Here’s a round up of the top five best parenting books that were released in 2022. Happy reading!
Best New Books:
1) Brain-Body Parenting: How to Stop Managing Behavior and Start Raising Joyful, Resilient Kids by Mona Delahooke
“Based on years of clinical experience, this book offers a new approach to parenting that considers and centers the essential role of the entire nervous system, which controls children’s feelings and behaviors, in how to raise children.”
2) Peaceful Discipline: Story Teaching, Brain Science & Better Behavior by Sarah R. Moore
“A reflection on the body-brain connection in behavior and why our concept of “consequences don’t work for children, and what to do, within a positive framework, instead.”
3) Raising Antiracist Children: A Practical Parenting Guide by Britt Hawthorne
“An essential guide to raising inclusive, antiracist children from educator and advocate, Britt Hawthorne.”
4) LGBTQ Family Building: A Guide for Prospective Parents by Abbie E. Goldberg
“This easy to read guide offers a comprehensive overview of parenting with regard to the specific complexities, joys, and nuances of being an LGBTQ+ person and parent.”
5) Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Dr. Becky Kennedy
“A comprehensive resource offering new techniques for modern parenting and how to raise kids to feel confident and resilient.”
And a few oldies but goodies:
(These are a few recommendations but this series continues all the way up to adolescence!)
I was never a cooking kid. Despite the many invitations into their separate kitchens I always refused my parents offers to help cook. I never made paprikash csirke with my mom or baked ziti with my dad. The kitchen and all its mysteries was the domain of parents. Except on Christmas. Because on Christmas we didn’t cook. We baked.
Cooking, to me, was the Wild West. Full of strange ingredients, relying on instinct and secret troves of knowledge. Baking was different. There were a key set of players that could be rearranged into a thousand different delicious things. There were steps, there was order, there was control. And as a kid, in that, I found magic.
For the past seven years I have missed those baking Christmases. I wasn’t with EITHER parent – both because I lived abroad and because of the pandemic.
For many people, like me, this will literally be the first holiday season they have together with family in years.
And while that is so so wonderful. It presents a challenge many of us weren’t expecting. In the absence of our routines, in a world turned topsy turvey, traditions were rearranged. Adapted. Transformed. As were relationships and rituals.
Right before the pandemic my mother had gone on a few dates with a guy, I barely remembered his name. Now I know him as Peter, my stepfather, and the man who made her feel loved enough she decided to move in with him after twenty years living on her own. The era of going to my grandmother’s house for the holiday too has ended (she’s moving in with my mom.) And my father, who, over the 25 years of their divorce only ever lived down the road, is moving the day after Christmas to Albany, 3.5 hours away.
There is a part of me that just wants to yell ‘Stop! Hang on a second! Let me catch up.”
At first, I felt like that little kid being invited back into my parents kitchen to cook.I don’t understand. Where is everything as I left it? Where is it all going?
I’m a thirty year old kid and having these questions, these before bedtime fears. So too may many of your little ones. Routine and ritual can be so beneficial and comforting to a child.
Kids love baking.
So how do we talk to our children, both little and big, about life, the holidays as they now are, about a world where traditions sometimes have to change and rearrange?
Every year as I was growing up, my mother and I celebrated advent (the entire December month long lead up to Christmas.) Since I was 18 and moved away, we haven’t had much of a chance to spend that time together. I haven’t gotten to read to her her favorite Christmas Story (A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas.)
This year I have. And when I sit on the couch to do so, my grandmother is there too. And before we begin, Peter lights the Chanukah candles and sings Maoz Tzur. Later tonight I’ll help my father finish packing, moving for the first time to a place that is his and no one else’s. As I sit and read, I can see the advent candles flickering side by side with our menorah.
It is indeed a strange new world. And that can scare kids and their grownups (and grownup kids) alike. But in the strangeness, new beauty and new wonders can be found. And as I sit and read, looking at the glowing world around me, I am reassured that everything is going to be fine, that the kids are going to be alright. Because they’ll learn that old traditions mesh with new ones, and you can make something together, in which everyone is involved. And, from where I’m sitting, that’s a wonderful thing.
