Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘parents’

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.

Parents do not like to admit, but their attitude and personality contributes a lot to their kids’ desire to watch TV. In this chapter of TV Diet, I will cover some of parents’ behaviors and personalities that drive kids to watch more and more TV.

As you read, I hope you do not find yourself there, but if you do, do not despair. You can turn things around. Of course, as is the “Family Matters” tradition, change will start with you and I will give you the solution (later in the series, so subscribe or come back to read).

Some people shiver when I tell them about this task. If you have had a chance to read my earlier post about divorcing your parents, you know that, as sad as this may be, too many people do not have good relationships with their parents. And you know what? This is not good! No matter how horrible our parents might be (or rather how horrible we perceive them to be), this relationship does not stop to exist because we do not like it. It continues to influence us in a sad and bad way.

Don’t get me wrong, it is OK to be grown up most of the time. It is OK to work, to clean up, to look after the kids and to be nice to my wife. But all this being-an-adult business requires energy and very often self-denial of good things and sometimes, I simply run out of resources. Luckily, I have kids!

Last year, I wrote about my life lessons in a post called “34 Life Lessons I Have Learned”. I think I have learned so many more lessons that I would like to share with you.

Both my sisters were in their late thirties. One was living with her partner and was going through a very frustrating fertility treatment that took over two years without much success, while the other was slowly progressing in her relationship with her new boyfriend.

Unlike what the title suggests, most people in the world believe that Friday the 13th is a scary combination. Most people believe that if the 13th falls on Friday, bad things will happen. Believe it or not, believing in it makes it true.

When someone tells you weird things, you think they are “psycho” or “mental”, but if you later find out what they told you was true, then you start questioning your “psycho” theory and allowing for the possibility there might be something there. When the weird things they tell you come true again and again, you start believing that the person (in my case, my mom) is psychic and has unusual abilities.

There are many reasons to choose a name for a baby. My dad used to say the kids make their name special and it does not really matter what name it is. If Mom and Dad love the kid, their love will be expressed every time they call his or her name.

For a name to be perfect, it needs to fulfill the parents’ needs. When the name fulfills their needs, the parents feel they have made a perfect decision.

This is a true story, every word of it.

My auntie was about 40 years old when she got married. Everyone was very happy for her and my mom was the happiest of all, because her youngest sister and her only sister will finally have a chance to be a mother (at that time, my mom did not even consider having kids out of marriage).