Family Matters

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!

It was 5am and our 8-year-old daughter Noff came into our room. It was so dark I thought I was dreaming it.

It was early and dark and I sooooo wanted to go back to sleep, but when Gal came back from his search, I realized I had done it to myself.

“Do you know where Tsoof is?” she asked.

Tsoof is our 14-year-old son and shares a room with Noff. He never comes to our room so early in the morning.

I jumped out of bed with my heart pumping. Where on Earth could he be?

For a second, I imagined scenes from movies.

“Maybe he’s downstairs”, Gal said after searching every room upstairs and went down with Noff to solve the case of missing child.

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.

For some people, the beginning of a new year (and their birthday), is a sad day. When everyone around talks about goals, motivation and New Year resolutions, it is hard to avoid measuring our achievements from the previous year and those we have not achieved stand out like a sore thumb. “There you have it – another proof you have not achieved your goals and time is ticking. If you don’t get your act together, it’s going to be too late”.

Is it?

The ticking of time as it runs out is an illusion we adopt as soon as we learn to tell the time. Together with the sense of the achievement (that we can tell the time), the loss of freedom and hope starts creeping in as time starts to control us. This is the birth of the notion that something can be “late”, which sits in our mind together with frustration, helplessness and giving up. From there, the road to “too late” is short.

This morning, the phone rang at 7:25am. During business hours, I normally say, “Be Happy in LIFE, this is Gal”, but it was only 7:25am during Summer Break (we live in Australia) and I was still in bed, so I said, “Hello”.

The voice of a teenage girl or fragile young woman on the other end said, “I think I got the wrong number”.

Realizing this may have been due to the way I answered the phone, I said, “Maybe not. Who were you looking for?”

She said, “I was looking for someone to talk to. I thought this was the number for a company that helps people”.

“It is”, I said, trying to encourage her, “You got the right number. It’s just a bit early, that’s all”.

And before I could say anything else, she mumbled, “Oh, sorry”, and hung up.

That left me feeling helpless and frustrated.

Kids are very gullible. They love colors and sounds and quickly catch on to new trends and new celebrities. Being young, unfortunately, they do not notice to the messages being delivered straight into their little brains in bright color and pleasant sound.

Our 8-year-old daughter Noff brings home a kids’ magazine called Just Kidding. The name is great and so is some of the content, offering riddles, jokes and general information our kids proudly quote for us. Alas, the good stuff spans about 11 pages out of 48. All the rest is advertising, some of which is cleverly disguised as articles.

Ronit and I were pretty happy about this magazine at first, because our kids like to read, seemed to enjoy the contents and even benefited from having something to talk about at dinner time.

However, through some weird coincidence, one particular magazine lost its cover page and the bare contents found their way to our office desk, where we had a chance to examine them more closely.

About a month ago, I was sitting with the kids somewhere and we listened to the radio. Then, a song started playing that sounded like Pink at first, but not quite, so I listened to it closely.

My kids started singing along (the little buggers already knew it, no idea where from) and enjoying the words. Their faces lit up as they sang “It’s alright to be myself” and “It’s OK to be just who I am”.

This got me thinking that if ever there was a song every child and teenager should hear, memorize and sing out loud, it is this one. Self-acceptance is a key message we must all deliver to our kids and bury it deep in their minds, where it cannot ever be taken out. Believing they are OK gives kids the foundation for a confident and happy life, which is our aim as parents, isn’t it?

In many areas of life, we relive the same pattern over and over again, but we do not notice it. Just like riding a bike (the ultimate cliché about automatic habits), we pedal on, completely oblivious to each up and down movement.

Sometimes, circumstances make us take note of our patterns and we start thinking about them. Rarely, we change those ingrained ways of behavior and our life changes as a result, hopefully for the better.

Anthony Robbins compares human beings to thermostats. He says every person has a sense of where they feel comfortable and does many things subconsciously to stay in that place. Sure, everyone knows what would be better, but too good is also uncomfortable, because it does not fit our sense of identity and self worth.

So each of us lives within a certain range of “temperatures”. When it gets to “cold”, we take some action to “warm up”. When it gets to “hot”, we procrastinate for a while and even sabotage our previous efforts, until it is “nice and cozy” again.

One particular area in which this happens to us is our finances.

Yesterday, when I drove with my daughter Noff to a “girls’ night out” at her school, she said to me, “I wish I had a baby sister or a baby brother”. That started a conversation about what is best to be – the youngest in the family (she is 8 years old and she is the youngest), the middle child (in our case, this is my 13-year-old son Tsoof) or the eldest (my 20-year-old daughter Eden).

Well, it was very interesting having a conversation like this with an 8-year-old, but she was mature enough to detach herself from her desires, stay in the conversation and examine all the advantages and disadvantages of each position. Here is how the conversation went:

Every one of my parent coaching clients needs one important component of parenting – an appreciation of his or her qualities as a parent. They know very well what does not work and where they fall short, but cannot see what they already have that makes them good parents already.

If you think about it, realizing what they have is a problem for most people, but these qualities are the ingredients kids are made of.

My mom was a chef. She was a simple woman with limited academic education but with a lot of wisdom from years of working in big kitchens and making food for thousands of people.

She taught me it is impossible to go to the market with a list. You never know what the weekly specials are. “You do the best with what you have”, she told me. My mom has made an art out of it. If she went to the market and found a fruit of vegetable for next to nothing, she would buy a whole box of it (there were 7 people in our house). She was very proud of herself for making many different dishes with it and freezing some for a season when that fruit or vegetable was not available.

Parenting is the same – you do the best you can with what you have and when I say “what you have”, I mean the mix of who you are, who your kids are and what your circumstances are. In the Be Happy in LIFE parent coaching program, the parents’ skills, abilities and character traits are the basic ingredients for raising wonderful, happy kids.