After I finish reading, I’ll watch the candles go out, wrap my dad his presents to open in his new house, and later I’ll help with the cooking (and the baking!)
Now that the Thanksgiving rush is over, the turkey is eaten and we have all returned to our own homes, perhaps we need to rethink this holiday.
Recently I listened to an interesting show on NPR about Thanksgiving from the Native American perspective.
It summarized what we all know by now: that the Thanksgiving story taught to most of us was a largely made up, highly romanticized version of the colonial — Native American relationship.
The show offered the Wompanoag perspective on what happened between the Colonists and the Native people — and it was NOT what any of us heard about in elementary school.
The author of a beautiful children’s book on the subject (see below for link) spoke about her people’s perspective. And if you go to the website that describes her book, this is what it says:
*****
A New Thanksgiving Story for a 21st Century America
Many Americans see Thanksgiving as a holiday rooted in our nation’s birth, celebrating a harvest feast. They imagine tables laden with turkey and its accompaniments, surrounded by brave Pilgrims and their newfound “Indian” friends. These ideas are reinforced every year in America’s classrooms, on televisions and at annual parades as the big day arrives.
Unfortunately, these ideas are based on a myth born at the height of the Civil War. Sarah Josepha Hale, an influential magazine editor who wrote the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” fervently campaigned for a national day of thanks. She envisioned a Thanksgiving holiday to celebrate peace and unite a divided country. In September 1863, Hale wrote to President Lincoln, urging him to create a national holiday, and he agreed. Thanksgiving, as we know it, was born.
Images of Pilgrims, “Indians” and turkeys embedded themselves into our nation’s conscience in the decades that followed–all at the expense of the true Thanksgiving story and the Wampanoag peoples who saved the Pilgrims. European historical records and Wampanoag accounts present a very different story.
In September 1620, a group of settlers left Plymouth to start new lives in the colony of Virginia. A storm blew them off course and they found themselves moored off the lands of the Wampanoag people in present-day Massachusetts. The newcomers explored their new world and stole food and provisions from Wampanoag homes. They created a new settlement, named Plymouth, on the site of a Wampanoag village devastated by disease and warfare caused in large part by earlier visits by European traders.
Unfortunately, the celebrations — and the newcomers’ thanks — did not last long. Fifty-five years later, in 1676, the settlers killed the son of the Wampanoag sachem who saved them. This was not new. European, and later American, settlers regularly attacked and exploited the Native people they met. This left Native Americans fighting foreign diseases, illegal occupation and removal from their homelands. The American government also created boarding schools that punished Native Americans who dared to speak their language or practice their culture.
*****
This is a painful part of American history — and one that is difficult to know how to approach with our children.
So what is a modern American family to do about this holiday? What can we rightfully celebrate? And what should we emphasize next year?
Many of us love the tradition of Thanksgiving — the turkey, the side dishes, the gathering of family and/or friends, the pies, (most of all the pies).
Or maybe we are vegetarian or vegan or come from elsewhere in the world and do not entirely own this holiday as our own — or maybe we choose not to gather or make a big deal of the day — but most of us have the day off as do our children —
So, how about if we make our own tradition? How about if between now and next year, we think about what kind of holiday ritual makes sense to us?
I suggest, as did the cross-cultural panel of guests on NPR, that we all find ways to celebrate what we have, that we celebrate our gratitude for whatever it is that makes each one of us feel grateful, and that with our children, we make this explicit and spoken.
We can still have a Thanksgiving feast — whether it features turkey or not — and we can still offer toasts or we can go around the table and say what we are grateful for — or we can respect the shy people at our table and just talk about our gratitude more casually — or we can take a hike out in nature and be grateful for the beauty we find there — or we can serve food at a communal kitchen — or we can spend a normal day at home.
But how about spending the day being grateful — and perhaps also make sure to have the children’s book below on hand to read to our children.
Tejal Toprani Misra is a psychotherapist in part-time private practice and a most-time stay at home mom. She lives in Arizona with her spouse and two young sons.
