responsibility Tag | Family Matters

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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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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The Truth About Teachers’ Poor Social Responsibility

I think that teachers have a social responsibility. Teaching is all about making a difference in the world by inspiring children to be the best they can be. Being in education myself, I often think of my role as that of a social activist.

You see, teaching is the best way to make the ripple continue. I have a social responsibility to give my students the tools to build this world. And to live in it in peace and harmony, with themselves, with the land they live, on and with others. This way, they will continue this cycle with everyone they meet in their life.

Making a difference is on the agenda of everyone who considers becoming a teacher. It’s part of the job description nobody ever reads before embarking on their teaching adventure, but everyone totally understands within a very short time of teaching.

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There is Life after Relationship Breakup

Relationships are at the heart of human society. Some say that being in a relationship is a basic need. In the bible, even the animals in Noah’s ark were in pairs. I think we are meant to be in relationships. Having a partner to share our life and be with us along the way gives lots of certainty in life. Together we share love, friendship, adventures, struggles, finance and children, and together, it is always easier and more fun. Unfortunately, sometimes, it just does not work. In fact, in our society today, relationship breakup comes more often than not and with it comes pain, grief and loss of hope.

I work with many couples through relationship breakups and with individuals rebuilding their life after breaking up with a partner, and I can reassure you, there is life after a relationship breakup. Usually, couples feel a hole in their heart that they wish to fill up. The desire to fill this hole drives them quickly into a new relationship that looks exactly like the one they left in pain.

Why?

Because the separation originated from a hole inside of them, which they thought the other did not fill, and they enter the new relationship with the same mindset. After a short time of excitement and attention, they realize that the new partner, lover or boyfriend/girlfriend cannot fulfill their needs and they go through the same breakup with more pain, more grief and more loss.

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Excuses, Excuses

We all have excuses for many things in life. If we examine our excuses, we will find that we only use them for the things that aren’t working in our life. We never make excuses for what works, do we?

Excuses are stories we tell ourselves to justify things that didn’t go according to the expectations of others and even our own. We have excuses for why we didn’t succeed, why we forgot, why we couldn’t and even why we missed opportunities. The list is endless.

Usually, we bounce between blame and justifications to overcome disappointment. It’s important to understand that it is not necessary to be hard on yourself whenever you come up with an excuse, and you should practice acceptance as another coping mechanism. Excuses are essential for our survival. Without them, we would not be able to overcome failure, but if we use them too often, we do more damage than good to our emotional state.

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The Importance of Traveling with Kids

Traveling has been part of my life in the last 22 years. It started with a move from one country to another with a 4-year-old daughter and ended up being a passion. Last month, Gal and I went on a 3-week road trip with our 2 younger kids, Tsoof, my 20-year-old son, who had just graduated from university, and Noff, my 14-year-old daughter, who was starting 10th Grade. This road trip it reminded me again that taking kids out of the comfort zone of their rooms, TV, computer, mobile phones and friends, and introducing them to a different world, can do magic.

Recently, I worked with a couple (let’s call them Bob and Matilda) who had a conflict. He dreamed of taking the kids (16 and 14) on a 6-month road trip and she was shocked and concerned about the kids not going to school during that time. Bob had memories of his family, at the age of 9 years old, taking 6 months off to travel in England and he wanted to give his kids the same experience, before it was too late. Matilda had memories of a different childhood, in which she was never ever allowed to miss school, not even for a day.

I understood them both.

I grow up like Matilda did. We were not “allowed” to be sick (my mom had to work, my dad had to work, and we had no one to stay with us at home), so we didn’t miss school. I have to say there was something good about it, because in my adult life, I’ve never missed work or study due to sickness.

I also understood Bob, because I had traveled with my kids and witnessed the huge growth we all went through as a family and as individuals. I guess when you experience it once, you understand the value of it forever.

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How to Prepare Your Child for the First Day of School

Recently, I got a request from a friend to help her prepare her son for school. When she went with him to soccer practice, she realized he was on his own, not really following the coach’s instructions or mixing with the other kids. Then, when she registered him for school, she met parents who told her about their own kids and she felt she was neglecting her son by thinking he would learn everything he needed at school. When she asked me about the academic requirements, she was a bit surprised when I told her that other skills were as important, maybe even more important, than reading and math.

