Is Your Child Being Robbed?

If a child is forced to say thank you or sorry, then he is robbed of a chance to express his own heartfelt gratitude or apology.

If a child is forced to eat two more bites of dinner, then she is robbed of a chance to feel just full enough to be satisfied.

If a child is forced to clean up, then he is robbed of a chance to show how helpful he can be, voluntarily.

If a child is forced to wear a jacket, then she is robbed of a chance to feel cold enough to know when she really needs one.

If a child is forced to stop crying, then he is robbed of a chance to express his fears or his dreams.

If a child is told she is not good enough, then she is robbed of a chance to be happy with herself the way she is.

All those times we exert control over our children, we are taking away chances for them to control themselves. How do we expect our children to learn "self-control" if we don't let them practice it?

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Read about one woman's struggles with a controlling parent over at Parent-Free By Choice.

Please Note: None of the examples above have anything to do with a child running into the street, or anything else involving imminent danger. Also, I have not said we should never guide our children.

Change Your Default Setting From "No" to "Maybe"

I have had many conversations about parenting in the past eight months since I started this blog. The absolute most frustrating type of conversation goes something like this:

Me: I like to help my kids get what they want.
Other Person: That's impossible! What if they want to go to the moon in a spaceship? I can't get my kids what they want every time they ask! I'd be broke.

Here's why I have a problem with this kind of thinking: It's focused on the impossibilities, the exceptions, the singularities. It's focused on what we can't do. How often do our children want things that are truly impossible to get? More importantly, how often do our children want things that are possible, and we brush them off because we have to teach them they can't always get what they want.

A parent who thinks this way has the default setting of No. She's at the grocery store with her kids, and they ask for a piece of  candy or a small toy at the checkout counter.

She thinks: We can't buy something for you every time we go to the store.

She responds: No, put it down. 

She's satisfied with the lesson: You can't always get what you want .

I guess the idea here is that the parent is afraid that if she "gives in" this time, the child will come to expect it every time.

Too Much Parenting? Or Too Much Nonsense?

I was tempted to write this post in ALL CAPS. I am so tired of reading things like this, I could actually scream:

I believe that the goal should change from making children happy and protecting them from harm to raising them to be independent adults able to problem-solve and cope in the real and sometimes difficult adult world. A safety net can become a trap. Dependence on one’s parents means lack of real security and often results in low self-esteem, depression and anxiety.

It's nonsense. Someone has written another book about how kids these days never grow up, and how it's all the parents' fault for being too helpful, too involved, too available. Read more about it here. Apparently, parents need to set more boundaries, have higher expectations, force independence at a younger age. The goal of parenting should be independence instead of happiness?! Dependence leads to low self-esteem?! Security makes us feel insecure?! I disagree.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think parents should hover anxiously around their children and never allow independence. Let me remind you there IS a third option. You don't have to choose between forcing independence and never allowing it. Between removing the safety net and using it as a trap. The third option looks like knowing your child, talking to your child, respecting the level of independence your child wishes to have. It looks like making that safety net available, and using it properly so it doesn't trap your child. I wrote about this kind of thing in Choosing Your Guide.

I Invited My Children To This Party

I am not the boss of my family. I didn't hire my kids as employees, to follow my orders and make me look good. I don't have a job description in mind for them, a list of responsibilities and tasks they are expected to perform, in return for compensation. The food, shelter, and other things my husband and I provide are not part of a salary. The love we give is not the benefits package.

It's more like I'm the hostess of a party. I sent invitations to my kids to join me in my life as honored guests. And they each had no choice but to accept my invitation. Now my goal is for all of us to have a good time. I suggest and plan fun things for us to do. I invite other interesting people to join us.

I aim to treat my children like I would treat guests at a party.

"Our Children Are Not Our Masterpieces"

There is one more quote from Lori Gottlieb's article that inspired me, from Wendy Mogel: 

Our children are not our masterpieces.

This one, I agree with wholeheartedly.

Is Independence Good Or Bad?

Here is one more topic from How to Land Your Kid in Therapy that I can't ignore: independence. On the one hand, Gottlieb talks about how kids have too many choices and too few limits, as I discussed in this post.

The advice is clearly that parents should limit how many choices their children get. We shouldn't worry about respecting our kids' wishes when they want something different than we are offering. This would be allowing... I don't know... too much independence at a young age?? We wouldn't want that.

One Vaccine My Kids Definitely Don't Need

Here's another topic butchered by Lori Gottlieb in How to Land Your Kid in Therapy: Happiness. She asks the following question, and seems to answer YES, without a doubt:

Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?

