100 Tips for My Children

Over 26 years of being a parent, I have made a huge effort to give my kids the rules of life that, in my belief, will set them up for a better life. Every parent wants to raise happy, healthy, successful, kind, smart, courageous, creative, friendly and wealthy children that have lots of love and happiness in their life.

I say that parenting is a sales job. If you sell your life philosophy to your kids well, you have great relationships with them and you know they will do well. If you are not a good sales person (even if your philosophy works well for you), you will face lots of conflict and frustration.

Years ago, I started writing a series called Things I want my kids to know. I think I want my kids to know everything I have written in this blog, but this series is a good summary. In this post, I would like to give my kids 100 tips from my bag of tips for a happy, healthy, successful and loving life.

I encourage you to make your own list of 100 pieces of advice you want to share with your kids, so that one day, when they ask themselves what you wanted for them, they will have it in writing.

Remember that giving advice is something you give from your own free will, with the full intention of doing good. It is your child’s choice whether to take your advice or not. We give! They need to choose to take. If they don’t take our advice, it may be because they are not in a good relationship with us and there is a distrust. It may be because they are not ready, you haven’t presented it well, you are not a good role model for what you suggest, or their life circumstances are different from yours and they can’t see how they can apply your advice to their life.

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Kids under Stress: How to Deal with Stress the Easy Way

In Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists, I covered easy ways to diagnose symptoms of stress in children, without having to go to psychiatrists that are very likely give your child medication that might prevent them from developing coping mechanisms and might damage them for life.

Once you have confirmed the stress, you will want to know how to deal with stress and start helping your child. So here is a list of easy solutions you can use at home to help your child cope. No Psychiatrists. No Medication. These methods take the same time to work as medication does, are just as effective and have no side effects, so they are much better in the long run.

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Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists

Boy looking worried. Worrying too often can be one of many stress symptoms

Stress is the epidemic of the modern world. All health concerns are associated with stress and as time goes on, stress goes up and stress symptoms show earlier and earlier in life. I was shocked to discover that psychiatrists now prescribe drugs to children as young as 3 years old!

Yes, instead of teaching children to deal with the feelings they have, which is what emotional intelligence is all about, we give them drugs that prevent their body from coping and developing the mechanisms to cope with stress.

Use of drugs to manage stress prevents the body from producing chemicals to calm the body. Over time, the stress increases and we have to increase the use of drugs to cope with natural and healthy life processes. Sadness, disappointment and anger are all healthy feelings, essential for our survival. The use of drugs to suppress them sends a message to the body that they are not healthy feelings for us and makes us helpless and powerless.

As a parent, I have a strong desire to keep my kids away from therapists (yes, even doctors, as much as I can). Why? Because for some reason, kids who are in therapy for a long time form the belief that something is wrong with them. As a life coach and special education professional, I can tell you that working with disabilities and learning difficulties is much easier than working with a child that thinks something is wrong with him or her.

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Common Stress Causes

In 3 Strategies to Find Your Sources of Pressure, I explained why it is important to recognize the sources of our pressure in order to eliminate stress in life and gave three strategies to find the stress causes in your life. If you have used these strategies, you are ready to use this list of common stress causes to refine your findings.

1. Lack of sleep is a major cause of stress.

2. Craving is a small source of pressure. Whenever you say to yourself, “I have to eat/do/be something”, you are putting pressure on yourself.

3. Addictions are a huge cause of pressure. Why? Because when we don’t have that thing we are addicted to, our brain goes into panic attack. Addiction can be to food, drinks (alcohol, coke…) to people, routines. If you want to know if you are addicted, try leaving without that thing for 3 weeks and see how the pressure builds up.

4. Caffeine is a big source of addiction. When our body has overdoes of Caffeine (coffee, tea, coke and chocolate) it will become edgy. If you want to recognize how much it affects you, stop any caffeine for 3 days and notice how nervous you are because your body goes through withdrawal symptoms.

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3 Strategies to Find Your Sources of Pressure

Stress - it can come from many sources of pressure

Many people are very stressed, because they are under lots of pressure. If you ask them about their sources of pressure, they are not very good at pinpointing it, which only makes their life more stressful and seem to have even more pressure. Catch 22…

Stress is very debilitating in our daily life. Much research connects our health and wellbeing directly to the level of stress and our ability (or inability) to manage it. Stressed people are sick more often, have more conflicts, more relationship breakdowns and are less effective at work. These things result in earning less money, so they live in this vicious cycle that each point of pressure only feeds more pressure on other areas of life. Like I said before: Catch 22!

Pressure is related to something specific. Stress is the result of accumulated pressures. When these pressures go over a threshold, it’s too much for us to handle. We go into stress and turn our focus from control to feeling helplessness and anxiety.