The first day of school is a very happy moment for every family. If the new student is not your first child, you probably know the drill. The excitement is still there with less anxiety. But if this is your first child, you can feel the excitement bubbling in your stomach in anticipation. The sense of pride is mixed with worry.

Is my child ready for school?

Am I ready for school?

First timers, parents and kids alike, can ease the process of starting school by preparing ahead of time and using the right focus. They should start the preparations early and do not rely solely on the school’s orientation days.

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Emergency Relationship Coaching Essentials

I have seen many couples who are in pain in their relationship. Many of them come for relationship coaching when they can no longer stand the pain. I have been in a relationship with my boyfriend/partner/father-of-my-children for 35 years and I have learned over time that couples can love each other very much but still be in this pain.

It is easy to take each other or the relationship for granted. The investment of energy we put into the beginning of this relationship (the chase) cannot continue with the same passion and effort forever, so we all ease the pressure of the hunt, which is natural and more sustainable, and sometimes we ease it too much.

The good news is that getting help is much better than not. Every year, I have more couples coming for relationship coaching. Every year, we hear about another couple we knew from our travels around the world who separated or divorced. Every year, our kids tell us about more friends whose parents divorced, and every year, another couple from our community is in some crisis and considering divorce.

Those people didn’t get help. At least not on time to sale their marriage. Do you know the phrase “seek and you shall find”? If they asked for help, they would have found it.

Those who did come for relationship coaching look for help because they still love each other and want their marriage to work. When both of them come with the desire to make their marriage work, it will work. Why? Because whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are always right, and they think they can.

Many of them search for quick fix and want to leave the session feeling fully in-love and without hurts and hard feelings, which never happens in the first session, though they leave with big hope because I give them emergency tools to manage the communication while allowing the pain to dissolve.

This post is part 30 of 33 in the series Save Your Marriage

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Don’t Give Your Kids Psychiatric Drugs!

No matter how hard parenting is, giving your child psychiatric drugs must be considered very seriously, because it is very often a bad idea. Here is why.

Working with parents and kids for 30 years, I can tell you that it is not easy to be a parent. It is not easy because unlike computers or other gadgets, kids do not come with an instruction manual and they do not behave in a way that is easy to predict.

Inexperienced parents react to things that do not work as they expect. Experienced parents, having raised other kids through the same situation, can see the patterns and not panic when something unexpected happens.

I realized this when I had an early childhood center. After working in a group of 30 toddlers, I became an experienced parent in a flash. Why? Because when you deal with 30 kids, you can see that when your child does not behave the way you expect, he/ she is still normal. When you see your toddler touching his/ her sex organs, you may think something is wrong with him/her, but when you see 30 toddlers doing it, and you see them stop when you do not pay attention to it, you feel a bit more relaxed about your own toddler and comfort yourself that he/she is normal.

Inexperienced parents have a problem with the concept of normality. Since they have nothing to compare to, they do not know what is normal and what is not and too often jump to the conclusion that something is wrong with their child and needs to be fixed. This fear and doubt mindset about children’s development, behavior and achievement can cause many problems, mainly because it determines the parents’ course of action.

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Distracted Drivers Kill and Die

Yes, it’s a harsh thing to say, but distracted drivers kill people and distracted drivers die unnecessarily.

My nephew is dead. He was a young man, just starting his adult life, and he did nothing wrong. He was riding his motorcycle, having had zero accidents and zero fines for 4 years, when a distracted driver in a car driver failed to stop at a stop sign, smashed into him and killed him on the spot.

Any life lost is not only lost by the person who died. This accident, caused by a tiny distraction, cost many people’s lives. My nephew is dead, but his family, and many people he was connected too, lost something that will never be returned. The pain of his close family is something that will never heal. Death and injuries due to distracted drivers leave scar that never heal.

My nephew and our family cannot change the past, even though we’ve tried. But we can prevent other families from experiencing the pain and devastation that comes with such accidents.

It is important to understand that every accident is a mistake. No one causes it intentionally. No one wants to injure or kill anyone else. No one wants to live with the massive pain and guilt on their conscience and ruin their own life. This is why it is called an accident, but many accidents happen due to some form of distraction.

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