Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘identity’

Lucky me, I have 3 kids who are 23, 16 and 10 years old and they have never asked to get a tattoo. If you also believe your kids will never be able to predict what the future holds for them and would like to reduce the chances they will ask to get a tattoo, here is what I have done and I hope it will give you some ideas.

If you see a beautiful tattoo and you like it, say right in front of your kids that you think it is beautiful. Make sure you separate the beauty from the act of burning the skin. You do not want them to think you are old in your mindset and do not understand anything about beauty.

Let your kids express themselves. If they want to start putting makeup early, let them do it. Noff has had her own makeup kit since the age of 3. She used to go to daycare with her face full of lipstick (even as eye shadow). Makeup can be cleaned with soap, not with a knife.

Allow your kids to enjoy face painting everywhere they go. Learn how to do face painting yourself and do it from time to time. Each time their face is painted, ask them if they would like to have it for the rest of their life. Ignore the answer. You are only planting the question in their head.

Anorexia is a very debilitating disease. While it looks like there is a physical problem, the real problem is the one we cannot see with our eyes but the one we can see with our heart. As hard as it is to accept, choosing not to eat is a way to deal with difficult emotions.

Most eating disorders are the same. Eating (too much) or not eating (at all) is the solution to worry, to fear, to shame, to confusion, to failure and to guilt, and gradually, the simplest strategy seems to be to shut down the desire for food.

I do not know if you have ever fasted for fun, for health or for weight loss. There is a point when you no longer feel hungry at all. I think it is important for people to feel this point to understand that we can eat or not eat at will. To survive, we really do not need much food, so someone who chooses not to eat, really does not feel hungry, but still has those emotions that he or she tries to keep away. If you want to help a person who has anorexia, remember that focusing on the food is (again) working on the symptom and not the problem.

The best solution to anorexia is increasing the emotional intelligence. The first step is to recognize the feelings and the second step is to manage the feelings.

Today, I will focus on tips to mange worrying.

In the last three weeks, I gave you a sneak peek into teenagers’ minds. Many parents say to me, “If I only knew what’s happening in their mind…” and I think they have only forgotten what was on their mind when they were teens, or maybe they have forgotten the struggles their friends had during the toughest periods of their life – adolescence.

Here are the last 5 typical teenager thoughts and tips to prevent or eliminate them.

I prefer to be alone

“Thank God they are going away this weekend. I can have the house to myself. I can watch TV as much as I like, play the computer as much as I like and eat whatever I want. Freedom at last!”

What parents can do

When kids reach the teen years, they loves to be on their own sometimes and it is normal and healthy for them to be on their own. Even bringing a babysitter to stay with them (to take care of the other kids, of course) can give them that sense of freedom and it is not a sign of your good or bad parenting.

Having an evening when they can do something different is very attractive to teenagers and as a parent, you need to provide them with opportunities for such time. I remember myself at the age of 15 having the time of my life when my parents were away for the weekend. I did all the same things I did when they were there, but it felt better. On evenings when they went out, we played hide and seek in the dark and I still have wonderful memories of those special days.

This series is meant to help parents of teens and parents of kids who are turning into teens understand what teenagers think and what they go through as part of this tough period of their life. Each “twisted” thought is followed by something parents can do to help their teenagers and everyone else involved.

As in previous chapters, here are 5 things teens think and feel that scare them and make them act weird, and what you can do about them. I hope it will help you find alternative ways to address the issues and prevent them from keeping those thoughts any longer.

My parents are cruel and weak

“I think my parents are cruel. They hate me. They scream, shout and always tell me I’m wrong. They brought me into the world to torture me. They are weak. How can I trust them when I need help if they are so weak?”

What parents can do

When children are upset, they may think that you are behaving the way you do with the ultimate purpose of hurting them. Many parents mistake discipline for power when in fact, abusing your power and yelling, shouting or telling kids they are wrong are signs of weakness and may cause your children, especially teenagers, not to trust you to support them when they need help. This is because using pressure and force is all about you, not them.

I love tattoos. As a visual person, I find a lot of beauty in tattoos. I think tattoos are a form of art. I can find many justifications for having a tattoo. Much like most women (and some men) use makeup to make themselves look pretty, I can understand having a tattoo to look pretty. Although today, I will not get any piercing to damage my body, I can still remember that when I was younger, I decided to have a second piercing in one of my ears (my ears had each been pierced once by our neighbor when I was about 7 or 8 years old).

Still, I have to say it scares me to think of my kids getting a tattoo. I imagine their soft skin that I bathed and touched being damaged and it really frightens me to think that people damage their skin to look pretty.

Tattoos are a very sensitive topic. If you ask every person that wants to carve their skin and damage their body beyond repair on their motives, they will always say, “I like it!” or “It’s beautiful”, and I believe them. Some tattoos are amazingly beautiful. What I do not understand is having a beautiful tattoo that you cannot enjoy, because you put them on your neck or on your back and you cannot see them.

The problem with kids wanting a tattoo is that kids cannot imagine the future. They cannot imagine a time when their dazzling tattoo will become a problem. Unlike piercing in your ears, your nose or even your tongue, which you can hide by taking the jewelry out when you go to an interview or a tiny braid in your hair that you can cut off just before your wedding, tattoos are permanent and you cannot just make them disappear.

