Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘health / wellbeing’

The world today is a rich, technologically advanced, ever-changing, interesting, exciting, confusing, demanding, fast-paced, interconnected, stressful, cold, impersonal and sometimes abusive place. We live a different life from any other period. What does this mean?

To many of us, it means we feel trapped. We often hear or read the term “rat race” as a description for the way we live – like rats in somebody’s lab, running around, trying to find a way out or get to the reward at the end of a confusing and frightening maze. Trouble is we do not even know whose lab we are in and we feel helpless and out of control.

In his excellent book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes some fascinating events and research about how our environment affects our behavior and the behavior of those around us. Sometimes, it can drive a man to kill, but when managed well, it can lower the crime rate and improve the lives of many people. He calls this “The power of context”.

The book highlights some things that we can all use to regain control of our lives, improve the quality of our time on Earth and make the world a better place for our children and even for other people around us.

Parents are the most important agents of socialization in our society. Unlike teachers, who are the second biggest influencers on children, the same parents are around their kids while their teachers change. It is only sensible to think that if we want to support kids’ health and wellbeing, we need to support the most important people in their life – their parents.

I came up with the idea of supporting kids by supporting their parents about 20 years ago when I had an early childhood center. I could increase my young kids’ success and confidence whenever I got to the parents and made the partners in the process of education. There was 100% correlation between the success of the child (1½ years old to 4 years old) and the level of their parents’ involvement. My young students could read, do math and solve 60-pieces puzzles. They had the fine and gross motor skills expected of kids 3 years older than they were. At first, their parents did not believe their own eyes, but I just sent all their games and work sheets home so they could see their kids were able to do everything I said they could.

After 25 years in education, I can dare to say that investing in the parents is the most effective investment in children. And as with any investment, the sooner you start, the greater the returns.

I believe that government organizations should be investing in parents, but until that time, I will use this blog to help parents help themselves.

Here are the next 5 tips to help parents stop the cycle of bullying, help themselves and help their children be confident and avoid being bullied, being a bully or being a silent bystander.

Everybody feels bad sometimes – sad, lonely, upset, worried, even angry. OK, except Tibetan monks, maybe, but only after 20 years of meditation and a strict diet of warm water. The rest of us sometimes feel bad.

The problem with feeling bad is not so much that we find something hard to deal with, but that we have been brought up not to feel bad, so we feel really bad about feeling bad. That, of course, makes everything worse, because now, we are feeling bad about ourselves and blocking ourselves from processing and letting go of the original bad feeling.

When I was growing up, I was often told that only girls cried. “Take it like a man”, people said to me and to all of my friends who were boys. The girls were not supposed to take it like men, but they were instructed not to bother others with their feelings and to “show their happy face” like “a good girl” should. So happiness was clearly good and resentment, anxiety, regret and sorrow were bad.

Many parents have issues with kids and food. I have to say that running a family and making sure they stay healthy is not easy, especially when your kids are babies and your heart aches with them whenever they are sick.

I added the connection between food and health to my bible after a huge pain of trying very hard to get rid of Eden’s pneumonia when she was just an 18-month-old baby. By the time she was 2 years old, Eden had been sick with pneumonia 3 times already and had been constantly on antibiotics and inhalers. Before those scary 6 months, I had never thought about what I ate and had just gone to the supermarket and bought the same things my parents and Gal’s parents had.

One of my friends, who was trying to help me, told me Eden should eat certain things and avoid eating others to improve her health. I thought she was not normal (which was true, but in a good sense) and that food had nothing to do with germs and health problems. It was only later, when we discovered Eden was sensitive to dairy food, that I realized just how tight the relationship between food and health was.

Food, and only food, was the difference between having a very sick girl (with pneumonia that 6 months of antibiotics could not fix) and having a healthy girl that went to see the doctor only once in the following 20 years. Food, and only food, was the difference between being anemic and having a healthy iron level. During my second, third, fourth and fifth pregnancies, while every other woman had to take iron tablets, my iron level was strong and stable, even the doctor was shocked. Food, and only food, was the difference between Gal having sinus surgery to unblock his nose and not needing that surgery until today.

Labeling is humans’ way of making things easier to deal with, or so they hope. I think it is probably because of our limited language. For example, if you had to pick a color, you might call it blue, but if you check carefully, you would find many shades of blue. In the graphics world, they do not even call it blue. They use numbers. Labeling is our way of understanding that when somebody says, “Oh, I love it when the sky is #87CEEB”, they mean “a medium-light shade of blue”.

