The Parenting FastCast

I was thinking about my soon to be 6 year old’s birthday the other day when it hit me. Out of the blue. “He could very well remember this – for the rest of his life”. And yes, he probably won’t remember this thing – but we all have memories from our youth, and we don’t get to choose what our kids remember.

 So it made me nervous. I mean I have literally been saying for years, “He won’t remember his 1st birthday. His 2nd birthday. Even into his 5th. I use it as an excuse to cut out the over the top things. And to focus on what’s important. At least to acknowledge that when we do things for our small children – it’s often for us adults. 

   But kids are going into a new stage.

Erik Erikson was a psychologist. He won a Pulitzer prize. He defined some levels to growing up. And our kids are into what he calls:

Stage Four – Industry vs Inferiority

 Children mature and their level of self-awareness increases. They understand logical reasoning, scientific facts, and other matters that are typically taught in school.

But they also become more competitive during this Erikson stage of development. They want to do things that other children of the same age can do. When they make the effort to perform a task and succeed, they develop self-confidence. However, if they fail, they tend to feel that they are inferior to others.

So we’re in a new arena here parents. This time it feels like it matters. They will remember the wins and the losses. And if they’re human they’ll be more hurt by the losses than happy with the wins.

My point is that they will put this on themselves. You’ll want to make them winners at everything – that’s called bulldozer parenting. Bulldozing the obstacles out of the way. You’ll want to monitor their moves and give feedback on the mistakes you see – that’s called helicopter parenting.

And now you realize what I said; we’re in a new arena. And it will have its challenges just like a 2 year old, but different challenges. The challenges will be on you, as much as your kid, and he has a memory now, so let’s work on helping them, but not too much, and always being there asking how they felt about their successes and their failures.

The title of today’s episode should elicit a pretty clear reaction in most of you. Some will say, “I’d love that!” – exasperated.

And others will say, “Because then it wouldn’t feel like motherhood”.

I’ll link the article in the shown notes. It’s a good, and long piece by USA today’s Alia Dastagir.

And I’m going to weasel my way into this conversation because I’m an involved father, and when I read it, I think, What if parenting didn’t have to be so hard?

 And my reaction was “Because then it wouldn’t feel like motherhood”.

   I throw out my honest answer because it cuts to the heart of what I think is a cultural expectation.

I mean, I literally think – If parenting wasn’t exhausting to me, and overwhelming most of the time – I would feel like I could be doing more.

And that’s the cultural problem right there.

Just like when your boss asks you to do something – and you hold back just a little – Could you have formatted that report differently? Or stayed a few more minutes after your shift to clean something up? Yea, probably,  but your boss will then ask you to do that all the time. That’s culture. That’s what society expects of us as parents too. To go the extra mile, else you want your kid to be successful. To get that popular Christmas present, else you don’t love your kid enough. And this article focused on the tangible shifts.

Less mothers staying home with their kids.

Increased child care costs.

Grandparents don’t live as close.

Social Media compares you to every other lying mother out there.

"People think motherhood is inherently overwhelming because we've made that idea seem natural," said the quoting professor. "We normalize the hardships of motherhood. ... This is now what's familiar."

 

Combine the lack of guaranteed maternity leave with a culture that bullies mothers for everything from breastfeeding in public to sleep training, and the generosity of a single holiday starts to pale.

 

I’m sorry mothers. Give yourself a break. I’ll work on helping educate, but we all have to work to change that voice in our heads which blames ourselves. Let’s start, by working on that.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fixing-families/201707/5-causes-sibling-rivalry-home-and-the-job

 Yesterday we talked about sibling rivalries and we gave you some tactics. Tactics are great. They get clicks on the internet, they make you feel like you have a hack that shortcuts the process.

But sometimes you can’t fix things with tactics and you need strategy. For the women out there, this is like pulling off a killer little black dress – pairing the right jewelry or hair, and looking great. Those are tactics. But if you wear the little black dress to your local gardening center; you’ve failed. Because where you wear the dress is the strategy.

 Today we talk about strategy.  