In the 4th grade I had two best friends with whom I played at the back of the playground during recess.
One Monday, my Korean Christian “best friend” asked me what I did on Sunday. I don’t remember what my answer was but it did not involve church.
“Why?” She asked.
“Because I’m not Christian.”
Eleven year old me was raised Hindu and I still am.
We can break here for a quick religious education: For those of you who don’t know, Hinduism is the world’s oldest religion and the third largest religion behind Christianity and Islam. Hindus believe that God exists and that all human beings are divine. Hindus also believe in the importance of religious harmony among all things. Our religious place of worship is called a Temple and the word for “temple” is different depending on what your native Indian language is.
Okay, back to the story: It’s Monday and I am at recess and my “best friend’s” response to my recollection of my Sunday was “You didn’t go to Church?” and I say “No I’m not Christian, I’m Hindu.” To which my “friend” replied, “If you’re not a Christian, you’re going to go to hell!”
Eleven-year-old me was shocked.
How could someone so affirmatively declare what was going to happen to ME in the after life? Who died and made her Queen?
But all my eleven year-old self could blurt out was “Nooo I’m not!!!” Being told I was going to go to hell felt isolating and hurtful. I didn’t know what to do with this information. Our other best friend stood by listening.
So when I went home that day I asked my Dad if we were going to hell when we die.
It bears mentioning that my Dad is the opposite of Mr. Rogers when it comes to explaining things to children.
But hindsight is 20/20.
My sweet, well intentioned Dad said that as Hindus, we don’t believe in hell.
Whew!
What a relief!
Now I can take this information back to Janet (oops!) and be exempt from any “Hell” she thought I was going to for not worshiping the same god as she did.
My bad!
But my Dad didn’t stop there. He proceeded to tell me that Hindus believe that heaven and hell are all here on earth. Hindus serve out their karma for good and bad deeds here in cycles of reincarnation. He said, “When each life ends our souls come back in other living things like a spider, a cockroach or …. a warthog.”
Eleven-year-old Tejal was freaking the F out!
My Dad sensed my fear and tried to walk backwards away from this landmine by saying “Maybe you will come back as a bird.”
To my parents credit there wasn’t a blueprint on how to handle these questions.. The great immigration cycle of Indians from India started in 1965, less than a 100 years ago. Up until recently there weren’t any childrens’ books or regular temple activities to teach young Indian American children like me about their culture and religion.
I wish I had had the chutzpah to explain my background when my Christian “best friend” told me I was going to “Hell.” I didn’t have a rebuttal or an explanation of my own to share with her.
As a result, the experience really shaped me. It empowered me to learn more about my culture and religion. It then informed me to figure out how I was to educate my children on Hinduism. Even though I’m still afraid of coming back as a warthog in my next life, I’m doing my best to write a blueprint that works for me and our family.
Following up on my last post where I talked about intensive parenting, I would like to talk a little more about the subject.
But this time I want to talk about one of the things that makes parenting intensive these days and one way to reduce the workload.
And to help, I want to quote Dawn Staley, former Temple University Women’s basketball coach, Olympic gold medallist, and Women’s Basketball Hall of Famer who was interviewed recently by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
Dawn Staley made some interesting observations about parenting.
She said that parents these days often cannot stand to see their children feel uncomfortable. She said that the parents of her players often want to protect them from frustration or failure … or even minor discomfort.
This takes A LOT of work on the parents’ part and is a questionable strategy for raising resilient, independent children.
She said:
“I find that just through my life, being uncomfortable, I found a way to grow. And I give that to our players. … I’ll give you an example. Most of the players that I coach, their parents, they don’t want them to hurt. Like, they don’t want them to be unhappy. They don’t want them to go through life hurting or failing… bad game, bad grade, just – break up with your (partner). Like, their parents don’t want them to go through that.
And I am the direct opposite of their parents. Like, I want them to do that. I want you to break up, have a breakup. I want you to have a bad game. I want you to fail the test because from those moments, growth is taking place. You find a way to not have those repeat performances in … your life. So sometimes my players – they struggle with me because I don’t treat them like their parents treat them.”
