Proud Kids and Proud Mothers on Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day was a few days ago and it always makes me think about my role as a parent. Over the years, I have written a lot about being a mother to my 3 wonderful children. As a life coach, specializing in families, parenting has been my calling. I believe we bring our kids into this world so we can learn love. When our first child is born, we discover just how much love we are capable of.

The greatest struggle of being a parent is the unrealistic desire to be superman and wonder woman so our kids can be proud of us. In this quest we are often too hard on ourselves. We focus too much on what we do not do well rather than what we do that is inspiring to our kids.

A while ago, I received this video from my daughter that shows how hard we are on ourselves as parents. I think it is very touching and inspiring.

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Guilt-Free Mother’s Day

It is Mother’s Day this week and all around the world, people take this opportunity to thank their moms for years of love and dedication.

I learned about the job of being a mother when I first had children. It was a mixture of joy and sadness to discover what it meant for my own mother to be my mom. I felt joy because I discovered how much she loved me and how much she was willing to do for me. At the same time, I felt sad that it took me so long to figure it out.

Imagine what kind of life your kids could have if they found out so much earlier just how much they meant to you?

My mum worked very hard to get me to understand how much she loved me. She used the only tool she had, which was guilt. In her time, this was the most commonly used parenting tool. Unfortunately, it does the exact opposite of what it is supposed to. Unfortunately, many parents still use this tool today.

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Preparing for Mother’s Day

Every year, when Mother’s Day approaches, I think of my role as a mother. It may not be easy to be a mom but it is highly rewarding. Many moms come to see me in my coaching practice. A lot of them experience many parenting struggles. Not all of them were ready to be a parent. This makes me wonder, how do we expect people to do something we do not prepare them for?!

The only preparation we get for being a parent is from our parents. This comes long before we even think of having children, and we need to keep these memories for over 20 to 25 years in order to use them with our own children. I think the saying “we are only as good as the quality of our teachers” is suitable here. Much like in school, you know your subjects well if your teacher was awesome. In the school of life, you know how to parent if your parents were awesome. Unfortunately, we cannot choose our teachers, not in school or in life.

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Ask Ronit: My Son is Very Clingy

Clingy kids can be very exhausting. We love them very much but we want to be able to do things without them from time to time. I have met many parents who are fighting this clinginess and they express a lot of frustration. I think the exhausting thing not necessary the clinginess itself. It is more from the fight, the feeling of failure and the expectation that it should be different.

This week, I received a question on my blog from a mother of a 9 year old boy. Mel wanted to know what I would suggest for dealing with a clingy child.

Here is what I wrote Mel. I hope you will find it encouraging. Most importantly, it is not as bad as it looks.

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Raising Older Parents

Recently, I travelled overseas to visit my family. While there, I spent a fair bit of time with my parents who are both getting on in age. My father is 80+ and my mother recently turned 73. Surprisingly, my dad is the healthier of the two. My mom on the other hand, has been not healthy for as long as I can remember her. First it was high blood pressure, then diabetes, cholesterol, obesity, osteoporosis and the list goes on.

Even though my visit was only for a short time, my mother and her health issues were a drama once again. Thankfully, she is not what you would call “sick”. As in, she does not have a fatal illness or anything like that. She just always seems to be in pain, or complaining about her physical condition. She visits her doctor regularly and often ends up telling them exactly what she wants them to prescribe for her. If you ask how she is, she will immediately start telling you. My sister, who is a social worker, says this is simply part of getting old. That may be, but my dad is older than her and he is not like that. I have met other people the same age, and even older, that were not like that either. I find it hard to accept that this is part of getting old.

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Proud as a Peacock (again)

Being a mother has been one of the greatest achievements of my life. Each of my kids is an achievement, and they are also big achievers themselves. Some say that it is a cycle. We, as parents, make our kids successful, loving achievers and in return they make us successful, loving achievers.

One of the best descriptions of my feeling towards them is pride. They do amazing things and I am enormously proud of them. I have come up with a theory that I like to call “Pride Therapy”. Every time one of my kids has an achievement, by proxy, I have also achieved something.

In my coaching and presentations, I sometimes ask people to describe their feelings as animals. I find it makes it easier to express these feeling. It does not have to be an animal that represents all your feelings all the time. Each feeling is a different animal. For example, you might be a panther in the office, and a sloth on a relaxed Sunday.

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What Does Children’s Behavior Mean?

This week, a client of mine asked about her son’s behavior. Thomas, her 3-year-old son, does not know what to do when kids take things from him. Sharon, his mum, says he starts crying immediately. She is worried that this will be his behavior in the future. She wrote in her email to me, “If a child cries when kids take toys from him, does it mean he will grow up to use crying whenever things do not go his way?”

The simple answer is:

No. Just because kids do certain things do when they are young, does not mean they will do them as adults.

Kids are inexperienced in searching for ways to get what they want. They have had limited exposure to “life” so they use more primitive and intuitive ways of getting things. When they were born, all they knew how to do was cry. And they found it to be an effective way to get what they needed. We all used crying as a method when we were babies, but that does not mean we do it now that we are grown up, at least, not in the same way.

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My Anti -TV campaign

As an advocate of emotional intelligence, I object to kids watching TV. Everything I try to give them, the TV is destroying. I think bringing a TV home is like bringing the opposition into your living room, to tell your kids that you, the parent is wrong. Why would you do that?

When Eden was young and we were a young couple, we did not have a TV at home. My grandmother, who wanted to buy a new TV, suggested we take hers and we refused. We worked and when we were home, there were better things to do with our time than watch TV. Some family members and friends thought we were nuts and that we were not preparing our daughter to live in the real world. 24 years later, I can tell you, she is prepared for the real world, maybe even better than many other kids her age.

A month ago, Brisbane experienced a huge storm and trees were up rooted not far from us (it was really scary). Many houses experienced major damage and were without electricity for days (Many difficulties pop up when you do not have electricity for 3 days. We depend on electricity so much). We were the lucky ones. The only thing that happened to us was that our 20 year old 25 inch TV shorted (even though it had a surge protector). Tsoof and Gal were very happy because they have been wanting to buy a new TV for a year. Eden and I were not very happy. We ended up buying a huge TV with the promise to only watch videos and minimize watching TV.

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Consistency is Key to Good Parenting

In my last post, I Learned it From the Best we talked about how influential parenting is for a child’s future. In the long term, some things parents do are positive and some are negative. But which ones are positive? Which parenting styles are good for your children? In this post, I want to go into detail about the importance of consistency – the value of giving consistent rewards, punishments, attention and praise.

In early childhood, parenting in general gives children a toolkit of skills and beliefs they can take with them. It helps them deal with the challenges that life puts in their paths. If parents give their child positive, useful tools, then they are well equipped for the future. Things like praise and attention give confidence. On the other hand, parents who give their children bad habits and poor attitudes are setting them up for struggle. Addictive behaviors and poor eating habits are examples of unhelpful tools.

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Compassionate Relationship: The Relationship Tests

Our lives are full of relationships. Each of them is a test we need to pass in order to have a happy, healthy, successful and fulfilling life. Relationships are such an important element in our lives that we start the process even before we are born. We have 9 months of close, physical contact with our mom and through her, with our dad or her partner. The success of these early relationships will have a huge impact on our long term relationship with our parents – the most important test of our lives.

Life is full of tests because at every stage of our lives, we will have relationships with other people. It can be our families, our friends, colleagues, clients, people that provide us with a service or even people we meet for a short time whose name we may never know.

This post is part 1 of 4 in the series Compassionate Relationship

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