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Posts tagged 'abuse'

I’m OK, You’re OK Parenting: Shame

It is not easy to parent when our young kids just do not do what we want them to do. It was once popular to physically punish children for not doing what they are told. It was believed that if pain was associated with not doing what you are told, children would immediately obey.

This strategy was only useful for figures in authority (like parents and teachers). Unfortunately, it did not provide the desired outcome. Children simply learned not to get caught. If an authority figure disappeared or lost their power, the subject would revenge, big time.

After parents, there are authority figures like teachers, bosses, and managers who used shame as an alternative to physical punishment. It was a way to punish through emotional pain, without the physical pain. This seemed to work but the side effects can be severe.

This post is part 2 of 7 in the series I'm OK - You're OK Parenting

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Anorexia: How to stop worrying

Anorexia is a very debilitating disease. While it looks like there is a physical problem, the real problem is the one we cannot see with our eyes but the one we can see with our heart. As hard as it is to accept, choosing not to eat is a way to deal with difficult emotions.

Most eating disorders are the same. Eating (too much) or not eating (at all) is the solution to worry, to fear, to shame, to confusion, to failure and to guilt, and gradually, the simplest strategy seems to be to shut down the desire for food.

I do not know if you have ever fasted for fun, for health or for weight loss. There is a point when you no longer feel hungry at all. I think it is important for people to feel this point to understand that we can eat or not eat at will. To survive, we really do not need much food, so someone who chooses not to eat, really does not feel hungry, but still has those emotions that he or she tries to keep away. If you want to help a person who has anorexia, remember that focusing on the food is (again) working on the symptom and not the problem.

The best solution to anorexia is increasing the emotional intelligence. The first step is to recognize the feelings and the second step is to manage the feelings.

Today, I will focus on tips to mange worrying.

This post is part 5 of 8 in the series Anorexia

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Help

Imagine you are faced with a problem, things are hectic and you are under a lot of pressure. Do you ask for help? Do you look around you and see kind people you can lean on in your time of need or do you see people you should be careful of, who might start perceiving you as weak and incapable?

Everyone starts life totally and utterly helpless. Excuse the French, but we cannot even wipe our own bum. We just lie there, wiggle out arms and legs and pray that someone will be kind to us and feed us when we are hungry, hold us when we need a cuddle and clean us when we feel uncomfortable for some strange reason.

Later on, we spend our life becoming more and more independent and developing more and more skills, but for the most part, we are told precisely what to do by people who think they know everything (and we think so too). Often, we try to do things on our own, but then those great people tell us off and instruct us in the “right” way of doing them.

So we build a sense of inadequacy into our identity during our first years of life and it is a serious challenge getting rid of it and starting to believe in our own power and abilities. It is tough to feel we are worthy, capable, responsible, “good enough” individuals.

When we face a difficult situation, our stress is often not a result of the level of technical or physical difficulty. It is a result of having a little identity crisis.

“Oh, my God, I have no idea how to do this, but I expect myself to be able to. What is the boss/Mom/my partner going to think of me now? I’m so useless and incompetent”.

This, in turn, causes our brain’s memory and creativity areas to be inhibited to the point of dysfunction, which makes matters even worse. It also causes us to fear the people around us, even those who can help us with our problem.

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Your Inner Child

Last night, Ronit and I went out on our weekly date and watched a film called Oranges and Sunshine about a British social worker who uncovers the deportation of many children from England to Australia over many years.

The movie suggests that the British government was helping the Australian government keep Australia white and reducing its own population of poor people by shipping children in foster care and orphanages to Australia, where they were supposed to be educated and then allowed to live as citizens.

What actually happened (according to the movie) was that these children were used as slave labor and abused physically, sexually and emotionally. They grew up to be confused, troubled adults who wondered about their identity, felt rejected and abandoned by their parents and betrayed by the people who were meant to care for them.

For me, both Ed’s story and Oranges and Sunshine brought up a really troubling question, “How can anyone abuse a child?”

Read Your Inner Child »

Kids in Power Prison (2): The great debate

This is part 2, where you will find out what happened at the camp when I gave the group of student leaders power over their friends.

Boys vs. girls, late group vs. those who came on time, punishment vs. forgiveness. The hot debate lasted for a whole hour, but in the end, did the children pass the power test?

It was scary for me to see how easy it was to fire them up, divide them and move them towards forgetting where they were, who they were and what was important for them. Many of them just surrendered to the feeling of power and control, but not all.

This post is part 2 of 2 in the series Kids in Power Prison

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Kids in Power Prison (1): The prison experiment

Two months ago, I took a group of kids to a leadership camp for two days. During these two days, we wanted to teach kids to recognize their abilities and take the role of leadership with responsibility.

The kids were awesome, chosen student leaders in Grade 7, which is the last year of primary school here in Queensland, Australia. They came from 5 schools and had been school captains for more than 7 months. As part of their role, they needed to set an example to other kids and help solve relationship problems among the students at their school. They were chosen because they were smart kids, sensitive and with a high sense of justice. According to their principal and teachers, most of them had passed many tests to become leaders, but they were not ready for the test I had for them – The Power Test.

Before I tell you what happened at the camp, I want to tell you about a famous experiment in psychology, the Prison Experiment, which was the inspiration for my character test. I learned a lot from this experiment and even more from running it myself with a group of young kids. I hope you will feel the same.

This post is part 1 of 2 in the series Kids in Power Prison

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Good Parenting is Easy

Go online any day, open your email inbox, read the papers or turn on the television and you are sure to find heaps of parenting advice, all claiming to teach you good parenting. Since you are here, even this blog is full of ideas, stories and tips on how to be the best parent you can be for your kids.

The downside of having so much information and possibly conflicting views on the same issues is that it can quickly become confusing and give you the impression that being a good parent is really hard. In fact, maybe it is so hard you are never going to be good at parenting.

Nonsense.

Good parenting is easy.

It is as easy as … 1, 2. Not even 3, just 1, 2. In parenting, the most important things are love and consistency.

Yes, really.

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Nobody’s Perfect

Regrettably, we are all born helpless and unable to do most things at all, never mind perfectly. All kids start life in this position, no exception. From there, we do our best to learn the ways of the world during childhood using the only method we can – trial and, unfortunately, error.

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How to Avoid Abusive Relationships

As your daughter grows older and develops a relationship with a steady partner, the feeling of losing control grows too. Being the mother of a young woman (OMG, she is 20!), I see a lot of value in teaching teenage girls the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships.

I am sometimes surprised to meet new clients who cannot understand how they got themselves into an abusive relationship. As you can imagine, getting a women out of an abusive relationship is much harder than not getting into such relationship in the first place.

If you are the parent of a young daughter, you are probably asking yourself, “How can I make sure my daughter never gets herself into an abusive relationship?” The good news is you can! And if you do it before the relationship starts, you have a better chance of succeeding.

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14 Tips to Protect Your Kids Online

The Internet is a great source of information and allows us to connect easily with many people around the globe. For kids, like adults, the Internet is a fascinating world of discoveries, great exploration and yes, some danger. Like many other areas of life, in order to appreciate the “light” of the Internet, we need to have some “darkness”.

There are horrible stories of abuse and even death through misuse of connections formed on the Internet. Sneaky people exist on the Internet as much as they do in any other place society and they abuse their right to participate and become a risk to our children. Education is the answer, I say (surprise, surprise :D ).

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