Family Matters | Practical Parenting Blog

Sharing Clothes in the Family

Over the years, I’ve set thousands of goals, and still do. Not because I haven’t achieved my goals, but because my family grows and evolves, and I never stop adding wants and desires, with action, into my family journey. As an example, here is how I’ve achieved the goal of sharing clothes in the family.

The first time I asked the hard questions was the time I woke up. You need courage to do that and I had it when I was 16 years old. I asked myself “What do I not like about my family and how can I change my life without getting rid of any family members?” Obviously, getting rid of my family was not an option, and understanding this was enlightening by itself.

I asked and asked and asked for weeks without an answer. Then, it hit me that the answer was to change myself. That was a very hard understanding and I went through some resistance to it for a while.

I believed my family members “wronged” me and changing myself meant they could keep doing what they’d always done, which was unfair!

Fairness has always been my weakness (still is in some ways). I’ve always wanted things to be fair and had this internal sense of justice my family just didn’t get.

So, I asked myself “What does fairness mean?” It was amazing what came up, which was different from the dictionary definition of the word.

This post is part 4 of 6 in the series Family Goals

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Goals and Actions

In the first post of the family goals series, I introduced “the taxi driver” – the part of our mind we need to work with to make changes. When we want to make changes, it’s like directing a taxi driver to take us to a desired destination. I shared a list of questions we must answer to give our “taxi driver” good directions.

In the post on family goal setting, I explained how to use the answers to those questions to write goals and how to write them in the way that will help us make the desired change.

In this post, I would like to talk about how focus helps the driver navigate the ride to suit your needs and get to the destination faster.

Many people say that they know what they want, but they don’t know how to get it. It is true that sometimes, the goal seems so far-fetched or hard-to-get that people feel overwhelmed and freeze. It is as if they know the destination, but don’t know which path to take to get there.

The thing is you don’t need to find the path. You just need to focus on what you want, and the “taxi driver” will do the rest. If you dedicate time to clarify your goals, that will help your taxi driver achieve them for you in a way that aligns the most with what you want.

This post is part 3 of 6 in the series Family Goals

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Ovarian Cancer: Awareness is Key

I didn’t know what ovarian cancer was until my mother-in-law died from it. It started with what looked like breast cancer. She removed her breast, and years later, it started again and spread to her bones and liver. Only on her last months of her life, when things were hopeless, the doctors discovered she had ovarian cancer.

My mother-in-law was very dear to me. I knew her since I was 16 years old and she was very special in my life. She was a courageous woman who inspiring to me. I don’t think I’ve recovered from her death yet.

When our daughter got married, she was not here with us. When our granddaughter was born, I was sad she was not here to meet her great-granddaughter. In the last 10 years of our lives, she has not been here to experience life with us.

There were many questions about what she would have done if she knew. If she was diagnosed earlier, she could have been saved. Removing her ovaries earlier (after having all her children) could have guaranteed she would still be with us, and not just in spirit.

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Choosing the Right Career Path for Your Kids

Parents worry about their children choosing the right career path. Some people start these worries very early in their kids’ life. I know parents who have registered their babies to a special daycare center when the mother discovered she was pregnant.

Don’t get me wrong, I think education is important and planning children’s future is important too, but choosing a child’s career path before he or she is born?

I met Miguel when he contacted me about child coaching. He wanted me to work with his son, Luca. When I asked him and his wife to tell me about Luca, they only had negative things to say right from the start.

This post is part of 18 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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I’m Disappointed in You!

Think of the last time anyone said to you, “I’m disappointed in you”. How did that make you feel?

Being disappointed is part of life. I guess it is one of the greatest challenges in life. Realizing that life is not happening the way you want and managing to push through despite it.

Although being disappointed is part of life, being disappointed in others should not be. When I work with my life coaching clients, we deal with a lot of disappointment. Sadly, what hurts them most is not self-disappointment – that things didn’t happen the way they “should have” – but being a disappointment to someone close.

When I think of all the times I have heard this, I can see two groups of people that express disappointment in my clients: teachers and parents, in this order. I dare say that they cause a lot of damage.

