Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘self confidence’

During my parenting workshops, I ask the parents to describe the challenges they have with their kids. Parents of teens often excuse all their challenges as the result of their kids reaching the “teen” stage. “You know how teens are”, they say.

During the workshops, we discuss many of our beliefs and how they affect our kids’ behavior and I hear myself saying to parents again and again that the image teens have is worse than their behavior. Teens are considered emotional, insensitive, subject to peer pressure, disrespectful, irresponsible and moody, but what they have is just a bad reputation!

I do not think it is a coincidence that all those teens have parents who are able to see beyond their hair color, their hairstyle, their piercing, their desire to be with friends, their rebellious behavior and their academic achievements. It is not a coincidence at all. It is a formula that works. If you can see beyond what is on the surface, you will raise happy teens and you will be a happy parent.

A few weeks ago, we attended a musical competition where my brother and his school band played. It occurred to me that every player in the band had a brother or sister in the crowd, some of whom were very resentful of their sibling up there on the stage. After all, it is hard to be that person in the crowd who misses out on all the attention.

When I was in high school, it was very common to hear stories about brothers and sisters who fought with each other constantly. I heard things like “My brother is so stupid. He’s always in the way” or “My sister is such a terror she never listens”.

Now that I am at university with students who are a little older, they are much more aware of the reasons behind it all, but they still seem to fight and argue a lot with their siblings. When I ask if they get along with their siblings, they reply, “Sure don’t. He hates my guts” or “No way! I can’t stand her”. One of my friends was on such bad terms with her sister she would wish on an almost weekly basis that her sister would hurry up and move out.

It is said that sibling rivalry is influenced by things like parental treatment, birth order, personality and experiences. Apparently, sibling rivalry is particularly strong when one child is gifted.

As a parent, I often wonder how my kids interpret their world. Besides being younger than I am and lacking experience, they have grown up in a period and an environment so different to mine this is worth looking at.

Try to remember the last time you watched the news on TV. The anchors smiled most of the time, didn’t they? They even exchanged jokes from time to time, right? But the topics on the news were all doom and gloom – shootings, robberies, dishonest politicians, government decisions you may not like, etc.

Is it appropriate to behave cheerfully when you deliver bad news?

Now, consider most of the “sitcoms”. In a typically conversation, the audience is the real listener and the participants are just acting out a script, so delivering hurtful words, putting others down and using sarcasm are all “part of the deal”, while keeping a posture and facial expression that says, “Yeah! I’m all that”.

But in our daily life, there is no audience. The only ones hearing the words are us and we get hurt by them. And when someone we love says something that hurts and looks like they have just won the lotto, it makes us wonder how much they care.

I believe these things (and others) are leading our kids to distrust body language, facial expression and tone of voice as ways to receive messages from others. Worse, by often mimicking this inconsistent behavior, our kids are actually training themselves to lie better, which makes me worry for them sometimes.

This week was the first week of tutorials at my university and we got to meet our tutor. You will be glad to know that my tutor is a bright young man in his mid 20′s with quite a bit of knowledge. From his introductory spiel, I gathered he had finished his honors year and is now in the process of applying for a PhD. As you may have noticed, he seems to have skipped some years, which should have been dedicated to his Master’s degree, but it seems this young man is quite smart.

As the tutor went through his slides, he kept putting himself down. He was using these slides to let us know we should criticize him if we discovered he was wrong, because that would be “his fault” and we should call him up if we do not understand, because sometimes “he” is unclear, and other quite harsh comments about his lack of knowledge being due to his nature and his inabilities. This was a bit of a shock for me, because he seemed quite nice and knowledgeable and he really had not taught us anything which could possibly have been wrong.

If the tutor was simply being humble about being smart or being nice or knowledgeable, I think that would have been OK. But there is a point at which this self criticism becomes a little bit more internal and that is where problems start.

Being parents means our job is to prepare our kids for the future, particularly for the unfortunate event of us stopping to be there for them. Whitney Houston made the phrase “I believe the children are our future” famous singing The Greatest Love of All.

