Why (and When) You Should Not Ask Your Kids “Why?”

Woman looking up in front of a blackboard full of question marks

Recently, I ran a professional development course for teachers and we had a big discussion about the simple question “Why?” When I told the participants we had to consider the use of this question carefully, they were confused. To them, “Why?” was an open question that allowed children to express themselves.

Why should we consider not allowing kids to express themselves?

When asked “Why?”, all the people in the world activate a mechanism in their brain that searches for the answer. Even if you ask the question and give the person a long time to find the answer, their brain will not rest until it finds the answer.

Therapists and teachers can make very good use for this when they want to develop mindfulness and critical thinking skills.

But “Why?” is a bad question when someone has done something we wish they had not done, like mess up the carpet, break our favorite vase or forget to do their homework.

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Questions to Practice Mindfulness and Change Your Life for the Better

Mistakes might not give you answers. But they give you questions for a greater answer.

Questions are very important on our way to mindfulness. The Greek philosopher Socrates thought that questions could lead us to many discoveries. One of the most important discoveries is the way we think and function. When we ask the right questions, we get good answers that help us grow and evolve to a better version of ourselves.

As a life coach, I master questions. I know that some questions I ask (myself or others) will lead to pain and others will empower people, like press buttons for “let’s move on”, “let’s do something”, “let’s think positively”, “let’s plan”, “let’s change perspective” and “let’s appreciate”.

There are many “buttons” in the brain that trigger a thought or a feeling. For example, the “good memory” button will make us happy and the “bad memory” button will bring us pain and suffering. We may not have more bad memories than good memories, but we will have more suffering if we hit bad memory buttons more often.

Questions can trigger happiness, empowerment, hope, anger, frustration or anxiety. When we ask, “Why do they hate me?” we trigger all memories supporting it. If we ask, “How can I make them love me?” our brain searches for memories of things we’ve done that have led to others showing us love.

Think of questions as instructions we give the brain to go and search for something. Like a dog – you throw it a toy or a boomerang and whatever you throw comes back (only the brain doesn’t bring it back wet).

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New Book by Ronit Baras: Reflections

I am happy to announce that this week, on my birthday, I launched a new book (my fourth), Reflections. Over the weekend, I had a wonderful and emotional celebration with my family and friends and I am happy that Reflections is now available and taking its first steps into the hearts of many readers.

My quest for happiness started at the age of 14, when I was a very confused teenager, searching for direction and purpose, and asking the big questions of life. Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going?

Back then, all I wanted was a glimpse of the future, so I could draw hope to carry me through tough times. I played the “fortunetelling” game many times, imagining myself as a hero, strong beyond measure, successful, happy, content and with purpose.

During my teen years, reading and writing were my refuge. At the age of 15, I met David. He was 72 years old when I met him and for a teenager, that seemed a huge gap. David was a holocaust survivor with a very special view on life. He had lost everyone and everything that was dear to him and developed and inspiring attitude to life.

We both shared a love for poetry and often asked each other’s opinion about the poems we wrote. He was the one who taught me to ask and to question. I spent hours with him asking big questions about life. Most of the time, he would ask me questions and when I asked him about any topic, he would give me a wise perspective on it and asked me a question in return.

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How to Calm Anxiety: 25 Easy Tips

When we fill out thoughts with right things, the wrong ones have no room to enter - Joyce Meyer

In What is Anxiety, I explained the process of creating anxiety. Today, I want to start describing how to calm anxiety with simple, everyday tips anybody can do.

It is important to remember that Anxiety is a thinking process that we do in the present of imagining a negative future. Anxiety is the modern evolution of the “fight or flight” response. We are not certain about the future and we predict a horrible one. Most of us are very bad fortunetellers, but still most people try fortunetelling in hope that the future will somehow change from being scary to being great, if only in our mind.

It won’t, unless we change the way we go through that process, and actively, with intention, change it!

In this post and the next, I will share with you 59 tips on how to calm anxiety. Each of those tips can do the trick for short time and if you continue doing them, they will become a habit. All you need are 2-3 tips that you feel conferrable with and alternate them.

Some of the tips are very much applicable to children, so teach your kids to develop strategies to manage and calm their anxiety as soon as possible. Research shows that kids as young as 3 years old already experience anxiety, and if they live in a very anxious house, they will master anxiety very early in life.

In schools, we see many anxious kids and this can be very exhausting for the body. Think of your body in “fight or flight” mode 30 to 40 times a day. An anxious child becomes so sensitive that every word said around them becomes a lion or a snake. The road from here to developing full-blown anxiety disorder is not too long.

This post is part 2 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

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How to Deal with Anxiety: What is Anxiety?

If you live in the past, you will suffer depression. If you live in the future, you will have anxiety. If you live in the present, you will be content. Lau Tzu

What is anxiety? Anxiety is one of the biggest problems of our society today. Research has found that it is one of the main reasons for sickness, relationship problems, crime and failure. People who are anxious have a bad physical reaction to thinking about the future.

Everybody feels anxiety sometimes. It is a natural reaction to what is perceived as danger – an evolution of the “fight or flight” response. While for most people, experiencing anxiety in small doses is normal and healthy, for others, feeling anxious about the future or about situations over which they have no control may cause real interference with daily living.

The problem is with the frequency of the fear and the perception of danger, when in fact there may be no real danger. When people experience mild anxiety, we call it “worrying”. When the fear takes over and blocks the person from living a normal life, we call it “Anxiety Disorder”.