Disappointment is “sadness or displeasure caused by the non-fulfilment of one’s hopes or expectations”. Therefore, saying to someone, “I’m disappointed in you”, is telling that person he or she is not fulfilling your hopes and expectations.

Who are you to cause someone a bad feeling for not fulfilling your expectations?

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Family Goal Setting: Set Yourself Up for Success

Family goal setting is very important. If you’ve had a chance to read the post about family goals, you know that for a family to be happy and successful, you need driven parents who give good instructions to their “taxi driver”.

The taxi driver is the “creature” we have in our mind that at any point in time, asks us “where would you like me to take you?” and to do a good job, he needs two sets of coordinates – pickup point and destination – and very clear and specific instructions.

If you’ve answered the tough questions in the previous post, you should now have a better perspective on what you want your family to be like. You are already in better shape than most of the parents in the world.

I can tell you that in my personal research of thousands of parents, most of them didn’t know what they wanted. They were the kind of passengers that tell their driver, “Drive”, without saying where. They say, “I don’t know what to expect. Just take me to where most people go”. This guarantees they will get lost and bump into lots of traffic jams.

This post is part 2 of 6 in the series Family Goals

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Make a List: 100 Reasons to Be Wealthy

Everyone wants to be wealthy. We want it for our children and for ourselves. The problem with being wealthy is that if you are not born to wealth and know exactly what it means, you don’t know how to get there.

The Internet contains millions of websites, blogs, podcasts and videos of people who promise you that if you do what they’ve done, you will become wealthy. If they were so successful, everyone who visited their site would be wealthy by now. Sadly, the transition from not being wealthy to being wealthy is filled with obstacles.

To me, wealth is a sense of security. Real richness is mostly about things that you have and no one can take away from you. We can be rich in memories, rich in experiences, rich in love and rich in friendships, not just possessions.

This post is part 44 of 44 in the series Make a List

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Parenting Autistic Children: Catch 22

The previous post in this series told the story of my first encounter with autism at a special school where I did work experience for 6 months. Today, I would like to introduce the problems families face when they notice something wrong in their child’s development. As you will see, the way the system works puts them in a Catch 22 situation.

Bringing a child into the world is a very exciting event in every family’s history. Noticing that something is wrong with a child is not easy to experience. As I’ve said before, mothers of autistic children were blamed in the past for the situation by the claim they did not connect with their child during the first weeks after birth.

Most of those moms sighed in relief when the results of an experiment confirmed that autistic babies were different from “normal” babies.

In the first stage of the research, every mom was given recordings of her baby crying and asked to guess the reason for the crying. Most moms of “normal” babies guessed correctly, while moms of autistic babies didn’t. So, those who advocated for the “let’s blame the mothers” said, “OK, then. That’s our proof”.

But the experiment continued.

This post is part 2 of 2 in the series Autism

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Make a List: Judgment of Right from Wrong

Judgment is a very tense concept. We hear many objections to it, like “Do not judge a book by its cover” or “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes”. Still, although judgment is considered negative, we have lots of judgment towards everything that happens around us.

The reason we do is that we need judgment to navigate through life. If you consider judgment as the process of determining right and wrong, then judgment is essential to our survival. This is especially true for social survival.

We must have some kind of judgment towards everything we do in life, because it helps us choose what to do and what to avoid doing. Judgment and decision-making are Siamese twins. They have the same DNA and are inseparable. Making decisions requires us to use judgment to determine which of our choices we consider the best. So, judgment is not bad if we use it to make better choices.

This post is part 43 of 44 in the series Make a List

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Family Goals: Let’s Ask the Tough Questions

Some people think it’s funny to talk about family goals, because they link goals with business and a family is not a business.

That’s true! They are not the same, but what drives them forward is exactly the same. Please note the word “drive”. Imagine that running a family is like driving a car. I can be a beaten car, no fuel, flat tires, squeaking wipers and no lights, or it can be in tip-top shape and race forward with air conditioning, a sound system, brand new tires and bright lights to show the way.

Which car are you driving your family in? What conditions are you creating for relationships to be strong and for the family members to succeed and be happy?

This post is part 1 of 6 in the series Family Goals

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