Yeah, well, this is exactly it: we need to stop thinking about how we used to be and focus more on how things are for our kids right now and how they are likely to be for them in the future. Lingering in the past is possibly the biggest disservice we can do for them.

We must grasp the idea that our kids’ life is going to be incredibly different from ours and that there is really no way to know for sure what it is going to be like. In fact, it is likely to keep changing all the time and very rapidly, which means we need to build them for change.

Parents want the best for their kids. We all know how important it is to brush our teeth in the morning and in the evening in order to keep germs away and avoid cavities and pain, not to mention large dental bills. But did you know that having white teeth can do a lot not just for your kids’ health, but also for their psychology and their level of success in life?

Well, when people smile, showing a full set of white teeth, it can be seen up to 200 meters. Whether we like the idea or not, people associate white teeth with success. I would want my kids to know that, together with the health benefits of taking care of your teeth.

We happened to watch a TV piece on top models’ body image, eating habits and self-inflicted damages.

Top model Jessica Gomes (24) said the pressure on models to be slim was enormous and that models are afraid to miss out on work opportunities in the highly competitive fashion industry, so they use some excessive methods to keep themselves trim. She said models run for days on a mix of lemon juice and maple syrup, which also “cleanses”. To keep their energy up and be able to work, they drink coffee and use Cocaine.

The article mentioned Ana Carolina Reston (see her in the pictures), a famous Brazilian model who died from Anorexia at the age of 21, weighing 40kg (88lbs). Her mother told the press Ana had eaten nothing but apples and tomatoes for 2 months before she died.

Although the article did a very good job showing models who decided to eat normally and still got excellent jobs, Ronit and I were left with a very painful question:

Where are those top models’ parents?

As a parent, I am in constant search for parenting tips. In my parenting workshops, I have a goal of learning at least one great parenting tip from my audience and you know what? I always do and I am very happy and grateful for it.

At the beginning of my education career, I gave up one big desire: to re-invent the wheel. It was not easy, because some people thought it made me less creative, but I always gave the example of my mom as a chef – she uses the same ingredients as everybody else but combines them differently. Over time, I stopped asking her about cooking recipes and started asking more about cooking tips, because with the click of my mouse, I can find millions of recipes, but they all lack the experience.

It is the same in parenting. It is even truer in parenting. Asking parents what works for them is a great way to accumulate enough information and make a good parenting style from it.

In a way, when I asked the Top Parenting Bloggers to share their parenting tips, I hoped to find some I can adopt too. I was very happy to discover many good tips and I hope you will too.

Scientists and researchers think the Sudoku puzzle is one of the easiest ways to improve brain function (other brain boosters are a high-protein diet, listening to classical music and rest). The same way physical activity produces healthy bodies, playing Sudoku is an effective way to stimulate the brain. Playing Sudoku keeps brain cells from dying and keeps the brain active and vital.

Some schools have introduced playing Sudoku as part of their daily routine after discovering that kids who played the game had higher IQs.

Although you may think you need mathematical abilities to play Sudoku (I insist on calling it a game), Sudoku requires good visual perception, hand-eye coordination, logic and focus. In fact, every kid who can recognize the numbers from 1 to 9 and the order of the numbers (just recognize, without even knowing their value), can play Sudoku.

Two years ago, I wrote about choosing to be miserable in the The Art of Misery. It is amazing how many people in the world qualify for the Certificate of Misery and have mastered this art. For some strange reason, it is easier to master misery than happiness. I do not know exactly why that is, but for most people, the definition of happiness is so hard to achieve they can never be happy. Even when they have a happy moment, it does not last long enough to get them to the next happy moment.

In The Art of Misery, I gave 10 lessons in misery with clear instructions on how to pass each test and gradually move on to the next level. Although I wrote that only those who completed the program would be entitled to the certificate, I have discovered it is enough for people to master some of the lessons to declare themselves eligible.

In the last two years, I have had many requests to extend the misery course and I believe the time has finally come. After two years of practicing and holding your misery certificate, you are ready for the next level. Today, in the second part of the Misery Mastery “training program”, I will improve, refine and help you upgrade your skills. I will add 10 more things you can do if being just miserable is not enough and you really, really want to be extremely miserable.