   The article I got some of these future details on is listed in our show notes.

These mainly look at the causes.

It could be a lack of structure. When there is a lack of or not enough structure in the home, children don’t feel safe, they feel anxious. They don’t know what to expect, don’t have that steady routine to ground them. The anxiety can fuel irritability and sibling rivalry; in the absence of clear structure, they may constantly be pushing and testing in order to find out where the boundaries are.

If your kids are spread out in a wide range and they all go to bed at the same time or get no privileges for being older and more competent, sibling rivalry will increase. Why? Because each child needs to have his own place in the family system; he needs to know that as he gets older and more responsible there are changes and benefits that come with it.

I’ll need to keep this in mind myself as my kids get older. We don’t love them exactly the same. We love them uniquely.

And last is negative attention. I think we all look at our kids as inherently nice, but acting out just for attention is wired into these little people.

Everyone needs positive attention. In its absence children and adults will shoot for negative attention. The worse is no attention at all.

https://www.positiveparentingsolutions.com/sibling-rivalry

 Here it is, I’ve had it on my list for a while now. And I haven’t addressed it because, well I’m not an expert on sibling rivalry. But I know some people that are. So over the next few days, I want to come at this unceasing drama a few different ways. First, to all the parents with one child. Take a few days off I guess? Revisit an old episode that you think really helped you, or better yet, talk with your bestie about that episode. Build your community up a little.

For the rest, it is a natural issue, sibling rivalries. You didn’t create it. You can’t make it go away completely. This is life. Don’t beat yourself up over it.

But the best way to accept it is to ask yourself, just like positiveparentingsolutions.com puts it:

 how would you feel if your spouse brought home someone else and expected the two of you to get along?

   I’ll link the website I got some of these tips from in the show notes.

There are 6 good tactics on that list.  I want to cover two of them, because I do one, and I should do more of the other.

Stay out of squabbles. When an argument brews: Ignore it. I’m not always good at it, especially when I see one kid flooding the other one, and that feels unfair. But now is the time to let them figure it out or fail. If it fails, it’s better that a 6 and 3 year old get into it vs a 17 and 14 year old. The punches are easier to get in the middle of now.

Arrange for attention: Your kids need attention. If you’re an average adult, with an above average cell phone screen time, you could probably stand to carve out a specific 10 or 15 minutes to play with your kid. This means uninterrupted. Present. I was pretty good at this when they were 2. When they were unable to self play, I would force myself to be present with them, even when it was rough. And I’ve lost some of that. So find something interesting, but let your little ones guide it.  

Last, conflict resolution is a very advanced skill set, so don’t project your adult reasoning onto developing brains. Give them some runway, but when it starts to work, you’ll feel the stress level in the house go down a notch.

“You have the opportunity to choose a goal that is important to you and the privilege of failing with very little consequence. Don’t waste that privilege. “

   That was a quote from a James Clear email that just stuck with me.

It stuck with me because it parallels some of that advice from my favorite timeless parenting book “Love and Logic”. The time for failure is now. It is always more expensive to fail in the future than it is now.

   Here’s an example. If you’re a parent listening to this, you’re likely in the demographic of 25 to 40. So you have a few years on the teenage version of you. Think of something you failed at in high school. A test, A date, A lean in for a kiss.

Did you die? Nope, And I can guarantee you are 100% ecstatic that you aren’t here in 2019 and failing at your current test, date, or that kiss you could lean in for.

You are very happy that you learned that lesson when you did.

 

So give your kids that opportunity.

Give your kids the opportunity to fail at feeding the dog. Give them the chance to fail at building that fort out of pillows. I watched my kid take a blanket and try to drape it across a 2 foot wide divide between the couch and the coffee table the other day. Nothing weighing the blanket down to the couch or coffee table. It was multiple attempts with the end result of the blanket sagging down to the floor between.

But I let him do it. We all want to jump in there and help our kids out.

But that’s called helicopter parenting.

