Parents: The 3 Most Catastrophic Mistakes Parents Make and How to Avoid Them

In all the years I have been working with children and parents, I am amazed at just how many parents believe they can tell their children what to do and their children should just “do as they are told”.

Well I am here to tell you: nothing could be further from the truth. Most of these parents who expect or demand compliance from their children are needlessly headed for frustration and ultimately disaster. The worst part is: it just doesn’t have to happen!

As parents, we know we are far from perfect. We know we make mistakes; in fact, mistakes are a part of life, so it is inevitable. However, what we want to avoid are those serious mistakes that create larger problems that are difficult to resolve.

TOP THREE PARENTING MISTAKES

• Getting into power struggles that create resistance in your child
• Treating your child as if they know nothing and you know everything
• Towering over and overpowering your child to get them to do as you want

WHY ARE THESE TOP THREE CONSIDERED CATASTROPHIC MISTAKES?

All three really deal with power OVER your child. While you have responsibility for your child, ultimately you want them to develop to their full potential so they can live fulfilling, independent lives. If you tell them what to do all the time, they will not learn how to problem solve effectively for themselves.

Think about what you would feel if someone were to assert power and control over you, at your expense. It would be hard to thrive. In nature if a sun loving plant lived under a tree with a huge canopy, the lack of sunlight would mean the plant would not thrive.

THE RESULT OF OVER CONTROL

Parents who micromanage their child and overshadow every move their child makes, will often say, “it worked for me…I turned out OK… Actually, I was so wild I needed that type of control”.

What a parent who was micromanaged often does not realize is that much of their upbringing and behavior was a product of their parent not knowing other options.

While most children ultimately bend to their parent who exerts their authority in a controlling manner, they do not learn effective coping skills. This hampers them in resolving conflicts through means other than overpowering someone else. Imagine using a sledge hammer when a small hammer would work so much better.

No matter how well intentioned an overpowering parent might be, they build a resistance in their child. A child might submit but silently defy. Silent defiance comes in many forms, perhaps in “showing” the parent that no matter how tough the parent is, they will not give the parent the satisfaction of crying or showing emotion.

This becomes the stoic child who stores their anger and frustration. These emotions when under pressure tend to either leak out or explode at some point with someone less powerful that they can intimidate.

Some children respond to over control with anxiety and fear. Over controlling parents then may feel frustrated that these children seem to have “no backbone”. These children may perceive themselves as weak and ineffectual.

We need to let children struggle against the elements of life, in order for them to develop their strength. If we squash the evolving strength with our rules and demands, we can weaken them.

WAYS TO AVOID THE TOP THREE PARENTING MISTAKES AND ALLOW YOUR CHILD TO GROW AND THRIVE

• Connect with your child, step into their shoes to experience the world as they do
• Calm your emotions because emotions are contagious and if you are calm they will catch your calmness
• Listen to their thoughts and feelings. Children see things, as they appear to them in the moment. Enjoy the humor; children can be enormously entertaining as they tell it like it seems to them. Art Linkletter interviewed thousands of children on his early TV show, and showed us how “Kids Will Say The Darndest Things”.
• Limits are important but you will deliver them very differently if you complete the first three steps first.
• Fresh-Starts are very important because it gives you and your child freedom from mistakes. It normalizes mistakes and communicates your belief that you child can correct the mistakes. This is important as a way to focus on making better choices in the future. With fresh-starts, there is no making a child feel bad about past mistakes once they correct the problem.

No matter how long you have been a parent, chances are you are missing one of these steps or applying them out of order. The good news: you can follow the simple steps I have outlined to stop making mistakes that have lasting impact, and insure that you connect to have positive influence with your child.

Sandra, psychotherapist and Child Expert, creator of the 5-Word Parenting System: Connect, Calm, Listen, Limits and Fresh-Start. Learn it once use it for life. Contributing author to All-in-One Marriage Prep.http://one-step-ahead-parenting.comhttp://www.facebook.com/OneStepAheadParenting

Germs Don’t Cause Disease, You Do

We once had an in-office day care. It was complete with a classroom, an area sectioned off for indoor play, kitchen and outside playground equipment. There was a full-time monitor/teacher and lots of little munchkins around the office interrupting us during the course of the day.
It was healthy and nice for moms and dads to be able to interact with their children during the day. If you own a business, think about doing this. If you are an employee, get together with coworkers to see what you can do to help the business you work for get one established. We operated ours for almost a decade, until most of the youngsters grew up. Several of them have even come back to work with us as young adults. We became like a home away from home.

