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From Sickness to Health: Working Together on a Shared Goal

Last week, I shared with you how the stories my mother told herself brought pain into their life. My mother was in constant pain and was on loads of medications and pain killers and nothing really helped. She was depressed and often talked about dying. Even the joy of having 5 new grandchildren in the last 8 years didn’t help her, and my mom loves babies very much.

Today, I would like to tell you how my siblings and I gathered and made choices to change my mom’s life and heal her.

It started a year before my parents came to visit. My dad seemed very frustrated. Even the doctors said my mother needed mental help. One day, my siblings and I created a WhatsApp group and considered different ways to approach the problem.

This post is part 2 of 6 in the series From Sickness to Health

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Pocket Money: Parents’ Dysfunctional Attitudes

Pocket money is a topic that concerns many parents. “When to start, if at all?” and “How much to give?” are questions that almost every parent struggles with. To answer these questions, most parents should first answer the following question:

Why do I want to give my child pocket money?

I grew up in a poor family and pocket money was never an option for me. Only when I was 14 and we moved to a new town (which was only slightly bigger than the small town I grew up in), I discovered there was such a thing as pocket money.

I was so surprised. My parents had so little that whenever we asked my dad to buy us something, he said, “We don’t have money”. Therefore, in my mind, pocket money was part of wealthy kids’ life.

But it does not have to be.

Read Pocket Money: Parents’ Dysfunctional Attitudes »

Pursuing Parenthood: This is Your Chance!

On my living room wall, there is a picture of a woman with peacock feathers for hair. I drew it six years ago and called it “Mother”. I wanted my children to see it every day so they can see how much I love them and how proud I am being their mother.

Last week, when my youngest daughter and my son performed together, I asked them at the end of the show if they were able to see my feathers. They knew what I meant.

Over the years, working to help my clients work on their emotions, I came up with a new form of therapy. I call it “Pride Therapy”. I believe it is the cheapest, healthiest, fastest and most effective form of self-therapy. You work on your emotions, become a happy parent, raise happy kids and boost your happiness by being very proud of whatever your kids achieve.

Read Pursuing Parenthood: This is Your Chance! »

Resilient Teens: Bend or Break!

“Teens today have an easy life” is a very common phrase. I tend to think that grownups say it because they have forgotten what it means to be a teenager. They say that teens need more discipline, more structure, more rules, more determination and more motivation. I say they need to be more resilient, because teens today have it tough and need to be able to bounce back quickly and very often. They need to bend, so they do not break.

It is easy to look at your own teenage years in retrospect, with the “creative dementia” that comes with age, and say that they were fun. People forget. We are programmed to forget the tough things in order to survive, but expecting our kids to perform where we have failed ourselves is a double standard. The reason I have not forgotten my teenage experiences was that I have been working with so many teens since then. Even if I would have forgotten naturally, they have reminded me that this period brings with it many challenges. The physical-hormonal part of adolescence is a myth that grownups have created to help them forget that the social-emotional side is where they failed.

Read Resilient Teens: Bend or Break! »

You Can Change Your Life

Change is not easy and you can recognize the points that have changed your course in life only in hindsight. We call these points “quantum moments”. I have had many quantum moments in life and the ones that have steered me in the right direction included reading books, meeting inspiring people and attending empowering events. I contemplated each of them until I got to some realization that later became part of my being.

My biggest change in life was when I was 15 years old. I remember how before it, I dreamed every day of waking up to a different life. I said, “I wish…” and had millions of wishes. I hoped to be the Genie of the Lamp, but every morning realized I was not. I built up hopes and got up in the morning to realize they were just illusions that I had no power to fulfill.

You see, it is one thing to want and another thing to make it happen.

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The Power of Complimenting: Don’t Be Stingy

Some parents are stingy with complimenting. I do not blame them. They probably grew up with stingy parents, who probably grew up with parents that did not compliment them either. I have said many times that we suffer today for things our ancestors did, which have not evolved.

Wake up, parents! We do not need to do the same things our great-great-grandparents did, because in some areas of life, they were not great at all. Giving compliments was definitely one of these areas.

The belief “back then” was that compliments got in the way of “building character”. I have clients and friends who say it aloud, “If you compliment people, especially children, they become complacent”.

What?!

Since when is complacent a bad word, anyway?

Read The Power of Complimenting: Don’t Be Stingy »

No More Disappointment: The Biggest Loser Leads the Dance

Many forms of therapy try to help the client overcome pain. One big source of pain starts during childhood, when kids, with their lack of life experience, feel that they are a disappointment to their parents. Here is the story of Simon, who believed he was the biggest loser in his parent’s eyes.

Simon was an angry and frustrated teenager when he came to sit with me on my life coaching deck. I read what he and his parents had written to me and felt frustrated to see how yet another whole family was a victim of circumstances. Parents’ love can be overwhelming sometimes and being unaware of feelings and lacking the ability to manage them sabotages the relationships at home.

Parents need courage to realize that they are the most powerful in this dysfunctional dynamic, but most of them feel helpless and send their kids to be “fixed”. A relationship with a child is a dance. Some parents do not understand that they need to lead.

This post is part 17 of 17 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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The Power of Bilingualism

My introduction to learning languages and bilingualism happened 24 years ago, when we moved to Texas, USA, and our daughter started to learn English. As a Special Education teacher, I knew she would be fine, but as a mother, I was scared, because at the age of 4, with the language of a 10 year old, I was afraid she would be left behind.

She wasn’t!

Since then, I have been working with inspiring people who specialize in language acquisition and with many children of migrants around the world. I have learned that parents and teachers play an important role in supporting language development. If they understand the challenges and consider the myths around language, they can help kids with healthy language acquisition.

Read The Power of Bilingualism »

When Your Teen’s Friends are Bad Influence

As parents, we put all our heart and energy into raising our children to be the best they can be. We want them to be as healthy, friendly, successful and happy as possible. In their teen years, most of us are afraid that their friends will become the most important people in our teenager’s life. So we want to make sure those friends do not have bad influence over them.

Our investment in our children, both material and emotional, is tested several times during their life. Their social connections are one big test of parenting, because as parents, we try to pass our philosophy and values to our children. If they spend their time with friends who tell them the opposite, this may weaken their belief in our philosophy and our values.

Read When Your Teen’s Friends are Bad Influence »

Kids Eating Healthy Food: You Can Be This Lucky Too

When it comes to kids’ healthy eating habits, I was lucky, because my children, all three of them, have no issues with eating healthy food. Our children eat healthy food and were never “junkies”. My youngest had a sweet tooth for a while, but as soon as she entered her teen years, with great influence of some of her friends, she switched to cherries and blueberries. I told you I was lucky!

My parents were not that fortunate. All five of their children struggled with our eating habits and with our health. Some of us still struggle as grownups today. As a child, I was on antibiotics for three months of every year until the age of 12. When we were kids, my parents spent many days with us in hospitals and clinics when we got sick.

I was in a hospital once with each of my children and it was a great reminder that I did not want to raise my children to be sick.

Food and health are strongly connected!

Read Kids Eating Healthy Food: You Can Be This Lucky Too »

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