Don’t Give Your Kids Psychiatric Drugs!

1 in 13 U.S. children take psychiatric drugs

No matter how hard parenting is, giving your child psychiatric drugs must be considered very seriously, because it is very often a bad idea. Here is why.

Working with parents and kids for 30 years, I can tell you that it is not easy to be a parent. It is not easy because unlike computers or other gadgets, kids do not come with an instruction manual and they do not behave in a way that is easy to predict.

Inexperienced parents react to things that do not work as they expect. Experienced parents, having raised other kids through the same situation, can see the patterns and not panic when something unexpected happens.

I realized this when I had an early childhood center. After working in a group of 30 toddlers, I became an experienced parent in a flash. Why? Because when you deal with 30 kids, you can see that when your child does not behave the way you expect, he/ she is still normal. When you see your toddler touching his/ her sex organs, you may think something is wrong with him/her, but when you see 30 toddlers doing it, and you see them stop when you do not pay attention to it, you feel a bit more relaxed about your own toddler and comfort yourself that he/she is normal.

Inexperienced parents have a problem with the concept of normality. Since they have nothing to compare to, they do not know what is normal and what is not and too often jump to the conclusion that something is wrong with their child and needs to be fixed. This fear and doubt mindset about children’s development, behavior and achievement can cause many problems, mainly because it determines the parents’ course of action.

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Kids under Stress: How to Deal with Stress the Easy Way

In Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists, I covered easy ways to diagnose symptoms of stress in children, without having to go to psychiatrists that are very likely give your child medication that might prevent them from developing coping mechanisms and might damage them for life.

Once you have confirmed the stress, you will want to know how to deal with stress and start helping your child. So here is a list of easy solutions you can use at home to help your child cope. No Psychiatrists. No Medication. These methods take the same time to work as medication does, are just as effective and have no side effects, so they are much better in the long run.

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Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists

Boy looking worried. Worrying too often can be one of many stress symptoms

Stress is the epidemic of the modern world. All health concerns are associated with stress and as time goes on, stress goes up and stress symptoms show earlier and earlier in life. I was shocked to discover that psychiatrists now prescribe drugs to children as young as 3 years old!

Yes, instead of teaching children to deal with the feelings they have, which is what emotional intelligence is all about, we give them drugs that prevent their body from coping and developing the mechanisms to cope with stress.

Use of drugs to manage stress prevents the body from producing chemicals to calm the body. Over time, the stress increases and we have to increase the use of drugs to cope with natural and healthy life processes. Sadness, disappointment and anger are all healthy feelings, essential for our survival. The use of drugs to suppress them sends a message to the body that they are not healthy feelings for us and makes us helpless and powerless.

As a parent, I have a strong desire to keep my kids away from therapists (yes, even doctors, as much as I can). Why? Because for some reason, kids who are in therapy for a long time form the belief that something is wrong with them. As a life coach and special education professional, I can tell you that working with disabilities and learning difficulties is much easier than working with a child that thinks something is wrong with him or her.

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Love without Boundaries: Watch this Inspiring Video

Love without boundaries - black man and pregnant white woman holding heart shaped hands

We learn about love from the second we are born. We are not always aware of the love around us, but it is always there – love without boundaries.

Some say that love is the energy that feeds us throughout life – it is food for our soul, and without it, we are doomed to die.

There have been many songs written about love. One of the interesting things about it is that most people learn to appreciate the love they took for granted when it is under threat or when it is tested.

On the flip-side, there is hatred and discrimination. For the last 8 years, I have been very active in the field of diversity education. I was sad to discover that there was a lot of discrimination and labeling, lots of bullying and bias towards others. And this was coming from children who simply cannot deal with others’ being different from them.

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Common Myths about Kids’ Learning and Success

Sometimes, kids’ worst obstacles are their own parents’ misconceptions about kids’ learning and success. As a teacher, I have seen many kids struggle on a daily basis to meet the extremely high and unrealistic expectations their parents set for them. These high expectations for children usually go hand in hand with expectations parents set for themselves.

Such extreme standards bring pressure, tension, pain, depression and a great feeling of inadequacy, both for the parents, and the child. Unfortunately, children carry this feeling with them into adulthood, and raise their own kids using the same misconceptions.

Here are some common myths I have heard over the years, about what will bring success and facilitate kids’ learning.

Myth #1: Kids’ learning is improved by pain and punishment

It is true that humans over time have learned through cause and effect. They improve and evolve by seeing the consequences of their actions.

However, using punishment as a teaching tool does not make children learn what you think (not even if you call it “consequences”). They learn to be afraid and to avoid the punishment. The lesson you were trying to teach them is completely lost. This is because the need to avoid pain is stronger than almost anything and they will do whatever they can to avoid it.

The more painful the punishment, the less they will learn of what you are actually trying to teach them.

