A mother at one of my recent talks told me afterward that the most helpful thing I said was, “If you make a mistake in parenting, your child will give you 400 more chances to get it right.” She was relieved by the grace our children offer us. Our kids let us practicing on them as we learn how to be parents. They suffer our mistakes. But they also forgive us, love us, and come back for more.
Like so many other mothers, she was so anxious to raise her kids correctly that she did not want to make any mistakes. And while we tell our kids, “There is no parenting manual,” there are many how-to guides that tell us how to raise our kids. In fact, there are too many of them, each one cataloging the mistakes of the bad-example parents, and show us how it should be done. Add to that our own high expectations of ourselves, and it is no wonder we don’t give ourselves any grace to learn on the job. We tell ourselves we must be perfect,
So, what to do? First, remember that your children are resilient. Second, I’d suggest picking a system that fits with your values and ways of parenting, and stick with it. The system will give you a platform from which to evaluate all of the other advice that comes your way. You won’t feel compelled to use every new technique. Plus, by following one system, you will learn its internal logic so that you can guide yourself through the situations not covered in the system you picked.
Posted in Parenting
|
Tagged Parent Hacks
|
Facebook launched a new feature called Groups. On its face, it offers a way to limit who you share information with. In an interview posted on Cnet, Mark Zukerberg said,
There are a lot of things you want to share with all your friends at once, but there are also things that you only want to share with your family or some co-workers. If you don’t have a way to do that, you just won’t share them at all.
So, to promote sharing, his company lets users set up a group to limit who you share with to a subset of friends. However, as that Cnet article warns, the friends you add to the group can add their friends as well. Say, for example, that you want to make a group for your cheer-leading squad. Well, one person on the squad can add a friend of hers, and that newly added person can add her friends too. Soon, you are sharing with so many more people than you imagined you would be, many of whom are not on the cheer-leading squad. Something that was meant to increase privacy and allow finer-tuned sharing ends up being just the opposite–it is too easy to over share.
Further, any friend can sign you up for a group. Imagine if someone adds you to a group you detest. What if an avowed Anarchist is added to the Republican National Convention group? TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, reports PC World, added Mark Zukerberg to the group North American Man/Boy Love Association, which promotes sex between adult men and under-aged boys. Being added to a group without your permission decreases your control over how you present yourself to the Facebook community. While we as citizens have the right to assemble, we ought also to have the right to no join groups when we don’t want to join. Note, though, that after being added to a group, you can remove yourself. This is, however, after the fact of being added in the first place.
Once again, Facebook has damaged the trust its users put into it.
Facebook rolled out the Places feature, which publishes where you are physically located at the time of your update. You tell Facebook where you are, and it publishes it. Facebook, it its infinite (advertiser-friendly) wisdom, has assumed you want this feature on and you want to share with everyone. This article from Lifehacker.com shows you how to turn off or limit this feature.
Switching your attention between different tasks, such driving and looking at your phone, is hard for the brain. And forget the idea of multitasking, human brains can only process one stream of information at a time. Switching between streams makes thinking about either one harder; add to that the cost of the switching itself. Terri Gross interviewed Matt Richtel about his New York Times series “Your Brain on Computers” on her show, Fresh Air.
Further, the more you switch between tasks, the harder it is to distinguish important and unimportant information. we seem to be training our brains that any thing that demands our attention will get it, this is the main symptom of ADD. The New York Times provides a test to see how well you do on multitasking. I landed in the category of of being able to focus and screen out distractions, which I would expect from someone who earned a doctorate degree and who needs to pay attention when meeting with clients. On the other hand, what if a mugger was approaching and I didn’t switch my attention?
Richtel also uses the same food metaphor familiar to those who have attended my “Facebook Ate My Teenager” talk. Food is necessary for survival, just as technology is necessary to survive in modern America. However, too much is harmful. He added that some technology is like eating the computer equivalent of Twinkies. He gave up his Twitter account because it was subtracting from the enjoyment of his son, for him Twitter is a Twinkie. He urges parents to put away the screens when we are nurturing our children.