I know that you all can do it. I believe in all of you. With a little practice, you will see confidence and maybe even a little grit.

https://www.wired.com/story/esther-wojcicki-teaching-kids-independent-thinkers/

 Over the past few days we’ve started to learn Esther Wojcicki’s lesson’s on raising successful people. And as with a lot of smart, interesting, successful people, there’s a lot below the surface. But today’s focus is on Creativity. It’s said so well by Esther: creativity, a wonderful by-product of independence and curiosity.

 She writes: In one study, a test based on NASA’s recruiting process for engineers and rocket scientists was used to measure creativity and innovative thinking in small children. At age five, 98 percent of the kids had genius-level imaginative abilities. But at age ten, only 30 percent of the children fell into that category. Want to guess how many adults maintain their creative thinking skills after making it through our educational system? Just 2 percent.

  This is probably why we all believe our kids have something special in them. Because they do!

And our goal is not to stifle this. Actually, now that we think about it. Our goal is to stifle it as little as possible. Because we will want our children to “fit in with normal”, and our children too will compromise to ‘fit in with normal”, all on their own.

Here’s what you can do as a parent, even if your child’s creativity isn’t being encouraged at school: I used to set up all kinds of art supplies for my daughters on the kitchen table. There would be markers, colored paper, books, Play-Doh, yarn for braiding, and other arts and crafts. When they came home from school, they got to make whatever they wanted. I was always on the lookout for toys that they could assemble and design themselves. The YouTube Kids app now has instructional videos for any kind of creative project you can think of.

Projects like these allow kids to imagine and experiment and, most important, play. Creativity flows from a sense of play, and it’s one of the easiest things to teach your child. Here’s a tip: Let them be. They will create their own imaginary worlds without any help from you.

Over the past few days we’ve started to learn Esther Wojcicki’s lesson’s on raising successful people. And today’s lesson starts with a story. When Esther was a teacher, she implemented a policy of free writing for every student a Palo Alto High school. So at the beginning of a class, or day, all students had to do was write. And here’s what she had to say about it.

 Do you want to know the single hardest assignment for my students? Coming up with their own topics. They find basic free-writing almost impossible. They complain that they don’t know what’s interesting. The main thing they want to know is if their “interesting idea” will earn an A. I tell them any idea is an A idea as long as they are interested in it, because if they’re not, why would anyone else want to read it?

  This exercise was the beginning of their independent thinking. And it turns out that the spark of curiosity has been extinguished in today’s kids. This matches up with something else I’ve spoke about in the past – Seth Godin and his take on the modern education system. And Seth says that the main thing kids need to do is “solve interesting problems”.

That’s it. That flicker, then flame of curiosity can spread like wildfire eventually. Yes, it takes a long time to smolder sometimes. Sometimes life douses our hope and dreams, but when that flame spreads, it spreads.

In her article on wired. Link in the shown notes. “Students often don’t know why they’re learning something. Asking why is so important to kids and they deserve a better answer than “because it will be on the test.”

… When teachers answer these questions, it prompts kids to think more deeply about the implications of what they’re learning. “

And a lot of times teacher’s don’t even know this. It’s why Palo Alto has a good teaching system – they find good teachers and let them run with crazy, but effective ideas like requiring free writing every day.

You’re local school probably isn’t this good. So we as parents have to take up the slack.

“Parents can elicit curiosity in their children through similar methods. We don’t need to have the right answers all the time, but we need to encourage kids to ask the right questions. If we don’t know the answer, we can say, “Let’s find out.”

Yesterday we started into Esther Wojcicki’s lessons on how she has raised 2 CEOs and a doctor. And while we didn’t give away her one secret that will totally transform your kids (spoiler alert: there isn’t one little life hack that flips the switch), we already cemented life lesson #1. At the end of yesterday’s episode we said that it’s based on trying. Some people say “hard work” but I say “slow work” – slow work is simply trying every day.

 And the article I was initially drawn to was broken down into 3 lessons by her. But really they can almost be combined into one area.

   Community.

Esther says she’s a doer. She says, “If everyone just sits around and talks, nothing gets done. I was always a doer.”