In life coaching, it is very important for people to recognize that they are under pressure and that when it accumulates, it creates stress and then they are anxious about the outcome or the future. The three feelings of pressure, stress and anxiety go hand in hand in people’s reaction to events in life. I call them brothers, because they come from the same family of fear and in that family, they appear in this order. First, we have pressure, which accumulates and turns to stress, which immediately creates anxiety about the future.

In this post, I will give you 3 strategies to find your sources of pressure and eliminate stress in your life. If you follow them, in the order they are presented, you will find relief. At first, it will be a small relief, which will accumulate. The same as pressure, accumulates and turns to stress, relief accumulates and turns into control.

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The Stress Pill: The Final 30 Causes of Stress

There are many causes of stress in our life. In the previous chapter of the stress pill series, I listed 30 causes of stress, which you may choose to avoid. Here are some more scientific evidence-based beliefs, ideas and thoughts that increase your level of stress.

1. Be dependent on others! We are not meant to be alone and it is only fair to expect others to do things for us. If you can count on someone else to do the job, then let them do it. Avoid going to new place on your own and never associate with new people. Always go to new places with a friend. If your friend is not coming to school for example, do not go to school that day because your productivity will be low anyway. Alternatively, you could recognize that you are unique. Your desires are your own. If you wait for someone else to do things for you, you may never get them done.

2. Everything that went wrong is your fault! Even if you had no direct connection to it, think that it is your fault. You could have done something to change it, so why didn’t you? Take the blame for everything. It makes you a sage! Unfortunately, it makes you tired and stressed too. Despite what you might think, not everything is related to you, and not everything is your responsibility to fix.

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The Stress Pill: 30 More Stressors

In the previous chapter of The Stress Pill, I described some ways people make themselves stressed. I call them “stress pills”. Others call them Stressors.

Here are another 30 tips on how to increase your daily dosage of stress. Of course, if you can avoid them, your stress level will go down and your happiness will go up.

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The Stress Pill: 10 Things that Increase Your Stress

Stress is known to be the number 1 killer in the world today. More even than accidents and war (which are also attributed to being stressed). Even the disease in the world are related to stress.

In my work with my coaching clients, I explain that our feelings and thoughts are a choice. My slogan is “happiness is a choice”. With this choice, there are three main pills: the happiness pill, the chill pill and the stress pill.

The happy pill

Smiling bouncy balls falling out of a bucketOver the years, I have collected many strategies to make people happy. I have tried to share them in this blog. When I write about them, I want each of them to be a happiness pill. Ever psot contains a “pill of happiness”.

The thing is, people seem to understand happiness better when they can compare it to stress. I have written some posts about stress in the past and found this to be true. That is how the idea for this series was born. So in this chapter I will describe thoughts, beliefs and ideas in the form of a “stress pill”.

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The Stress Pill: Seeing Shadows of Lions

I have written a lot about happiness over the years. I think happiness (in all its variations) is what everyone wants in life. For example, researchers found that parents name happiness as the ultimate goal of their parenting role. Happy parents = happy parenting = happy kids.

Happiness is not only the goal of parenting, it is also a most basic human goal. We are here to be happy, to find happiness and to enjoy it. We want to be happy with our relationships, with our families, at work, with our health, with money. We want to be happy with our friends and hobbies, with our achievements, with our homes. We want to be happy with what we have and we also want to be happy about some things we don’t have. For example, if I don’t have sick kids, that makes me externally happy.

One small thing that gets taken away from us helps us feel happy about what we have in our lives. For example, it’s only when you get a muscle cramp from lifting too much that you learn to appreciate the simple ability to raise your hand to the steering wheel or to take off your shirt. That is basic human nature, to define happiness by comparing it to unhappy times.

The most common obstacle to happiness is stress. In reality, stress is fear. It is fear that manifests in tensions that drive us into primal behavior (fight or flight). In the old days, it was what made us freeze in the face of a lion. While in the past, it was very obvious that lions, snakes and other scary animals were the enemy, today, the enemy is inside of us. We get anxious and stressed just thinking about a possible scary future.

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Attachment Theory: Main Characteristics of Attachment

Baby boy in a sailors hat sitting in a lifesaver float

The emotional bond between people depends on their ability to connect and the style of the connection. The attachment we have with the people in our lives (partners, children, siblings, friends and even our own parents) are strongly associated with the attachment we formed in our early years of life, with our primary caregiver (usually our parents). Similarly, the challenges we experience in our relationships as adults are shaped by the patterns of challenge from our early attachments.

According to John Bowlby, attachment is the connection a baby forms with its parent to ensure their basic needs of safety, comfort, care and pleasure are met. He described this attachment as “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings”. Bowlby believed that the style of the relationship between the parent (mainly the mother) and the child in this critical period of the baby’s development becomes a blue print for later relationships.

The main idea of attachment theory is that the caregivers provides the baby with a safe and secure base from which to explore the world. The baby knows that it is safe to venture out and explore the world, and that the caregiver will always be there to come back to for comfort in times of stress and discomfort.

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