This is so profound – Coach Staley is suggesting that in her own life she grew from the times when she was uncomfortable – and she thinks her players can do the same.
This may sound sensible – and yet it is so hard to institute a similar policy with our own children – so hard to tolerate our own children’s frustration or pain.
Letting children fail or fall or have a bad break up without rushing in to prevent it or to fix it is hard for parents. We want our children to be happy and comfortable. We want their lives to be smooth and easy.
But is this the best thing for our children? And is it the best thing for us parents?
Will our children learn what they need to live their lives independently, and to survive frustrations and disappointments – if we don’t let them experience difficulty as they grow up?
I have written about this in other posts and no doubt I will write about it again. But I think it is worth thinking about the answer it to these questions.
And I think it is likely that protecting our children too much is not a good parenting strategy – not only for our children but for us.
Trying to cushion every fall (metaphorical or real) is a full time job even if you just have one child. And if you have more than one? Well, that is total overload.
And taking this approach to child raising leaves very little time to be an adult outside of work, to talk to our partner, to be with our friends, to relax, to read, etc.
To be good parents, we need time to refuel, including in the presence of our children – not just on nights out.
We need to do this partly for ourselves, and partly to show children that being an adult is not just one never ending string of chores and responsibilities.
I just read a wonderful comedic memoir called, “Did Ye Hear Mammy Died” by Seamus O’Reilly. In this book O’Reilly describes how his father raised him – and his ten siblings – after their mother died.
His father had eleven children. He raised them without help. He never remarried. But he did expect the older ones to watch the younger ones and perhaps, most importantly, he did expect them all to amuse themselves.
The author describes hours and days and weeks of boredom. And he also describes all the reading and other activities he and his siblings dreamed up to do.
Their father did not sit on the floor to play with them. He did not see it as his job to entertain them, except, perhaps on the occasional vacation. But he did keep an enormous library of books and videos (movies) in the house and he did insist that they spend time with each other and he also made sure that they knew what they were supposed to do and when they were supposed to do it. He did wake them all up every morning and he did chauffeur them to their various clubs and choirs and classes and performances. He made sure they got where they needed to be and he did have someone to clean up the house after them. But again, he did not feel it was his job to sit on the floor with them or to entertain them. He had his own interests and hobbies and activities that are well described in the book.
This is a fascinating story for so many reasons, not the least of which has to do with parenting.
Reading this book, and listening to Dawn Staley gives us pause to think – and these two tremendous adults make clear how all encompassing AND how limited our current view of parenting is.
Parents’ lives today are arduous, in part because we have a hard time discriminating what our jobs are with our children and what we need to leave up to our children to do on their own.
When our 16 year old gets a ticket, if we contact our friend who has an inside track on cancelling that parking or speeding ticket, will that teenager learn that it’s better not to speed or to park in an illegal spot?
Or, if we pay the fine for them, again, will they learn anything from the experience?
The answer is obvious.
And the same goes for what will happen if we always jump in to help them to finish the school projects they have left to the last moment or when we write the college essay for them.
We may feel the stakes are too high to let our child experience consequences. If he doesn’t get a good grade in 6th grade, he won’t get into the higher level classes in middle school. If she doesn’t write a good essay, she won’t get into the college she wants.
But we have to ask ourselves, how will our child learn to do what they need to do in life if they DON’T suffer the consequences when they fail to do these things? And why we are so worried about our child’s project or college essay or problem with a girlfriend/boyfriend/partner in the first place?
We have to ask ourselves why we don’t think our children can sort these things out and what our children will miss out on learning if we sort everything out FOR them.
And then we need to think carefully about when and where we step in to help – and when and where we sit back, do our own thing, and let our children figure things out for themselves.
Is parenting too intensive?
YES. But perhaps we can do something about SOME of the load by looking at our own behavior.
And for the Dawn Staley interview, here it is in its entirety:
Recently while talking to Dr. Pauline Boss (author of Ambiguous Loss and The Myth of Closure), she said something remarkable. Although we were not really talking about parenting, as an aside, she said, “I think parenting, the way it’s done today, is unsustainable”.