So that’s inline with what I say. You have to try, see, adjust.”

She says, “How many of us take up causes and show our kids, through our own behavior, how to fight for our communities?”

And I would say not many.

She writes, “It’s sad to say, but I’ve noticed more and more kids completely focused on themselves. Where they want to go to college, vacations they want to take, things they want to buy. Sometimes it feels like we’re training a nation and a world of narcissists, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that helicopter parenting has played a big role in this.”

And to that I think our podcast has some answers. But one of the things I latch onto is this:

The American idea is all wrong

Kids are growing up feeling like they’re the center of the universe. As young adults, they’re not only lacking grit and independence …  they tend to focus on money, because they think it will make them happy and fulfilled. It’s the American idea: Get rich, then do nothing.

 

And that’s the culture I hope to change. I’m fine with everyone searching and working for happiness. But I think our culture has defined becoming Zuckerburg rich as it’s endgame. Well that endgame isn’t happiness. So work with your kids to kill the old American Idea “Get rich, then do nothing” – and start a new one.

Esther Wojcicki is a rockstar. But not like Dave Grohl or Eddie Vedder. She’s a parenting rockstar. She has 3 daughters who all have, decent, jobs: You know. A CEO of Youtube, a professor of pediatrics and CEO of 23andMe.

Now, in contrast, when my kids say they want to be a trash man when they grow up (and this is plausible at this point – my little man really really loves sweeping), my wife says, I’ll be happy he has a job. And actually I think this is a great place to start with our expectations. Expecting that your child will be a CEO of a major tech firm has high odds that you will be disappointed.

 So did Esther Wojcicki start her children with a laser focus on maximum success for themselves?

   She did not. In fact, in her news blitz recently (as she has a book coming out), she talks a lot about getting kids to care about things other than themselves.

So over the next few days I’d like to go over some of the lessons that she talk about.

We’ll learn about some new lessons, and we’ll see that some of the things she talks about are lessons that we’ve been teaching here. So if you’ve been following some of our daily advice, and learning from our daily stories, fantastic – you’re on the right path – please please help someone else out and share this with your friends.

 

Because when I hear about a parent like this, I’m ready to listen. I’m ready to do. I’m telling myself, whatever lessons this parent wants to teach me, I’m ready to implement them!

Until she asks you to go out and volunteer for something in your community. I don’t have time for that!!

And I think that’s how a lot of us will feel. Unwilling to do the work.

And you’re not alone. You’re not a bad parent because you don’t raise CEOs (like that’s the only measure of success in the world), and you’re not a failure if you don’t run for city councilwoman.

But you should try. Try something. Try small.

We’ll be back tomorrow with our dive into her thought

https://www.fastcompany.com/90313598/kids-surrounded-by-greenery-may-grow-up-to-be-happier-adults?partner=rss

 Amazing Read – I’ll post it in the show notes. And actually, now that I think about it – this article isn’t an amazing read. Don’t read it. But listen to this summary of the article. Follow the advice. Live a better life.

That’s it. We’re here to help and I think we can today.

Ok, so what’s this juicy piece of information that you have for us today?

Green space.

We all know intuitively that nature is good for us–but its precise impact on our well-being can be tough to articulate. An important new study has found that when children grow up surrounded by green space, they have 55% less risk of developing a wide range of mental health problems later in life.

  But I live in a city. But I work all the time. But I’m an older parent.

   Doesn’t matter. Controlling for all of those variables, The researchers were then able to show a correlation between one kid’s proximity to green space during childhood and that same person’s mental health problems like mood disorders, depression, and stress-related disorders as an adult.

This study was Danish. They ended up having good historical data and combined that with satellite images to determine green spaces.

 

It has important lessons in urban planning and building design. But the lesson to me is simple: We intuitively know that nature helps us . be. So put your kids in a place for success. Take them to the park and bring a soccer ball. Heck, after reading this, I feel like going out and buying a few plants to put in the house to reduce the stress levels a fraction.

But figure out what works for you. Do the hard work – get out side when you don’t want to and enjoy that nature.