Parenting 201

Welcome students to Parenting 201! If you do not know the basics of parenting, such as how to change a diaper, clean up messes and repeating yourself at least 50 million times, then please transfer to Parenting 101 with Professor Adam.

Please listen carefully, because in this next sentence, I will perfectly describe parenting. Parenting is HARD!!!!!!! If you do not believe me, just go and ask your parents. (If your parents said that parenting was easy, then I NEED to meet them and learn everything that I can from them! 😊 ) There are many aspects to parenting. You have to deal with the mountains of dirty diapers, runny noses, missing shoes, messy rooms and food where you least expect it. Parents deal with not only their trials and burdens, but also those of their children. Parents have to be coaches, hair stylists, captain of bath time, disciplinarian, managers, teachers, organizers, chefs, chauffeurs, and the world’s best huggers, just to name a few. I do not know about y’all, but just reading that short list makes me appreciate my parents more and it makes me tired. 😉

It is so hard to be a parent because there are probably at least a billion books about parenting! So, it can be extremely overwhelming to know which source to trust! There are different parenting styles and different ways to encourage children. And once you figure out how be a good parent to your child, then your next child has a completely different temperament and personality. There is not a to-do list that guarantees a perfect parenting life or perfect children. However, there are principles that can apply to everyone.

We all have basic needs. Physically, we all need food, water, shelter, air and clothes. But what are our emotional needs? Dr. Michael Popkin (click on his name to learn more about him) came up with a parenting program called “Active Parenting” (AKA Authoritative Parenting) and has written many books about parenting. He says that everyone has five needs (especially children). They are contact and belonging, power, protection, withdrawal, and  challenge.

Now let us dive deeper into each of these “Belonging and contact” is physical contact and feeling like they are a part of the family. “Power” is the ability to have at least some control in their lives. We obviously do not want to trust a two-year-old  to determine whether we move to Alaska or Florida. The toddler does not have enough cognitive ability to do so. We want to let children be able to make decisions that are developmentally (age) appropriate. So, you might let your toddler pick out their outfit. You could let older children make recommendations for what meals that your family will eat or if they would rather do the dishes or clean the toilet for their chore. The main point of power is to let your child have control and a say in their life. This doesn’t mean that they get to control 100% of their life. (Even  adults do not have 100% control on their circumstances! I am pretty sure that none of us had a say whether COVID-19 would start)  As the child gets older, they can have more control in their lives. The next one is “Protection”. We all want to feel safe. When we feel safe, we feel comfortable exploring the environment around us and we know what is appropriate behavior from others.

“Withdrawal” means to do just that: to take a little break and then get back to work. And finally “Challenge”. Having something be a little harder than our capabilities helps us grow. We would be bored stiff if we just had to sit on our couch all day and just breathe. Most of us like a challenge, but we may each like different kinds of challenges. For example, I like to solve riddles, while my nephew loves to figure out how things work.

Dr. Michael Popkin's 5 Needs

When Needs are Unmet	Need	When Needs are Met
Find Belonging Elsewhere	Contact and Belonging	Contribute
Rebellion	Power	Response-ability
Revenge	Protection	Assertiveness and Forgiveness
Undue Avoidance	Withdrawal	Know Their Limits
Risk Taking	Challenge	Builds Skills

 

A little side note:

For a while, I was a child development major. So, I got to study a lot of child development theorists. One of my favorites is Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky believed that each child had a Zone of Proximal Development, or the ZPD. This is where a challenge is doable with some effort without being overwhelming. He believed that children learn best when they have a mentor. The mentor’s job is to scaffold. Then as the child gets better at the task, the mentor does not help as much. An example of this is helping your child put on a shirt. When they are a baby, you have to help your child because, she can’t do that. As your child gets older, she may be able to put her head in her shirt by herself, but then needs help with her arms. Later, she may only need help with one arm. Then eventually, she will be able to put on her shirt all by herself.

 

I’m sorry if this post was a bit long. Parenting is SUPER important, and I LOVE child development! I could go on and on about these topics. Well, what do you think? Do you have any other connections from child development to parenting? Do you agree with Dr. Popkin? Do you have any parenting stories that you would like to share? Do you have any questions for me? (I'm not expert, but I'll do my best.😃 )

Keep Dancing!!

💙

Emily

What?! Hard Work is FUN?!?!

What is the first thing that you think of when you hear the word, “work?” Fun? Backbreaking? Easy? Boring? Do you have any memories of working with your family? I want you to think about that for a minute… What did y’all do? Did you talk, laugh, create memories while you worked? I have a question for you: why are you smiling as you remember the tedious work that you had to do? Was it not hard work? Did you not complain and say something like, “Mom (or Dad), I do NOT want to (insert undesirable chore)!” Today, we will explore why you have positive memories of work when at the time, you may not have wanted to do the work.

Let us first travel back in time. Long before any of us were born. Let us look at what would work look like. If you lived in the 1800s what would you do for work? Well, back then, they did not have light bulbs, or dishwashers, or vacuums, or fancy machine plows. Let’s pretend that your dad was a farmer. Everyone would help out with the chores. The whole family would help plant, water and weed the garden. Everyone would have something that they were responsible for. They would often work together. Fathers, mothers and children would work side by side. Everyone would help the house chores or any other projects that were needed to help take care of the family.