And then, just today I saw an article in The Atlantic on the same topic (copied below because it’s important to read in its entirety).
Parenting today is SO intensive that it is exhausting parents and making them feel ever guilty that they are not doing enough. And it is not necessarily benefitting children.
I noticed a trend in the parent-baby groups I run, starting about twenty years ago. Parents were suddenly feeling that they had to make their own baby food, they had to be “present” with their babies and children at all times, they had to get down on the floor and play as often as possible and they had to sign their children up for music and language classes starting in early toddlerhood.
But why?
In previous generations, parents were too busy to get down on the floor to play – children were sent outside to play or expected to play on their own in the house. One meal was made for breakfast, lunch and dinner and children were expected to eat it.
You know what I’m talking about here – every child was not the focus of attention every minute.
But somehow the demands of parenting have escalated exponentially. To consider themselves good parents, parents now have to exhaust themselves all day, every day, meeting every need of every child.
And this IS unsustainable.
Read the below and see what YOU think.
From The Atlantic:
How to Quit Intensive Parenting
It’s the prevailing American child-rearing model across class lines. But there’s a better way.
By Elliot Haspel, May 10, 2022
Luca Zordan / Gallery Stock
Intensive parenting—the dominant model of modern American child-rearing—is a bit like smoking: The evidence shows that it’s unhealthy, yet the addiction can be hard to kick. I’d like to suggest strategies that could help society quit overparenting, and they require parents, policy makers, and even the childless to pitch in. But first, we need to understand why intensive parenting—whereby mothers and fathers overextend their time and money curating their child’s life in hopes of maximizing the child’s future success—prevails.
Often used interchangeably with more derisive terms such as helicopter parenting, bulldozer parenting, and snowplow parenting, intensive parenting has its appeals. Scholars suggest that it first arose among middle-class families in the mid-to-late 20th century, amid shrinking manufacturing jobs, globalization, growing wealth inequality, a sense that children were both “vulnerable and moldable,” and a general feeling that American triumphalism was perhaps not a guarantee. In response to this anxiety, parents started pushing harder to ensure their kids’ future stability. Throughout the 2010s, as precarity continued to increase, the intensive-parenting ideology stretched its tendrils across class lines.
Rafts of research prove that intensive parenting mainly serves to burn out parents while harming children’s competence and mental health. But the facts are losing. In a 2018 survey, 75 percent of respondents rated various intensive-parenting scenarios as “very good” or “excellent,” and less than 40 percent said the same about scenarios showing a non-intensive approach. (An example that respondents grappled with: When a child says they’re bored, should a parent find an activity to sign them up for or suggest they go outside and play?)
What parents need, then, is not another bromide against micromanaging their kids, but pragmatic steps to alter course and still feel good about it. This is where the idea of “good enough” parenting comes in. The phrase was coined in 1953 by the British pediatrician and psychologist Donald Winnicott, and we can now update his work. Winnicott pushed back strongly against the idea that children require perfection from their parents, or that children should be perfectible. “There is room for all kinds of [parents] in the world,” Winnicott wrote. “And some will be good at one thing, and some good at another. Or shall I say, some will be bad at one thing, and some bad at another.” He added another idea too: That no one-size-fits-all parenting model exists. “You are specialists in this particular matter of the care of your own children. I want to encourage you to keep and defend this specialist knowledge. It cannot be taught.”
“Good enough” does not mean mediocre or apathetic (the not-good-enough parent is real), but requires acknowledging the point beyond which attempts at further optimization cause more harm than good. Given reasonable conditions and plenty of love, there are many ways in which kids can have happy childhoods and emerge as healthy, conscientious, successful adults. The developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik likens this approach to gardening. Where intensive parents are carpenters, hammering children into a particular shape one stroke at a time, gardening parents pour their labor into creating preconditions of “love, safety, and stability” for their kids to grow in potentially unpredictable ways.
