Changing your life is difficult, very difficult, despite what all of those self-help gurus say. If it wasn’t so hard, most everyone would be the people they want to be and live the lives they want to live. Too often, people blame themselves for their inability to change their lives for the better, seeing weakness [...]
Last night I was invited to speak as part of a TheMindsJournal.com series titled "Expert Mind Talks" on Facebook. I presented a parenting workshop followed by a Q&A based on three of my parenting books. I begin speaking at about 1:30 of the recording.
In an era in which young women are receiving so many mixed messages about who they can be and who they should be. In a time when so many young women are spending too much time staring at screens that are shaping the way they think and feel about themselves, mostly for the negative. At [...]
As the author of Your Children are Under Attack, I'm no fan of popular culture. Its aim is not to support healthy development of young people, but rather to profit from selling kids junk and attitudes wrapped in "it'll make you happy" vibes. Well, recent research from the UK provides painful support for my views. [...]
Your family life is rife with rituals that can send messages of compassion, kindness, and sharing to your children. When you sit down for a meal, you are sharing your food and each other's company. When you hug and kiss your children good night, you are sharing your love. When you play games together, you [...]
Think of all of the qualities that you admire most in others and that you would most like to instill in your children. My guess is that compassion is high on your list. Why is that? Perhaps because, like diamonds, compassion is a rare gem in a society in which selfishness and disregard for others are as common as rhinestones. Consider what compassion is. Most fundamentally, it is “not about me.” Compassion involves being aware of and caring about the needs of others. It means wanting to help others who are less fortunate than you. Compassion has so many other wonderful attributes associated with it, for example, benevolence, good will, unselfishness, and empathy, just to name a few. If these qualities were ingredients to be mixed and baked, you would have the recipe for about as fine a person as you could imagine.
In recent years, our parenting culture began to send the message that competence was important for building self-esteem and that parents needed to do everything they can to convince their children how competent they were. All very reasonable, to be sure. However, that same parenting culture made a big mistake by telling parents that the way to instill competence in their children was to tell them how competent they were. Parents bought into this message and starting telling their children how smart and talented and wonderful they were. But here's the problem. Children can't be convinced that they are competent. When parents try to convince their children of how competent they are, they often have the exact opposite effect. There is this little thing called reality that children have to confront on a daily basis; life has a way of sending messages about competence that can be in sharp contrast to the out-sized messages of competence that parents send their children. When children are faced with the conflict between what their parents had told them about how good they are and what reality is telling them, the result is the bursting of the “You are the best” bubble that their parents blew up for them. The result: disappointment, hurt, and an actual loss of sense of competence. Let me be clear here: The only way for children to build a true sense of competence is through first-hand experience that includes travails, triumphs, struggles, setbacks, and successes.
I was recently interviewed for an article about spoiled children for U.S. News & World Report online.
Beyond the specific areas in which you need to prepare your children for this crazy new world and, as I have shown, in which popular culture and technology is not helping you, there is an overriding way you can best ready your children for what lies ahead. You need to prepare them for life. You [...]
Technology, such as the Internet, smartphones, and social media, can have great benefits in helping your children form and maintain relationships. At the same time, if not used with limits and guidance by your children, such use may prevent them from developing the essential relationship qualities and skills that have allowed us to make real [...]