Think about it this way: anxiety is when your mind goes towards a possible, horrible, bad, unpleasant future and you react to it NOW. No one is anxious when they think about getting compliments, or having a great time. We are anxious about something that MAY go wrong in the future.

This post is part 1 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

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What to Say When You Hear that Teen Life Sucks

Sometimes, when I talk to teens, they tell me that teen life sucks.

It is sad to hear them say that at a time in their lives that is supposed to be wonderful, interesting and exciting. The teenage years are when they form their identity and it is sad to hear that they came to the conclusion that teen life sucks.

It is sad because if they believe it sucks, they are more likely to feel that it sucks. If they think teen life sucks, their subconscious will create a self-fulfilling prophecy, and their life will actually “suck”. It is not the thought that makes it true, it is that subconsciously, the thought will lead to action that will make it true. Whatever you believe, this is your reality.

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Do Parents Let Their Kids Play Violent Video Games?

Recently, I received a question from a mother who said her teenage kids wanted to watch violent video games and they claimed other parents allowed their kids to do so. They thought she was just being mean and ignorant of what was happening in the world. “I do not like the idea of them playing violent and sexist video games but I feel helpless”. Her idea was to design a questionnaire for parents and see if her teenagers were right. She asked me what I think of her idea. Here is what I wrote to her:

Your experience is quite normal and it is wonderful to read that there are people like you still out there, advocating for children to be engaging in healthy activities!

Feel free to set the rules in your house. Your teen is a teen. He does not set the rules. You do! He is welcome to make different rules in his house!

You don’t need a questionnaire to back up what you already know is right. You can be the captain of your own family ship, regardless of what other parents do.

Kids cannot buy their own games, computers, iPhones, etc. You have a lot more power than you think! I have clients who found amazing result when they put their kids on a technology diet for a week. Their kids were suddenly like new! If they can’t use your credit card and don’t know your PayPal password, you have nothing to worry about.

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How Can Parents with Different Religions Raise Kids Successfully? (Q&A)

The question about two parents with different religions or belief systems raising kids has become very relevant in our society today. The world is much more multicultural and there are many mixed couples finding love and wondering about the impact of this on their kids.

My eldest daughter, Eden, is getting married in 2 months to her now-boyfriend, Sandy. Eden and Sandy are a gorgeous couple and we are very happy they found each other. No pressure or anything, but we are also very much looking forward to them having kids.

The interesting thing is that Eden and Sandy come from two different cultural backgrounds, different languages and different faiths. Many of our family members and friends have been wondering about the “chance” of such a relationship succeeding and the difficulty in raising kids.

I cannot say exactly what will happen for Sandy and Eden. I am not a fortune teller after all. I am, however, the state director of a not for profit organization that provides education on diversity and advocates for religious and cultural tolerance. I strongly believe in this work.

In some way, Eden and Sandy have more similarities than many other couples do. For example, they are both migrants, both their parents are still together, they both value different cultures, they both speak languages other than English and appreciate others who speak other languages, they are both kind and accepting of others.

I think the “chance” of a successful relationship depends not on the number of differences between them but in their ability to appreciate and take advantage of the similarities.

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Justifying our Parenting Style

Finding your own parenting style is not easy. Most of us adopt our parents’ parenting style, without regard really thinking about it. We don’t choose our parenting style, but let the style choose us.

We also like to think that we are better at parenting than our own parents. We often don’t notice how we use the exact same parenting styles we hated in them. To our credit, we sometimes manage to make small changes and this makes us think that we are better than them. We can do something they couldn’t. We think that the harder it was to make the changes, the better we are. This is not always true. In fact, the damage from our choices can be as bad for our own children as it was for us (or even worse).

This is a very hard concept for parents to understand. Kids see things completely differently. If your dad beat you with a belt or hot iron and you only use your hands to beat your own children, it is not very effective to tell your kids that you had it worse and that you are better than your own dad. When you hurt your kids, they can’t really be all “Pollyanna” about it (Pollyanna was a girl who always found the positive side of everything).

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You Kick Like a Girl

As a young girl, I grew up in a small town where kids played in the street until their parents called them home for dinner. It was a small street and playing there was much like playing in your front yard. You could count about 10 steps from your front door to the street. It was a generation when most people had many kids. My family was one of the smallest – only 5 kids. Most of my friends had 6 or 7 siblings.

I was very much a tomboy and never did things “like a girl”. I played with the boys, mainly because there were more of them than girls. It seemed very natural for me to hang around them, even at night, when we went to the orchards to make bonfires. I think they did not notice I was a girl until I started wearing a bra. Until then, I was their equal – chasing one another on the street, riding bikes, fighting or playing soccer, there was no difference between us.

At home was another matter.

In my family, the roles of boys and girls were very clear – boys played rough while girls cleaned and cared for the family. My mom could not bear the thought of me hanging around the boys so much. So she told me I should act “like a girl”, because with so many bruises and cuts I would never be allowed to learn ballet.

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Why (and When) You Should Not Ask Your Kids “Why?”

Questions to Practice Mindfulness and Change Your Life for the Better

New Book by Ronit Baras: Reflections

How to Calm Anxiety: 25 Easy Tips

How to Deal with Anxiety: What is Anxiety?

How Can Parents with Different Religions Raise Kids Successfully? (Q&A)

Justifying our Parenting Style

You Kick Like a Girl

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Books by Ronit Baras

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