So how do we move away from the cult of intensive parenting? Very carefully and intentionally. We have to start thinking of parenting not as a set of instructions but as several dials. Research suggests that certain dials, such as “display love,” “validate feelings,” and “set aside some regular quality time,” should absolutely be turned up to 10. Others, such as “solve your child’s (nonserious) problem for them,” should be pretty low. And many, such as “provide educational support” and “offer enrichment activities,” should be somewhere in the center. Your exact dial settings will depend on your values and your family situation, of course. All 10s and all ones are almost always a bad idea.
We can’t calibrate those dials correctly, however, without unraveling some societal myths that perpetuate intensive parenting. For instance, many parents overestimate the extent to which their day-to-day parenting choices influence child development, fueling unnecessary pressure. Similarly, the perception that kids face enormous physical dangers outside the home, which is often not reflective of reality, influences limits on many children’s autonomy. And perhaps no myth has done more damage than the idea that one must attend an elite college to secure financial stability. Matt Feeney, the author of the book Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age, has called the college-admissions process “truly one of the most influential forces for the steering of human behaviors and the formation of human attitudes in the United States.”
The “wage premium” for those who graduate college versus those who don’t continues to be very real (although it has narrowed in recent years, and elite-college access remains hugely inequitable). But the differences among college-completers are much more modest, particularly if the goal is middle-class security as opposed to extreme wealth. The Harvard economist Raj Chetty found that by age 33, people of any income bracket who attended Ivy League and other top schools ended up earning more, on average, than nearly 80 percent of their birth-year peers. Yet those who attended non-elite four-year colleges still ended up earning more than nearly 70 percent of their similarly aged peers. In other words, parents should be reassured—and reassuring one another—that their kid attending a mid-tier university instead of an Ivy, or even taking a track toward a well-paying trade, is an equal cause for celebration.
Moving away from intensive parenting will also require a culture in which parents’ needs outweigh child optimizations. We need to normalize not adding more extracurriculars (and all the attendant time and money) to our schedule; not spending hours completing our children’s homework with (or for) them. To be sure, parental intervention is necessary at times—securing a tutor for a struggling reader, ensuring college financial-aid applications are completed—but those times are limited in scope and merely require attentive, rather than intensive, efforts.
At the same time, we need to normalize saying yes to prioritizing adult friendships and an adequate amount of sleep. We need to reassure one another—explicitly, publicly—that being a whole person is being a good parent. Generally, content parents are less prone to conflict and more prone to listening, and the opposite also holds true. Small, everyday parenting decisions may not have a massive impact on kids, but the causal link between parental well-being and child well-being is quite strong. Anxiety-driven intensive parenting has even been implicated as one factor in the rising youth mental-health crisis. Freedom from intensive methods provides both parents and their children with the ability to fashion a healthier life.
This is neither a purely individual problem nor an endeavor for parents alone: American public policy encourages intensive parenting. The United States lacks affordable child care and paid family leave, tolerates massive income inequality, and enshrines few employee protections, such as fair workweek laws. This setup generates tremendous stress and insecurity, and many parents respond by clenching tighter around their children’s lives. The “free-market family” system, as the author Maxine Eichner fashions it—in which families are largely on their own to meet child-rearing needs with limited public options—leaves parents competing against one another for resources kept artificially scarce. Those same competitive forces that isolate and exhaust parents are a barrier to them rallying together and demanding that lawmakers pass pro-family policies. A conscious effort will be necessary to see that, as Dana Suskind and Lydia Denworth put it in Parent Nation, “the fate of each child, no matter how well nurtured, is, ultimately, intimately intertwined with the fates of all children.”
Changing the nation’s dominant parenting model might feel daunting. But in seeking a replacement for intensive parenting, we shouldn’t harken back to a mythical yesteryear: Steven Mintz, the author of Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, writes that “there has never been a time when the overwhelming majority of American children were well cared for and their experiences idyllic.” Instead, we need a model that meets the current context while rejecting false premises. Intensive parenting, for now, has the momentum of a surging river. By replacing mindsets and policies of scarcity with mindsets and policies of abundance, carpentry with gardening, competition with solidarity, we can erect a dam. And a new, healthier way forward can emerge: not more, not perfect, but good enough.
