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Category Archives: Mistakes yours and theirs
Mistakes Can Be Opportunities
No one likes to make mistakes. Making mistakes can invite uncomfortable feelings of guilt and shame. Those feelings result in students (and most of us) thinking about mistakes in ways that aren’t helpful. Students may think that mistakes are “bad” … Continue reading
TURNING BLUNDERS INTO WONDERS
Traditional discipline often focuses on what not to do – often blaming, shaming or humiliating children when they make a mistake, in an attempt to “teach” them to behave. Isn’t it interesting that we think we have to make children … Continue reading
Resiliency Lessons from the Minivan
I started to write about helping our kids to develop resiliency last night, thinking that I would have the perfect words to describe to other parents how to go about doing this. Now I am starting over. Because something came clear to me today… It’s not about them. It’s about us. Continue reading
Date Night Gone Right
This special time business is as much for us as it is for them. It allows parenting to be joyful and loving, provides space for us all to be our best. Jane Nelsen, author of Positive Discipline says, “Children do better when they feel better.” I think this goes for grown ups too – we all do better when we feel better. Continue reading
Growing (Our) Character: Using the Practice of Gratitude, Centering and Forgiveness
The most challenging parenting moments for me are keeping my own emotional triggers in check when I am confronted with conflict involving my kids. Before I even realize I am acting from a place of emotion I am acting like the mother I so desperately do not want to be. I feel hot and tingly all over my body and, well, out of control. Guess what follows these mommy meltdowns? Shame. Shame that I can’t hold it together, that I am treating a person I love more than life itself in a way that makes them feel bad. Shame that I work to teach parents the principles of Positive Discipline and that I have failed, yet again, to embody those principles. Ick! Continue reading
Ghosts in our Closets
As we enter the time of year when the days get shorter and nights get longer one of the traditions that many of us share in the United States is Halloween. Ghosts, goblins, witches (and now zombies) are part of the ambience and excitement of the tradition. This is the night when goblins roam the streets, we go out to look for scary things and explore “haunted” places as part of the ritual. We dress up, look fearful things in the eye and make it fun. (Yes, candy is part of the routine too.)
The following day we figure out how to deal with children who’ve over indulged on sweet things and put the costumes, the pumpkins, witches and ghosts back in the closet. At least the ones we can see. Many of us however have closets that are pretty full with different kinds of ghosts. We are haunted – not just on Halloween by challenging experiences from our own childhood. Continue reading
Posted in Feelings and emotions, Mistakes yours and theirs, Self-care, Uncategorized
Tagged ghosts, self-care
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Creating Protection from Shame
It turns out that how you interpret the mistakes you make is a very big deal. When we make a mistake and see it as that, just a mistake, we may feel guilt – but mostly we can talk about it and fix that mistake. On the other hand, if we have an inner voice that implies that we are the mistake, that somehow we are defective or bad (I’m so stupid, I’m a bad kid/parent, I can never get it right, etc.) we feel a sense of shame: that almost unspeakable icky sticky feeling. Continue reading
Parents: Trapped by Our Fears
The real question for all of us is: What invites us to respond in drastic ways to our childrens’ misbehavior and mistakes? My hunch is that is fear. Many of the parents I work with are afraid when their children lie, steal, are mean to their siblings, swear, wear sexually provocative clothing, investigate pornography online, start cutting, text or sext at all hours of day or night, smoke pot…etc. Continue reading
What Kind of Bystander are You?
Imagine that your daughter and her friends are sitting hanging out in the family room – talking and texting and you hear, “Oh that is so gay!” Do you feel uncomfortable but remain silent because you don’t want to embarrass your daughter? Do you wait and talk about it in private afterwards? What do you do when you hear Uncle Alfred make a derogatory comment about women or children or people of a different race or sexual orientation? Do you just say to yourself or your children, “That’s Alfred, he is a little off color?”
What do you think that is teaching our children about how to be an effective bystander?
What could do you do instead? Continue reading
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