We feel compelled to check our e-mail, Richtel says, both because it provides an enjoyable little squirt of dopamine and because we get a pleasant e-mail on a variable, unpredictable schedule, just like with playing a slot machines or fishing. I would add that we also check it because we are social creatures. Staying in the social loop is important to humans, and e-mail is one of the ways we share. Facebook is a great example of our need for interaction.
The study of technology on the brain continues apace. Richtel series will continue, and he set up a cliff hanger in his interview with Terri Gross.
An NPR story takes a tender look through the eyes of Lisa Daxter, an adult with autism. Lisa, taking a role much like an anthropologist from Mars, points out just how social we “neurotypicals” are. We clump together into social groups, we mimic each others expressions and behaviors, and we accomplish more together than we could ever do alone. To help her fit in, Lisa makes lists of topics neurotypicals don’t like to talk about. Being social smooths the interactions at work and helps her make friends.
NPR reports two studies (here and here) showing that younger kids in a classroom are more often (60% of the cases) diagnosed with ADHD when compared to their older classmates. The researchers looked at birth dates and school cut off dates to compare kids who can be up to a year apart in age, but placed in the same grade. Both studies conclude that teachers, usually the first to suggest the need for an ADHD evaluation, are evaluating kids to each other even when the younger ones are less mature due to their age, not to attention problems or hyperactivity.
This is similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s finding that, “a hugely disproportionate number of professional hockey and soccer players are born in January, February and March (his blog).” His findings are, in short, that older kids in the same grade show more promise only because of their physical maturity, not inborn talent; nonetheless, they are given more practice, praise and coaching because of their skills.
Since a misdiagnosis of ADHD can lead to a mental health diagnosis, special placement with in a school system and psychotropic medications, parents and teachers should note the child’s age, not the school grade. Those making the diagnosis should also attend to this.
Gary Stanoff, MFT, referred me to a website that offers drug testing kits and a breathalyzer for less cost than at local drug stores.
Posted in Uncategorized
|
Tagged Drug Use
|
I’ve been back for a week. It was a wonderful time away, and just long enough. Several times during the last two days, I caught myself longing to get back to work; I started to thing about clients and what would be helpful to them. It is good to be back
The suggestion to be creative, much like the command, “Be spontaneous,” just kills the process. A sidebar in this week’s Newsweek, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman point out Mark Runco’s research that a general instruction to “be creative” dries up the creative juices. Instead, a more specific challenge generates twice as many creative responses.
This is so much like the therapy I conduct. I ask questions, not to get facts in response, but to generate new ideas. Clients and I have a pretty good sense of what the problems are. What we don’t yet have a sense of (and are striving to clarify) is what life might be like if the problem were diminished, taken care of, put aside, etc.
We find this new vision through questions. For example: How might you life be different if you didn’t listen to Depression in first thing in the morning? If you were to stand with yourself and not against yourself, what might be the first difference you notice? The first effect is to nurture hope, the second is to move to change, and the third is to start living those new visions.
I ask questions instead of make statements because questions allow clients more freedom to go where they want to go than a declaration from me does. I tend to ask questions in the subjunctive mood (might, could be, if…were, etc) to add in a sense of speculation and to undermine the sensation of realism that problems cloak themselves in.
Newsweek: Forget Brainstorming
Posted in Uncategorized
|
Tagged Therapy
|
SuperMe is a new, on-line collection of video games designed, in the words of Alice Taylor, commissioning editor for UK’s Channel 4, “It’s about resilience: how to feel good when life chucks you lemons. How to be better at thinking positively. How to cope with (and learn to love) failure.”
I watched the promotional video, which talks about how the games are aimed at promoting happiness, and played one game. The game was fun, but I’m not too sure of the link between it and happiness. My skills in aiming a ball to hit a target allowed the regular categories of winning and losing, much like any video game. What did you think of the concept and the ability to promote happiness or resilience? Tell us in the comments.
SuperMe via BoingBoing.net.