Our hearts go out to the grieving parents, children and community of the Robb School in Uvalde, Texas, a town we would not have known much about were it not for an 18 year old gunman. It is time to work toward better gun control laws in the U. S. to protect our children and to make all of us safer.
By Tejal Toprani Misra who is a psychotherapist in part-time private practice and a most-time stay at home mom. She lives in California with her spouse and two young sons.
Is it just me or does every mom stay up at night thinking about how they are raising their kids?
Maybe it’s being a therapist.
We think – and then we over think – every single decision.
Is my goal to make sure my kids don’t talk about how I messed them up when they go into therapy in twenty years?
Or is it just that I want to raise good kids?
Let me give you some back story: When I became a mom over six years ago, I intentionally decided to give my kids the opportunities and experiences I wanted, but never had.
This led to burning questions keeping me up at night like, Is privilege “bad”? And what is “privilege”?
When my six-year-old has a conversation with his friend about luxury cars should I be happy that he found a common interest with a friend or should I cringe that they compare Teslas to BMW’s? At their age, I didn’t know the difference between an Altima and an Audi.
We just moved to an affluent, predominantly upper middle-class suburb this year. Should we want to keep up with the Jones – those proverbial people with “all the things”? And…should my six year old son even know what a Tesla is?
Here’s another example: I now survey trusted mothers on how many extracurriculars are enough. One friend tells me one or two. The other says as many as you can handle as a parent. The third says something in between. Meanwhile, I keep asking my 6-year-old if we can accelerate getting him his driver’s license. Who wants to drive to all these activities, anyway?
When I was growing up, my family fell into the middle to lower middle class “trap.” There was enough money to have everything we needed and a few things we wanted – but not so little that we qualified for assistance – or so much that we had money for the extras. For example, when I asked to join Girl Scouts, the answer was an immediate “no”. My parents had full time jobs that prevented them from taking me to activities. And they certainly did not have the money to sign me up for them and buy all the uniforms and other paraphernalia.
This fall, when my oldest son asked me if I could sign him up for soccer, I thought this is great, right? Now he can do what I never got to do. This is the way it’s supposed to go. Your child expresses an interest in an activity which hopefully means they will put effort into it, and then gain confidence and skill.
But then I thought, is one practice and one game a week enough? Should we sign up for a fundamentals class to further his knowledge base of soccer? Should we take a ball anytime we go to a park or encourage him to play when there is down time? Or should we hire a private coach?
It’s a slippery slope.
When I signed my son up, I paid extra for a partial scholarship so an interested child who might not have the means would have the opportunity to play soccer in a league. I didn’t do this as a “flex” I did it because the child who couldn’t afford to join reminded me of the younger version of myself. My child of course has no knowledge of my childhood. He thinks it isn’t too much to ask for a thousand dollars from the tooth fairy.
So now I’ve fallen into the ”if you give a mouse a cookie” situation.
Since I signed the 6-year-old up for soccer then it felt like I had to sign my three-year-old up for something too. So, I signed the three-year-old up for after school soccer.
To be honest I did this to give myself another hour before pick up time. – but that doesn’t mean he isn’t enjoying it.
I’ve started telling myself that by doing these activities, my kids build connections with others – like Adam Neumann and We Work.
But really, they’re just a six-year-old and a three-year-old who want to play soccer.
And when I ask my six-year-old about his teammates’ names I get, “I don’t know.”
So, is it even working?
And the question remains, what will ever be enough? Will tennis lessons be next? Then chess lessons? And how about a second language?
Where is the balance? When am I just trying to keep up with my upper class neighbors and when am I actually helping my children to have good learning and social opportunities and helping them to acquire grit and resilience?
And THIS is another unanswered question from yours truly.
Some parents think that raising their children to be resilient means trying to instill confidence in their children.
And they think that the way to do THAT is to say, “Good job. Buddy!” after everything their child does.
Other parents, often Dads (sorry, Dads) think that raising resilient children means telling your children to “shake it off” when they fall down or miss a goal in a soccer game.