I was the official sliver surgeon for all the kids. Our office is in a wooded area so almost every week there was a sliver drama. That’s when I got to perform my magic with terrifying instruments like a scalpel, forceps, needle and magnifying glasses. My little patients tried to be real brave and fight back tears, but their dilated pupils and clammy trembling hands revealed the true life threatening state they found themselves in. All the other kids were a wide-eyed and awed audience for these major surgical events. It was just like The Learning Channel surgery programs, but with a Sesame Street flair and a little less blood and guts. Once my patient’s survival was assured, there were lots of hugs and thanks. Then off they would all skip, relieved that their friend had survived one of life’s dire and perilous calamities. They could be heard around the building all abuzz with, “Did it hurt?” “I saw the blood!” “You were brave!” “How big was it?” “Glad that wasn’t me!”

Actually, everyone would be pretty brave about this except my own kids. To listen to them when I am removing a sliver not even visible except with magnification, you would swear I was working on a 2 x 4 with vice grips or sawing their limb off with a chain saw. No need to be brave when it’s Dad who’s working on you.

As I would work on sweaty, grubby little hands, I wondered how kids ever survive childhood with all the filth. If germs were really the true cause of disease, how could any of us survive? Do we really think washing our hands with antiseptic soap, disinfecting toilet seats, doorknobs and telephones, wearing surgeon-type face masks on the streets and getting vaccinated keeps all of the germs at bay?
One E. coli bacterium can produce four billion offspring by the next morning. Viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa and parasites are ubiquitous throughout nature in air, water, on surfaces, skin, food and ground. They are microscopic and in countless numbers. Just one gram of soil contains over a billion microorganisms. If you shoveled just one cubic meter of dirt, 35 pounds of it would be these microscopic critters. Some are pathogens; others are necessary for our survival. Without bacteria to consume garbage, we would have long ago been smothered under the refuse nature and we create.
Good bacteria (probiotics) on our skin and in our mouths and intestinal tract actually help thwart the bad bacteria. Disease causing pathogens can even exert a beneficial effect by stimulating immunity. That is the principle of vaccines. The thing that it seems science is trying to achieve – no bacteria at all – with obsessive disinfection and sterilization is neither possible nor beneficial.

For example, scientists attempting to rid chickens of salmonella (food-borne pathogens) tried a sterile environment. The result was that mortality increased because the chicken’s immune system could not develop properly without exposure to the pathogens it needed to be protected against. Germ-free chickens were fine so long as there were absolutely no germs around. But since that would never be possible, once exposed to the pathogens they would easily succumb to disease and die. The solution was to feed baby chicks the salmonella infested droppings of the mother hens. After all the sterility failed, they found the cure was in the filthy poop! (Wysong, R. L. Salmonella Enteritidis Infection From Eggs, Wysong e-Health Letter, September 1999.)

We could never sterilize the world if we wanted to. If we did it would result in our demise. The microbe paranoia serves primarily the interests of drug, vaccine and disinfectant manufacturers. (I am not suggesting reasonable hygiene is not in order.)

I hear you, “Yeah, but we would be having the plague and other epidemics if it weren’t for medicine.” Contrary to popular belief, diseases like polio, measles and typhus were not conquered by humans. Note in the accompanying graphs that the vaccine or chemotherapeutic agent that is credited with vanquishing the scourges was introduced after the majority of the decline in the disease had already occurred! (Why Modern Medicine is the Greatest Threat to Health http://www.wysong.net/health/hl_884.shtml) It would be like me taking credit for dropping the tide by bucketing water out of the ocean as the tide was receding. Infectious diseases have a natural ebb and flow and so does the general immunity of the population. That is the reason epidemics decline regardless of human intervention.

We can’t even eradicate the mosquito, a creature which we can see and for which we can examine every life stage in detail. How are we going to eradicate microorganisms, which, if crowded side-by-side, would number in the trillions to occupy the space of one mosquito?

