Family Matters

It was the third birthday our daughter had refused to celebrate with friends. For her 17th birthday, she invited a couple of girls to go out for a movie. For her 18th birthday, she spent the day crying because it was her grandmother’s funeral (and her dad was away to attend). When she approached her 19th birthday, we had the same discussions about a party all over again.

When I was kid, most of the kids wanted to have a party, at least on their birthdays. Only the “rich” kids could have parties every year. Some rare kids had parties more than once a year and those were obviously the most popular.

A couple of clients came to me for parent coaching because of a problem they had with their teen boy, and were very surprised when we went through Pink Elephants. They said, “We tell him every day NOT to hang around bad kids, but saying it only puts the focus on those kids we want him to stay away from”.

If you want to understand the influence of the groups on our life, put yourself at the centre of a circle and draw bigger and bigger circles around you for your family, friend, work colleagues, acquaintances and so on. The closest the circle to you, the more influence you allow this group to have on your life.

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.

It all started 18 years ago, when I wrote the “Garden of Eden” program, which put most of the emphasis emotional intelligence. I started an early childhood centre with kids aged 1½ to 4 and proved that excellence depends on the teaching, not on the kids.

For kids to be happy, they need to have boundaries. In the fish bowl, the fish cannot swim past the glass. Tiny fish prefer small, familiar, friendly bowls because they feel safer in them. No matter how many times they bang their heads against the glass, it still makes them feel safe, because it keeps the water around them and potential threats away from them.

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.

Pride is a selfish feeling. It is the reward we give ourselves for the love, the dedication, the heartache, the fears, the support, the caring, the worries and the sleepless nights (although I did not have too many sleepless nights with any of my kids). On every Journey we need rewards to help us keep moving forward. In parenting, pride is the best reward. It helps us convince ourselves parenting is worthwhile.

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?

Find the answers to all the good questions I was asked about my first teen book “Be Special, Be Yourself for Teenagers”.