They often believe that it is better if their children don’t cry or focus on their disappointments and hurts.
But let’s look at what a researcher in the field has to say.
Dr. Lucy Hones studied resilience at the University of Pennsylvania and then at The University of Christ Church in New Zealand.
What she found is that resilient people are different from others in three main ways.
And, according to me, we can help our children to become more resilient by adopting some of the strategies that are used by resilient people.
First, Dr. Hones says, resilient people know that suffering is part of life — which helps them to accept negative events when they happen without feeling victimized. When it comes to children, it is important for parents neither to protect them from every scrape or disappointment nor discourage their children from feeling their feelings about getting hurt or disappointed.
What parents can do instead, is to help children to understand that difficult things happen in life, they won’t always succeed, and they will sometimes fall down and get hurt. And when they are disappointed or hurt, it is painful.
And parents can also help children to know that they can withstand disappointment and move on afterwards.
Recently, I talked to a psychologist who works at the counseling center of a local college. He said that he sees college freshmen ALL the time who have NEVER received less than an A and don’t know how to handle it when they receive a B or a C at college. And he said that he sees loads of freshmen who do not seem to know how to tolerate and manage disappointment or failure on any level. For example, he said when they are rejected from the fraternity or sorority of their choice, or when they suffer a romantic disappointment, they break down, they cry and they feel like they just can’t handle it.
These college kids have clearly been protected from failure their entire lives. And it has not helped them.
Second, Dr. Hones says, resilient people acknowledge what they cannot control and focus on what they can. So again, when it comes to children, we can help them to understand that there are certain things they must do in life whether they like it or not, and rather than trying to rescue them from these things or do these things for them, we can help them to understand that some things are hard and no fun but they need to try their best to get through them.
For example, I had a parent who came to me because her son never finished his projects for school on time. When I asked her how she had handled this in the past, she said that she hated doing this, but she felt that she had to help him because he was so anxious about getting the projects done by the due date that he would get himself all upset and stay up late into the night being unproductive. As a result, she often stayed up late with him on the night before it was due to get it done.
This mother, like so many parents, was not helping her son to do the thing he did not like to do, she was not helping him to accept that if he wanted to finish something on time he had to start before the last day. Instead, she was rescuing him. And I don’t think that this strategy was helping the boy toward reliance. I suggested that she hire a nice high school student to start the next project with the boy a couple of weeks ahead of time and come by a few times a week to work on the project with him. It is often hard for parents to get a child to do something differently, but often an older teen or a tutor CAN. This boy accepted this strategy and gradually learned how to start doing his projects ahead of time.
Third, Dr. Hones found that resilient people acknowledge the negative but focus on the positive.
She gave the example of someone coming out of their house and seeing a tiger on a hillside several thousand yards away on one side and a nice surprise on the front walkway on the other side. She said that it is of course important for that person to note that the tiger is there and to take adequate precautions to protect themself from it and THEN to go and get the nice surprise.
If, instead, she said, the person focuses on the fact that there is a tiger in the vicinity and as a result, stays anxious all day and night, they will never get to see what the surprise is and enjoy it.
So, how can we help children to focus on the positive?
The worst way is to tell them to do this. This will be meaningless to them.
The best way is through modeling. If we are anxious all the time, focusing on all the bad news and terrible events in the world, our children will undoubtedly learn from us that the world is a dangerous place, and they too will feel anxious.
Moreover, if we watch the news 24/7 and check our phones constantly, we will not be available to our children to comfort them and to provide them with an island of security and reassurance — which all children need.
If, on the other hand, we can acknowledge the terrible events going on in the world and in our lives, learn what we have to do to protect ourselves and take care of ourselves, limit our news and disaster “diet”, and then celebrate the good in our lives, our children will learn that there is a balance. Life has difficulties we must be knowledgeable about and deal with and it also has relaxed times and joyous events we can celebrate.
We do not have to deny the negative but nor should we focus on it full time — and we must help our children to do the same.
So, try these strategies with your children and see if they help them toward greater resilience.
And for more from Dr. Hones on resilience, see her TED talk:
Thoughtful Parenting 