Look at the creatures in the wild co-existing, and even thriving in what we would consider filth. Rabbits eat their stool, vultures eat rotten carcasses, and dogs will roll in the most putrid, decaying material they can find and then lick themselves clean and offer the perfumery to their friends to lick as well.

Children constantly have their fingers in their mouths after wallowing on the floor, playing in the toilet or exploring the garbage pail. We adults aren’t exactly sterile in our habits either. Up until relatively recently a bath once a year was considered plenty in western society. That or less is common elsewhere in the world to this day. Billions wipe themselves with their fingers (usually with the left hand, a good reason to shake with the right) and yet live in societies that rank higher on health scores than nations with bidets, perfumed toilet paper and disinfectant aerosols and soaps.

Don’t buy the simplistic germ-view of how we get disease. True, certain pathogenic organisms can be associated with disease, but likewise so are crows and buzzards associated with road kill. The buzzard is not responsible for the road kill, neither are the pathogenic organisms responsible for disease. They are both opportunists. They wait until the prey is weakened and then they dive in. In microcosm, infectious disease is like the carnivore-prey drama occurring throughout nature. Predators always choose the easiest meal: the unfit, the weak and disabled.

We are not victims. Disease does not strike us. The opposite view that disease is a result of virulent microorganisms lurking in our environment waiting to attack us, organisms we can’t even see much less understand, makes us dependent on experts who have a vested interest in our illness. No matter how much money we give them, they will not protect us from the dark germ forces in spite of their Star Wars antiseptics, vaccinations, antibiotics and chemotherapeutic agents.

We are in control of our own defenses. We either create the setting for health or the meal for pathogens. Our choice.
 Dr. Wysong: A former veterinary clinician and surgeon, college instructor, inventor, research director for the company by his name and founder of the philanthropic Wysong Institute.http://www.wysong.net. Also check out http://www.cerealwysong.com

Mother Love

Scientific studies conclude something mothers everywhere have always intuitively known – that the unique love they have for their offspring is vitally important to their development. A mother’s love and nurturing even directly impacts the biological development of the child's brain and central nervous system. In effect, mother and child are “hard-wired” for mutual love. The brain is like a template designed to await molding by its early environment. One researcher even wrote that hugs and kisses during the early critical periods assist in making neurons grow and connect properly with other neurons.
Throughout childhood, warm human love and touch generate an internal release of addicting and pleasurable opiates. Even teenagers (who may act as if they don't need the parents at all) must receive ongoing neural synchrony – love – from the parents. The brain and heart appear literally designed for love, with happiness and even health depending on it.

The pituitary hormone, oxytocin, is present during all loving acts but most especially at birth where it serves to stimulate uterine contractions, and during nursing for the milk ejection reflex. It, along with the nursing hormone, prolactin, help create that intense feeling of love shared by mother and child. Endorphins are physiological chemicals that are also released in both the mother and child during loving contact. They create a feel-good high for both and thus play a critical role in encouraging affection and dependency.

When bonding fails, it is theorized that the absence of these pleasure chemicals can leave a void, making such children especially susceptible to drugs that can also release such pleasure chemicals. The stress hormone cortisol is also released when touch and love are lacking. Sensory deprivation in mother-absent children – a form of stress that stimulates the release of cortisol – can increase susceptibility to abnormalities such as depression, violence, substance abuse, and even impaired immune response.

The most natural way mothers deal with newborns in the majority of the world is with an in-arms approach. In more primitive cultures where mothers are barely allowed a break from work to give birth, babies are swaddled to the body creating constant contact and reassurance. This bathes tissues in love hormones and encourages development of healthy neural connections, particularly as the synaptic connections in the cortex develop for the first two years of life.

There is also heart-to-heart, quite literally, between mother and child. Heart muscle cells not only contract, but also communicate with one another. Isolating one cell from the heart in a petri dish causes it to lose its rhythm and begin to fibrillate until it dies. Putting two cells in proximity to one another causes them to synchronize and beat in unison. There is an unseen and as yet unmeasured communication between living cells. The beating of the mother's heart and her breathing pattern coordinate in a critical way with the infant's internal rhythms. This is part of what is known as a synchronizing hormonal flow that occurs between mother and child (directly from breast milk and also from loving contact and even from proximity and thought) that help to regulate vital rhythms in the child. Mothers instinctively place their babies to their left breast, keeping their two hearts close. The mother's developed heart actually stimulates the newborn heart activating a dialogue between the two hearts and minds. Mother and child are more appropriately considered as one, rather than two separate entities as they bond while the child is being held and nursed.