Being a teenager is not easy. Being a parent of teenagers is not easy either, but there are ways for parents to help make life easier for both. Here is a list of 5 more thoughts that teens have, which your behavior and attitude as a parent can change to make the teen years much nicer.

I must be adopted

“Maybe I was adopted. That explains the way they treat me. I’ve heard them saying I looked like Mom, but I look at my photos as a baby and I don’t look like either one of my parents or even like myself today. They could have adopted me when I was just a baby. That makes sense. I think this is why they love my brother more than they love me.”

What parents can do

Every child has this horrible thought at some stage. It is very natural to question your parents’ behavior as that of adoptive parents. There is no real way to prevent this thought from getting into kids’ mind, but there are good ways to make sure it will go away quickly, before it creates any damage.

Talk to your kids about their birth and talk about it a lot. Kids ask question about their pregnancy and birth to check if all the stories match. If Mom tells one story and Dad tells another one about the same birth, that will be odd, but if they tell the stories over and over and everything matches, they must be true!

Raising kids with confidence has been my goal ever since I started studying education. It was funny to discover along the way that teaching my kids knowledge was not going to make them successful and happy in life. At first, I was a bit disappointed to discover this, but as I have chosen to focus on the role of the most important agents – parents and teachers – in raising happy, confident, successful, healthy and friendly kids, I kept searching for ways that work.

I have 3 kids of my own and they are everything a parent can dream of. They are “the full package”. One of my friends told me that if she did not know them, she would think I was making them up. Almost every person who meets my kids asks us, “How did you do it?” Modestly, we say we were lucky, and we were. I am convinced that some things were just lucky, but no one wants to know about your luck, because luck is not something you can bring into your life. So these people say, “Come on, Ronit, tell us how you did it”.

I think I am using this parenting blog to say how I did it. As of today, there are 911 posts (is this a sign?) explaining how 3 kids in big differences in age, each born in a different place in the world, who each went through many changes in their life, can all be their parents’ bliss.

Today, I want to share with you a very easy trick to raise such kids. I call it “the mirror trick”.

In the past, people thought that teens’ behavior during the teenage years was directly connected to physical changes they start to experience at the age of 12, which makes them feel strange with their body changes and confuses them. Today, the approach is that adolescence is a more gradual process that starts with the first time children want to try doing things on their own, sometime as early as the age of 3.

If teenagers seem confused to you, it is mainly because they have reached a point in their life when they need to define who they are, what they think, what they like or hate, what their beliefs are and what they wants to be later on in life. These thoughts are tough. I know many adults who have not reached that self-definition yet, so this is not easy for a 12-year-old to do, although they are expected to have some clue about it.

Around the age of 10, beliefs that were part of children’s identity are shattered and they need to put the pieces together to survive emotionally. Kids with high emotional intelligence can do that, but most cannot, so they have to ask for help from those who unintentionally create the problem – their parents or their teachers.

This series will give you a sneak peek into teens’ confused brain and help you understand why it is so hard do be a teenager. I still remember my adolescence, I am raising my second teen, the third one is reaching puberty soon and I have worked with lots of teenagers in the last 25 years, so this list is quite reliable.

People with eating disorders like anorexia often have an exaggerated perception of life. It is as if they see the world through huge magnifying glasses and things that seem minor to others seem huge and overwhelming to them.

If you have anorexia or any other eating disorder, or if you have a child that has it and you want to help, it is important to focus on the thoughts and the mindset and not on the food. Not eating is not the problem. It is the solution that people with a distorted perception find for their problems.

Avoid trying to convince them to eat. It only makes things worse. Anorexic people need control, not a nagger.

Avoid punishing a child who has anorexia. It only increases their helplessness and their desire to control something (ANYTHING) in their life, like what they eat, when they eat and how much they eat.

Generally, anorexic people have a very bad self-image, considering self as useless, not worthy, a failure, stupid, an idiot, etc, and they use every little thing that happens in their life to reinforce it. They use their glasses to look for proof they are worthless and they do not consider single events as temporary or coincidental, but as part of their identity.

Here is a list of thoughts that make big things out of small things and demonstrates the effect of the huge magnifying glasses anorexic people wear. Each one you get rid of will reduce the magnifying effect.

I have clients who are perfectionists and they know they are perfectionists. They have been to some form of counseling or have seen psychologists and they claim that things have become worse since they discovered their perfectionism. The label “Perfectionist” has allowed them to justify their behavior and that has increased the friction in their relationships even more.

Most of them came for life coaching when they reached rock bottom in their relationship due to their high demands when their wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, friends, work colleagues or even boss said, “Get lost!” and kicked them out of the relationship or left them.

In the previous post on perfectionism, I wrote about ways to assess whether you or your children are perfectionists. In this chapter, I will give you some tips to help perfectionists. If you want to use them to help a child, remember that your goal is to plant those thoughts into your child’s mind or create circumstances that will help them overcome the fear that is associated with things not happening exactly the way they want them to.

I hope these tips will help you help your perfectionist child and if you need the help yourself, translate them into adult vocabulary and your own circumstances and make perfectionism a period in your life, not a lifestyle.