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!

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Children with Auditory Processing Disorders or Not?

A brain made from words marking the different brain functions

I went to study special education to help children and adults with learning difficulties. When I started my journey, over 30 years ago, I thought there were many people with learning difficulties. I still think there are, but in the past, I was convinced they were “organic” – physical, possibly genetic – and therefore hard to change.

Now, after seeing so many children and people of all ages, I think that social attitude creates or aggravates the problems in many cases. Many people have small difficulties that are blown out of proportion and labeled as disorders.

Auditory processing disorders are very popular and easily labeled, even among very young children. Every year that passes, I hear about younger and younger kids with auditory processing disorders. Recently, I even talked to a mother whose son was one year old and she insisted he had an auditory processing disorder. I am qualified enough to know that I cannot assess a child for APD at one year of age.

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Mental Pain Shouldn’t Kill You. It Can Make You Stronger

The word depression projected onto a sad man's face

I have written before about emotional pain as a reaction to a perceived threat and our body’s way of telling us that something is wrong. Mental pain is not the enemy. It is the messenger. And it is very important not to kill it.

Many people will tell you that when you come out of the other side of pain, you feel stronger. I have learned the hard way that the fear of pain takes more energy than the pain itself. Worry is an example of it. When we worry, we experience mental pain from something negative we have imagined in our head. Yes, all in our head.

There are many techniques to turn mental pain into psychological strength and the more you use them, the less you feel the pain. I have gathered some of them here to share with you. All of them are proven and practical. I use them with my clients.

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Vibrating Creamy Thoughts: My Birthday Present

I am celebrating my birthday tomorrow. Every year, on my birthday, I hold a reflection ceremony. It is like a stock take for the passing year. I hope to grow from the inside every year, like the rings of a tree. I hope to add learnings into my life that will make me stronger and happier. These realizations are my own birthday presents.

Some people say that change takes a long time. I disagree. Only the lead-up to the change takes time. The change itself is immediate.

This year, when I did my annual reflection, I realized I had an insightful quantum moment that changed my path. This profound moment was short. It only took one hour.

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Body Piercing: Laws Without Teeth

My eldest daughter Eden wanted a body piercing in her belly button when she as 15. She was already in 11th Grade and some of her friends had them. When she said that it would be beautiful, I could not disagree. It would be beautiful, but the thought of her damaging her body was very unattractive to me.

At first, I felt a bit hypocritical. I had my ears pierced when I was young. In my neighborhood, kids had their ears pierced when they were one to two years old. I was “old” (6 or 7) and did it at my neighbor’s house. At the time, it was not a choice but a social obligation. Back then, this defined me as a girl.

I got my second piercing when I was 21. This was my choice. It was a compromise, because having seven earrings in one ear was the norm at the time. Still, I did it due to peer pressure. It was accepted, it was common, it was cool and it was pretty.

How could I blame my daughter for wanting to do the same 25 years later?

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How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep and Why You Really Need It

When I was a kid, I did not really understand the importance of sleep. For years, I considered sleep a waste of time. I wanted to do so many things that I did not sleep much. My oldest daughter, Eden, never slept much either. She is 27 now and although she understands the importance of sleep in her mind, she sleeps very little.

It took me a long time to understand that we need to sleep because our body uses this time to rejuvenate, clear out toxins and recharge our batteries. Over the years, I also learned that the hours of sleep is not the only important thing. More important is who you are taking to bed with you every night and what happens in the minutes before you fall asleep.

I am sure you have heard the importance of starting the day on the right foot many times. Whatever happens in the morning will determine the rest of the day. Your day can be calm, organized, happy and cheerful, or angry, rushed, stressed, chaotic, sad and grumpy, depending on how you get out of bed.

Well, same thing happens when you get into bed, when you prepare for another big part of your every day – sleep. We spend a third of our life sleeping. If you live to be 90 years old, you will have slept 30 years of it. So you might as well make sure you get the most of this time.

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Addiction in the Family

Addiction a dependency on an object, a substance or an activity. As hard as it is to admit, we are all addicted in some way or another. If you want to know if you are addicted do something, take it out of your life for a week and watch your reaction.

People can be addicted to food, phone, TV, a person (like their spouse), work, coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, glue, sex, medication, gambling, drugs and more. I had a friend who was addicted to pain killers. She took them as if she was eating candy, and it became obvious she had an addiction because she could not cope without them and needed more and more of them over time.

It is very important to remember that every addiction we develop is an attempt to fill an emotional and/or physical “hole”. We want it to give us the feeling we are missing without it. This is as true when we talk about drugs as it is when we talk about food.

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What to Do if Your Child is Overweight and You Worry about Diabetes

When there are so many overweight people in the world and diabetes is a common problem, many parents are concerned about their kids’ weight and developing diabetes. Statistics from around the world is not very encouraging. It is estimated that 600 million people will be living with diabetes by 2035. Whether you like or not, you and your children are part of this statistics.

In 2015, the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) published their Diabetes Atlas, which estimates that:

– One in 11 adults has diabetes (422 million)
– One in two (46.5%) adults with diabetes is undiagnosed
– 12% of global health expenditure is spent on diabetes (USD673 billion)
– One in seven births is affected by gestational diabetes
– Three-quarters (75%) of people with diabetes live in low- and middle-income countries
– 542,000 children have type 1 diabetes
– Every six seconds, a person dies from diabetes (5 million deaths a year)
– China with over 100 million people with diabetes (ranked highest number of people with diabetes)
– Cambodia is the lowest in the world

Being overweight is just one possible cause of diabetes and it can be prevented. When children grow up with no health awareness, they become adults with no health awareness and their life can be harder, more expensive and shorter than average.

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Biological Parents are Best for Child Safety

When children are born, their parents are typically concerned for their safety. People spend a fortune making sure their children use the safest beds, the safest car seat and safest stroller. This is very natural and very important. For some reason, when the same parents’ relationship breaks down and they separate, the importance of their kids’ physical and emotional safety is often neglected.

Why?

Because once they separate, the decision-making process about the children is divided. Unfortunately, in some cases, parents’ separation means that one parent raises the kids and the other poses a risk to their safety. In other cases, the conflict between the parents puts the kids’ emotional, and sometimes physical, wellbeing at risk. In severe cases, both parents are a risk to their children’s safety and there is a need to remove them from their home completely.

My sister is a social worker in a special unit that takes kids away from their family and puts them in foster care. This always happens because the emotional and/or physical safety of the child is at risk and none of the parents is able to keep them safe. My sister claims that this just moves the kids from one unsafe place to another unsafe place. Unlike Cinderella’s fairy tale, their stories never end in living happily ever after. Instead, stepparents and foster parents struggle greatly to supply a safe environment for the children.

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Distorted Definition of Depression Increases Depression

Young man walking head down in a wide fied

Depression is a big problem in our society. People think that nowadays we have more depression, when in fact we do not. What we have is a distorted definition of happiness and depression.

Here are some myths about happiness and depression that make people feel even more depressed.

Myth 1: Happy people are happy at all the time

When I go over the happiness scale with my clients, many of them think that they are supposed to be happy all the time. I can understand how people with this distorted definition of happiness can feel depressed. Some of them say that on a scale of 1-100, a happy person feels 95 happy or even 100. Since 100 is a state of total excitement and bliss, we cannot experience the excitement if we are high all the time.

Human beings’ nervous system notices differences. Feeling just a little bit happier than before works just as well when you go from 32 to 35 as when you go from 62 to 65. So every day, focus on being just a little happier than you were yesterday.

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