These interesting links that science is revealing between mother and child are another proof that all life is holistic and intimately interconnected. The ideal holistic model is that which nature presents and it is clear that mother and child are meant to be intimate. Children cannot simply be cast off to be fed, clothed and housed as if that were enough. Society needs to take note of this important biology as more and more pressure is put on modern families and mothers to treat newborns as just another duty to schedule into the appointment book or to have serviced by a third party. By giving love the respect it deserves and making it the starting point of life, the odds are much greater that love will then blossom in children and be carried through to their children…and, who knows, perhaps continue on to the world at large. We could use a lot of that.

Dr. Wysong: A former veterinary clinician and surgeon, college instructor in human anatomy, physiology and the origin of life, inventor of numerous medical, surgical, nutritional, athletic and fitness products and devices, research director for the present company by his name and founder of the philanthropic Wysong Institute.http://www.wysong.net. Also check out http://www.cerealwysong.com.  

Helping Your Child to Read Well

Instilling the habit of reading in your child will help their mind open up to all sorts of possibilities that they otherwise wouldn't have. This is one of the most important things you can do for them as a parent.

If you want to be successful with helping them to read well, it is important to be patient with them as they are learning their new skill. Giving them a lot of room to grow will help them get comfortable easier.

New readers will encounter the frustration of trying to learn how to put letters together into words. Not only that, but it takes a lot of practice to get the pronunciation down as well, so be ready to be a constant source of encouragement for them.

When you are introducing them to reading, pick books that are geared for children. The ones with nice and colorful drawings along with large type helps them to stay focused as well as speeding up the learning process.

Keep them at their reading level until they are ready to move into something harder. Let them grow at their own pace, with a little direction, and they will move into some more difficult reads soon enough.

Remember that children need breaks too, and try not to overdo it. They will have a better chance of loving to read if they can grow at a steady pace without it becoming a chore that they will hate.
The same goes with teaching them new words. Don't over stuff their minds right away, and try giving a few a day for them to work on.

Remember to also guide them through the process. Don't be afraid to read along with them, and always be encouraging as they stumble through words and sentences. Being patient and gentle now will make them better and more confident readers as well as developing the skills they will need in other areas as well.

Reading is something that almost anyone can master if they learn under the right conditions, and you as a parent are the greatest asset in making that happen. Guide them but don't intimidate them while being patient, and they will develop a strong understanding as well as love of reading for their entire lives.
 

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Severe Anxiety and Phobia in Children - How to Know If a Child Needs Help

Anxiety is one of the most prevalent problems of childhood and adolescence, but the least likely problem to be treated. Common effects of severe anxiety or fears include interference with family relationships, school performance and friendships as well as significant personal distress.

Avoidance is a Key Sign of Severe Anxiety

It is not always obvious that a child's difficulties are a result of extreme anxiety or fear. Avoidance is the most common outward sign that there may be a problem. Children and adolescents will actively try to avoid encountering anxiety or fear inducing events or objects.

Some parents, and even some health professionals, believe that children will eventually outgrow their problems with severe fears and anxiety. Research clearly shows us that this is not the case. Left untreated, children who suffer from severe anxiety and fears are at greater risk for additional emotional and behavioral problems such as depression and substance abuse.

How do you know whether a child is suffering from severe anxiety or fear?

Examples of interference or impairment in a school setting:

What you may see or hear
What may be happening
Child's school work is deteriorating because the child is so distracted from worrying
Child has high rate of absenteeism
Due to separation anxiety disorder, e.g., the child worried about being away from mom
Child's grades are dropping off because child does not participate and does poorly on tests
Due to interfering social evaluative fears, e.g., the child worried about what others think
Child making frequent visits to school nurse and is frequently picked up early by mom
Due to panic disorder, e.g., the child who feels like she needs to vomit every day

For further information on whether your child may need help, please visit our website:

Child Anxiety and Phobia Program (CAPP) at Florida International University