they get all excited when Mommy pulls a breast out of her bra. They wag their little arms and legs, their face lights up with excited anticipation and they cling and suck with everything they have. When Mommy goes out of their room, on the other hand, they start crying bitterly, twitching their arms and legs in a futile attempt to chase her.

Last weekend, I had a chance to talk to a mother about my better parenting skills program. She told me about her son’s behavior problems and wanted to know what was so magical about my program that made kids perform so well. I said to her, “There is no magic in the program. It is just based on understanding of the human brain, as every one of my parent coaching clients and better parenting skills workshop participants discovers”.

Although I like the thought that I work magic in my programs, I truly believe this magic can be done by everyone who understands the importance of having fun in the learning process and focusing their energy in a positive direction.

The woman told me her son was “hyperactive”.

Parenting kids is a challenge for most people. There are many things that make parenting such a challenge, but one of the big ones is that a couple of parents is made up of two different individuals, each with their own upbringing, values, beliefs and preferences.

If life was just smooth sailing, this would not be such a big problem, except life is bumpy sometimes and when tensions are high, things can get silly and weaken the parents’ position of authority.

Even when things are pretty quiet, the ever-so-sensitive kids can detect notes of disagreement between their parents and immediately try to use them to their advantage (little buggers). Parents who are too preoccupied to notice end up facing the “But Mom/Dad said” and looking pretty stupid being caught unprepared.

Are kids of some ages worse than others? Is there a link between age and behavior? Are teens especially terrible?

I think not.

A few days ago, I went to pick Tsoof up from school and bumped into his guitar teacher, Andrew. We had a chat about Tsoof’s progress and how much he was enjoying his lessons, and then Andrew asked me, “How old is Tsoof?”

“Just turned 14″, I said.

“That’s the worst age”, he said, “Lots of kids stay nice until about that age, but then they start having problems and going wild. That was the most difficult age for me too”.

As it happens, both Ronit and I have heard this sort of warning from many people, so Andrew was expressing a very common notion about teens and how they change, but it made me want to write this post.

I get asked many times about disciplining kids. I hate the word “discipline”, because I believe kids do not need to be disciplined, they need to be loved and cared for, supported and encouraged. Discipline has nothing to do with being happy – not with being a happy kid and definitely not with being a happy parent. In fact, parents with discipline questions are unhappy and know their kids are unhappy too.

I guess most of the parents who ask me about discipline really mean they want to know how to help their kids behave in a way that will make life easier for them. After all, kids learn their behavior from the people around them. The challenge that people have with discipline is that instead of it being a method of guiding kids towards the desired behavior, it is used as a way to control them. But kids are very smart and when you use controlling methods to manipulate them, they quickly start using the same techniques to manipulate you, which is very annoying.

I may not go as far as advocating attachment parenting, because I think parents should also have a life and kids should learn to respect that, but I believe that attention is a good thing and that much of what we call “spoiled” behavior is actually due to lack of attention or not knowing how to pay attention.

In the past few weeks, I overheard talk about a teenager (let’s call him Jonathan), who used to be friendly and “normal”, besides being very talented, but who recently started to miss classes, show up late, fail various subjects and behave indifferently. One speculation was that he might have started using drugs, but he was clearly troubled.