In other words, in order for an adult to have a chance at happiness, he has to get doses of unhappiness (word used in the article: "devastation") as a child, dealt by or at least not stopped by his parents. Sort of like a vaccine against unhappiness. One psychologist quoted in the article describes the phenomenon of "psychological immunity," where kids should get used to settling for any crappy hand they get as early as possible in life. When parents step in and try to "fix" everything, he says, the kids won't learn to "adapt to less-than-perfect situations." The effectiveness of the unhappiness vaccine could be easily verified, because the kids with the most miserable childhoods should be the happiest adults. Right?

Where Children Are Treated Like Adults

This is my third post in a series about an article in The Atlantic called How to Land Your Kids in Therapy. In it, Jean Twenge, a co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic and professor of psychology at San Diego State University claims that:

We treat our kids like adults when they’re children, and we infantilize them when they’re 18 years old.

Sometimes I feel like I don't live on the same planet as these experts. How many people do you know who treat their kids even remotely like adults?

If My Kid "Lands" In Therapy

There is an article on The Atlantic, called How to Land Your Kid in Therapy. If you haven't read it yet, I recommend it. It is a very long article and I have a lot to say about it, a few posts worth. The author, Lori Gottlieb, is a therapist and mother. When she started seeing patients, she was expecting for most of them to have complaints about their parents. She was surprised to find this was not the case for a lot of them, explaining:

These patients talked about how much they “adored” their parents. Many called their parents their “best friends in the whole world,” and they’d say things like “My parents are always there for me.” Sometimes these same parents would even be funding their psychotherapy (not to mention their rent and car insurance), which left my patients feeling both guilty and utterly confused. After all, their biggest complaint was that they had nothing to complain about!

These experiences led her to wonder: Was it possible these parents had done too much for their children?

Three Steps To Keeping a Clean House

It's hard to keep a clean house when you have young kids.

You want your kids to enjoy living in their own home, but that means messes will be made. You want to spend as much time as you can engaged with your kids and still have some time for your own pursuits, but that leaves little time for cleaning. So how do you do it?


I have solution for parents out there who want to have a guest-ready house at all times, where everything is clean and tidy and perfectly arranged, without losing too much fun time with the little ones...

Three Steps To Keeping a Clean House

Five Things I Wish I Had Never Said About Parenting

I wish I had never said never. Before I had kids, I used to look at other people and how they dealt with their kids, and think I would never do that. At times, I even made the worse mistake of saying it out loud. The problem is, I didn't know. I didn't have a clue what it would be like when I had my own kids.

Quit Happens

Look at some of the popular "wisdom," in the form of one-liner clichés, about quitting:

1. Winners never quit, and quitters never win. False. First of all, winners sometimes quit. Especially after they win. Second, quitters sometimes win. Sure, maybe if you quit playing baseball, you won't win at baseball anymore. But you can win at other stuff because you aren't wasting your time playing baseball when you don't really want to. And third, what if you don't care about winning? Or what if happiness is a win for you? Then quitting something that takes away from your happiness is an automatic win.

I prefer: Quit while you are ahead. As in, if you have achieved what seems to you to be a satisfactory level of success, and you don't want to do something anymore, then it's ok to quit. Also, if you realize that you are not enjoying something, then quit before you waste too much more time doing it.

A Kid Who's Not a Quitter?

Yesterday, there was a segment on the Today Show with "parenting expert" Michele Borba, based on her article entitled How To Raise a Kid Who's Not a Quitter. First of all, I am always suspicious of anyone who writes a "How-to-raise-a-kid-who's-not" article, because I don't think it's possible to use a formula on your child to make him a certain way or not a certain way. Secondly, I recently blogged about how I Am a Quitter, and I don't think it's a bad thing. Why do people think it is important to raise "non-quitters"? Have they thought about what that means?

I'm A Quitter.

Being labeled a quitter is not usually a good thing. Quitting anything apparently means you have a character flaw. It means you give up too easily. It means your parents probably let you quit things when you were a kid. You don't have any sense of commitment. As a parent, you are not supposed to want your child to be a quitter. You can make sure that this will not happen if you don't let your children quit things. Teach them that the commitment is more important than their happiness. Teach them that they might even end up liking something if they stick with it even when they don't want to.

I have known people who played the same sport almost every day for over a decade, from childhood through college, and still struggled with the idea of "quitting" the sport even when it was not bringing her any happiness anymore. So it's not ok to quit something if you have only just started, and then it's also not ok to quit something if you have been at it for a while. When IS it ok to quit something? How long are you supposed to give it before you can appropriately decide you have had enough?