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Character Traits: Swapping the Bad for the Good

In the previous post about bad character traits, I gave an exercise to examine the bad traits parents and kids have. In this post, I will focus more on the good character traits and how to make sure they are “watered” well and kept alive.

Here is the list of good character traits again:

Letter A: Active, Adaptable, Adventurous, Agreeable, Appreciative, Articulate, Athletic, Ambitions, Artistic, Aesthetic

Letter B: Balanced, Brilliant, Brave

Letter C: Calm, Capable, Caring, Charismatic, Charming, Cheerful, Careful, Clean, Clever, Colorful, Compassionate, Confident, Conscientious, Considerate, Consistent, Contemplative, Cooperative, Courageous, Courteous, Creative, Curious, Crafty,

Letter D: Daring, Decisive, Dedicated, Deep, Discreet, Dramatic, Dynamic

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Kids’ Personality Traits: How to Change Them with Awareness

If our children are like a garden, we the parents are the gardeners. If you have a garden at home, you know that when you take care of your garden, it looks beautiful and has lots of flowers and grows healthy nutritious fruits. If you neglect your garden or worse, water it with weed killer, no flowers or fruits will grow. Our kids are the same. If kids are the garden, and kids’ personality traits are the plants, we need to water them with great love and care and remember that their early years are critical.

Think about it this way: if wanted to have a big plant of tomatoes, you would water it with water and use fertilizer that that supports healthy tomato growth. It is the same with kids and their traits. If you wanted your child to grow kindness like you would grow a tomato, you need to water with support, not a weed killer, to help it grow. It’s a simple rule and a simple process.

One thing people are often uncomfortable about is saying their child’s personality has “traits”. If you are not 100% comfortable with calling it traits, call it a behavior that is constant or that appears more often than not. I, for example, am not 100% comfortable calling it a trait. That is because I don’t believe a child who is being stubborn on several occasion means that they are stubborn as a personality trait. It is a behavior he/she has learned in some way. If we learn it, we can always un-learn it, or learn a new or opposite trait. This time, I cannot say the process of un-learning is simple. It is definitely possible, but not always easy and simple.

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How to Destroy Good Character Traits in Children: G-Z

Girl with thumbs up, boy with thumbs down

In the previous chapter of the helping kids build character series, I explained about the beliefs we try to instill in our kids. We need to focus on encouraging the good character traits we want our children to have. We should not try to prevent the characters we don’t want them to have.

If good character traits are like plants, the fear that your child will develop a bad character is like watering the plant with weed killer. The character will never grow. For good character to grow and flourish, we need to water it and give it nutritious and healthy fertilizer.

In the last chapter, we listed the A to F of good character traits that we want our kids to have. We talked about some of the major weed killers that prevent these good character traits from growing. This chapter covers the good character traits from G to Z.

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Do Parents Let Their Kids Play Violent Video Games?

Recently, I received a question from a mother who said her teenage kids wanted to watch violent video games and they claimed other parents allowed their kids to do so. They thought she was just being mean and ignorant of what was happening in the world. “I do not like the idea of them playing violent and sexist video games but I feel helpless”. Her idea was to design a questionnaire for parents and see if her teenagers were right. She asked me what I think of her idea. Here is what I wrote to her:

Your experience is quite normal and it is wonderful to read that there are people like you still out there, advocating for children to be engaging in healthy activities!

Feel free to set the rules in your house. Your teen is a teen. He does not set the rules. You do! He is welcome to make different rules in his house!

You don’t need a questionnaire to back up what you already know is right. You can be the captain of your own family ship, regardless of what other parents do.

Kids cannot buy their own games, computers, iPhones, etc. You have a lot more power than you think! I have clients who found amazing result when they put their kids on a technology diet for a week. Their kids were suddenly like new! If they can’t use your credit card and don’t know your PayPal password, you have nothing to worry about.

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How to Destroy Good Character Traits for Children: A to F

In the last chapter, of the Helping Kids Build Character Series, I explained the nature of watering with weed killer. There are certain things we do as parents that prevent good character traits from developing.

If you want to encourage good character traits in your children, there are some important things you should do differently.

Here is a list of good character traits that will not develop in the presence of bad beliefs (“weed killers”). Read them. If there are phrases on the list that you recognize in yourself, try removing them from your day to day speech. See if you can replace them with more positive phrases.

Over the years, I have worked with many parents who succeeded in changing the seeds they were planting, from poisonous communication and planting helpful beliefs. Being a parent can be a burden and a blessing. If you were the one who watered your child’s character with weed killer (rather than nutritious water), only you have the power to change it.

Parents have an amazing power. I have seen many kids and coached many people about beliefs. Working with parents has always been the best solution because me telling a kid “your parents love you” is meaningless compared to a parent saying “I love you”.

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