I am not against labeling. I use labeling a lot in my work, especially with kids, because it saves a lot of time explaining the range of each label. Instead of saying, “On a scale of 1 to 100 of being scared, you scored 30″, I say, “You are very cautious and that should be really appreciated”.

But what happens when professionals become too attached to the labels they give kids?

Recently, I watched a video done by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. I would like to support their cause by encouraging all the parents in the world to watch it and I know you will enjoy.

An old Chinese proverb says “Fall seven times, get up eight”. While in the past, people thought that high intelligence or IQ would guarantee falling less often, research on emotional intelligence has discovered that smart people fall exactly as often as anybody else, but those with high emotional intelligence are better at “getting up”.

Optimism is better than Knowledge
During the 80′s, Martin Seligman researched optimism and its effects on people’s performance. One of his greatest discoveries was presented in his research of insurance sales people. Seligman convinced an insurance company to hire people who passed the optimism test but failed their standard test. He compared their sales to those of sales people who were hired based on the standard tests alone. In the first year, Seligman’s group sold 21% more than the other group did. In the second year, they sold 57% more! The conclusion of his research was that optimistic people handle rejection better than others.

One great art that will help you get up again, whether you are facing a challenge or difficulty in your personal life or business, is the art of NEXTing.

There are many things kids do not realize because they are too young. Most of them are related to knowing nothing about tomorrow and just living in the moment. One of these things is maintenance, particularly the need to maintain our physical and mental health. But maintaining our health is too important to ignore.

A few days ago, I went for a walk with Eden, who is a 22-year-old student of psychology. I was telling her about my previous day, when she asked me, “Dad, what’s with all these therapies and supplements and stuff? When will you be healthy and stop them already? When will it all end?”

She was referring to my visits to the chiropractor, kinesiologist and behavioral optometrist, which, admittedly, I was hoping would take a lot less time to get my spine straight, my body balanced and my eyes reading as quickly as I want them to. She was also referring to the various stretching exercises I now do and the occasional supplement I take to aide in those various treatments.

Modern times have put us in charge of our health and wellbeing and as parents, of the health and wellbeing of our kids. Gone are the days of the good old doctor who knew everybody by name and actually cared about them. House calls are certainly a thing of the past.

- We must take responsibility for our own health, because nobody else will do it

- We must take responsibility for our children’s health, because it is part of the “job description” and they are important to us

- We understand that being healthy is a prerequisite to doing well at school and at work, to staying alive longer and to enjoying life

- We live a lifestyle that is faster than ever and far more stressful, which is bad for our health

- We eat food made to taste good, not to be nutritious, which means that most of us do not get what we need out of it

- We need to prevent physical and mental issues and keep ourselves balanced, rather than treat symptoms

- We already use chemicals to overcome our challenges and we are typically aware of their effects (good and bad) on our body and mind

So why not use food supplements?

We are not experts, but we have found value in some food supplements, despite having to overcome the feeling we are self-medicating. We have tried superfoods and spices, as well as pills and capsules. We have tried “natural” products and “artificial” ones, and we have not found the complete answer yet.

Maybe if we parents get together and discover the best ways to supplement our life and the life of our kids, we will all be healthier, happier and more successful.

Last month, someone very close to me (I will call her Naomi) went through a very tough decision. She discovered on the 19th week of her pregnancy she was carrying a baby with Down Syndrome. Although she works as a social worker, she had no doubts about what she was going to do, but the people around her were not so sure.

Down Syndrome can be detected during pregnancy by checking the amniotic fluid (Amniocentesis) or after birth by a quick physical test. In 1866, a British physician named John Langdon Down described the condition. Almost 100 years later, Jerome Lejeune discovered it was caused by an extra copy (whole or part) of the 21st chromosome. The chance of having a baby with Down Syndrome is 1 in 733, but it becomes more common with the age of the parents.

Apart from very distinctive facial features, the average IQ of kids with Down Syndrome is 50, as opposed to the general IQ average of 100. Their health is very poor and their life expectancy is very low, and even though their life expectancy is increasing, the intellectual and physical disabilities remain part of their life and the life of their parents.

Family Matters is taking some time off from researching, coaching and writing and heading off on a family vacation. After all, this is why we do what we do – to help ourselves have a better family time together.

It has been an awesome year for us. We were very proud and happy that our daughter Eden, our happy thought, joined us in writing this year. We have had many personal achievements at work, in our relationships and with our kids. The only wish we have for ourselves is that next year will be even better. Better is a good formula for a happy life.

We want to thank all of the 150,000 readers we have had this year and give special thanks to all those who have posted comments, shared their opinions and contributed to the community of parents and educators around this blog. Whatever your personal views, we love to read them and engage in a discussion on the important aspects of parenting with you.