I want you to think of a normal 3-legged stool. It is stable. It is going to be hard to knock it over; it is balanced. That is kind of like how the family worked together before the industrial revolution. When the dad had to go to work, it was like one of the legs of the stool was removed. More of the weight and responsibility to do the housework and tend the garden fell on the mothers and children. It’s a lot harder to balance the family life now.

Now fast forward to modern days. Now in the modern era of 2020, we have many labor-saving inventions. What does our work look like then? Well, it depends on what kind of family that you grew up in and the one that you raise your children in. Some families have chores while others do not. Some parents do all of the house keeping while children are playing on technology or with friends. Is playing with friends or on technology inherently bad? Of course not! Some screen time is okay! It is wonderful for children to create and sustain friendships with other children! We just want to make sure that those are not blown out of proportion. (If you want to learn more about how much screen time is appropriate for different age ranges, you can go to Google Scholar and search “screen time recommendations”. You can also play around with your search and explore. If I remember correctly, it is recommended that teens get less than 2 hours of screen time per day. And I think for toddlers it is around 30 minutes/ day* And each family will be different. There is not a specific plan that will work for every family in every circumstance.

Are there benefits to working as a family? I am so glad that you asked! Yes, there are!!! What happens when you do a mundane task (like cleaning a room, washing the dishes, cleaning the bathroom) together? The task is easy enough, so you do not have to put all of your focus on getting the task done. So, your brain is free to think. This is a marvelous opportunity to talk with each other! What happens when you talk? You CONNECT with each other! You build stronger relationships! Now will there be some griping or complaining when you ask your children to help you or each other with a chore, probably. But, in my opinion the benefits of working together as a family outweigh the cons. (You can go to Google Scholar and look up “benefits of family work” or something like that. This has been researched A LOT!!) But as usual, you get to decide for yourself now you are able to recognize the value of hard work.

Do you have any stories about work that you would like to share? If you could choose, when would you live? Would you live with modern technologies or back in the olden days? Did you have chores growing up? Did you like doing them? What has been your experiences with them?

As usual, keep on dancing!

💙

Emily

 

Communicating: What did You Say?

Communication, communication, communication.  Whenever someone has a problem in a friendship, marriage or life you seem to be the answer. Is that true? At least partially. The problem may not be that you aren’t communicating, but that you are miscommunicating. Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. First, what is communication? It is how we express a thought or an idea. Is talking the only form of communication? NO! We communicate through our body language, facial expressions, nonverbal cues, our tone, through texting, emails, and social media. It is important that our nonverbal cues, tone, and words all line up.

When we communicate, we encode what we are thinking into words. Then the words that we say travel through the air or media and into another’s ear. Then he or she has to decode and process what we said. Hopefully, our message comes across clearly! If not, then there has been a miscommunication. There are many ways that a miscommunication can happen. We could misspeak, or if we texted our friend instead of talking to them, then they missed out of our facial expressions and tone. Or our friend can misinterpret what we said. Who would of thought that talking and texting others could be so difficult and complex!

I will share an example when I miscommunicated. Let us see if you can figure out what I did wrong. 😊 In my sophomore year, I had to teach my Leadership class about verbal and nonverbal communication. Imagine that you are in my class. When the teacher turned the time over to me, I walked up to the front of the room with my notes. I slammed down my notes on the podium at the front of the room and angrily said, “Today is going to be a great day. We are going to have so much fun!” Do you think that my classmates believed me? Would you? Why not? It is because my body language and tone did not match what I said. There have many studies done that show that our nonverbal cues are between 50-80% of our communication. That is HUGE!! Have you ever read a social media post or a text and attached a different tone than the author was trying to convey? I know that I have. Now you know why we tend to have more miscommunications more on social media/texting than in face to face conversations. We are missing out on at least half of the conversation!!

The words that we say are also important. When we want others to understand what we are experiencing, we should express how our emotions and thoughts were affected by the events. This is known by many names. In child development this is called, “Emotion coaching,” while some schools call this, “mindfulness.”  I do not know about y’all, but when someone (like my parents) explains why I should/should not do something and how it affects others and myself, then I am more likely to be obedient. I like how my teacher showed us one way we could do this. This is what he drew on his white board.

I know that my example is kind of weird, but you get the general idea. Now that you have some practice here’s a POP QUIZ!!!

We all know the nursery rhyme of Jack be nimble. (If not, here it is: Jack be nimble. Jack be quick. Jack jumped over the candle stick.) Let us pretend that Jack’s mother saw what he was doing. She decided to talk to him about what he is doing. Pick the response that would help Jack understand what his mother is experiencing. She should say,

A) “Jack, you are GROUNDED for 20 years!!! You are never allowed to play with the candlestick again!”

B) “Jack! Don’t do that! You scared me!”

C) “Jack, when you jumped over the candle stick, I felt scared, because I thought that you were going to catch on fire and get hurt. In the future, I would like for you not to do that.”

The correct answer is drumroll……C! C helps Jack understand how what he did connects to what his mom thought and felt. A is okay. It tells him that he did something wrong, but he may not know what he did wrong or why it is wrong. B is slightly better. It conveys that his mom was scared when he did “that,” but he still may not know what exactly “that” is. Maybe he was picking his nose at the same time.

That’s it for this week! I’d love to hear what y’all think! Do you have any awesome miscommunication stories? What’s your favorite way to communicate? What do you think about technology’s effects on communication?

Keep on dancing!!

💙

Emily