You are here: Home / Archives for Family Life

Should We Shield Kids After Boston Blasts?

April 16, 2013 By
2013 Boston Marathon winner Rita Jeptoo from myajc.com

2013 Boston Marathon winner Rita Jeptoo from myajc.com

 

It feels like we just did this. And it’s very hard to have to do it yet again. Sharing our re-broken hearts and our care for strangers hurt by a violent tragedy.

Listening to and talking with kids to help process their feelings after a scary public event. Admitting to ourselves and our kids that terrible things happen without reason in our world. All this is daunting and exhausting for parents, especially when it means talking about actions we’d rather kids never, ever had to know anything about.

Most recently, before April 15, 2013,  here in the U.S. it was the Steubenville, Ohio trial of teens found guilty of assaulting a girl. Before that it was the Chicago teen killed in a park only days after marching with her band at President Obama’s inauguration. Before that it was the Sandy Hook school attack.

Just listing those three events brings up a self-protective feeling of numbness in me. Just like the three events above, I didn’t personally know anyone hurt yesterday at the Boston Marathon finish line. So can’t I just ignore all the pain and unanswerable questions this brings up? Why not try to shield our kids from thinking about it if they don’t have a personal connection?

My answer, hard as it is, is that I can’t ignore the pain and questions. I can’t shut down my feelings and turn away from those who are scared by it. And I can’t support shielding most kids (older than five) from hearing about it either. Even though it will be difficult to talk about with them.

Here’s why. More than anything we parents and grandparents need to practice emotional honesty and resilience ourselves. And we need to allow our children the experiences to help them be resilient. Resilience is like a muscle that can only get stronger with use. This means allowing kids to feel sadness, fear, lack of control, frustration, failure, confusion, and a host of other unpleasant feelings.

Resilience comes from having those kinds of feelings and doing whatever’s needed to come through them to the other side and heal.  Amazingly, most kids can do this on their own, even without adult help. But we don’t need to leave them alone with it. Resilience in kids is strengthened even more when there are adults who will listen to the feelings and help the child find ways to work through them.

This is how we can help our kids both keep their compassionate open hearts and be resilient. Then they can eventually think about, and do, what they can to change whatever can be changed to make our world safer, more fair, and more just.

Elizabeth Weise on USA Today  and Sasha Emmons on iVillage give lots of specific tips on talking with kids about public tragedies that are age-appropriate and easy to use if you feel they fit your child.

 

Filed Under: Communication, Family Life Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Coming of Age Resources

May 31, 2012 By

Coming of Age for a girl is often assumed to mean getting her first menstrual period. That is a very important occasion but there are also many other coming of age landmarks that we can honor and celebrate with rituals small or large.

I think of Coming of Age as marking the transition from childhood to adulthood, so of course it really doesn’t happen at one specific time. It’s a long series of learning responsibility and gaining self-sufficiency.

As parents we can choose the events and rituals that we emphasize as coming of age for our children. From birthdays to first day of pre-school, to losing a baby tooth, to riding a two-wheel bike. to learning to read, etc., etc.

My daughters always preferred smaller rituals to big elaborate ones. When they got their first periods they didn’t want a party so I did something special with just me & them, tailored to the interests of the individual.

Resources on Coming of Age Rituals:

Articles at Daughters.com

Michelle’s Rite of Passage Story

Wikipedia Article

Rite of Passage Journeys

Going on 13 Film

What resources do you recommend?

Filed Under: Family Life, Health & Safety Tagged With: , , , , , ,

All I Want for the Holidays is Body Gratitude

November 10, 2011 By

As the holidays approach I’m already hearing friends worry about how much they’ll eat at Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and Christmas feasts.  It’s a topic that pops up every year at this time in every group of women I know. It’s a strangely negative backdrop to the overall messages of abundance and gratitude during the winter holidays.

And it has a negative effect on girls who overhear and recreate the conversations of their moms, grandmas, aunts and teachers. It’s a shame to teach girls, through our own example, that abundance and gratitude are the hallmarks of the season EXCEPT when it comes to food and their bodies. Then they are supposed to deny themselves abundance and criticize themselves and their bodies.

I say it’s time to replace the self-torment with actual gratitude for our bodies.  We need to say out loud, in the hearing of girls, that we’re grateful for our bodies and all they do. And then we need to repeat it just as often as we used to repeat our self-bashing scripts about “being bad” for eating certain foods.

Tonight we’re chatting on Twitter and this blog about this – sharing tips and changing the messages we pass on to girls.  A few of the things we’ll be talking about:

  • What common things do you hear women say about our bodies during winter holiday season?
  • What do you want to tell the girls you love about body image during the holidays?
  • Why do so many holiday season conversations between women focus on weight and body image?
  • How can we show girls that we love and respect our and their bodies regardless of size, shape, disability, etc.?
  • How can we shift the holiday season conversation to be about body gratitude, not self-bashing?
  • What words do you like best to express body gratitude in Nov & Dec?

To talk with other parents about how to help girls be grateful for their body, especially during the holidays, join me and four other awesome advocates for girls on Nov 10.

Thursday Nov 10  at 9pm est/8 cst/7 mst/6 pst for a chat on Twitter. Follow hash tag  #girlsnow. Add it to the end of your tweet so we can see your question or comment. 

Before the chat  follow @Nancy_Newmoon, @PigtailPals, @BeABetterWoman, @AudreyBrashich, @DrRobyn .

If you’re not on Twitter you can still participate live on my blog. We want to hear from you!

If you can’t make it live, the transcript will be available afterward at my blog.

My c0-advocates are:

Amy Harman of Becoming A Better Woman

Dr. Robyn Silverman, author of Good Girls Don’t Get Fat

Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals

Audrey Brashich, author of All Made Up

Filed Under: Communication, Family Life, Health & Safety Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Girls Now: Halloween Sexualization Hurts Imagination

October 12, 2011 By

via SheHeroes.org

Halloween was one of my very favorite holidays with Nia & Mavis. I loved it all, from helping them create costumes, to carve pumpkins, to visit the neighbors for treats. It’s totally fun to dress up and pretend to be a different person, an animal, your fave food, a character from a book or comic, whatever you want to imagine being.

But in the past decade the fun of wearing a costume has become a tighter and tighter straightjacket of sexualization for girls. While sex fantasy has long been part of adult costumes, the costumes now being marketed to girls ages 4 and up disturb me with the exploitiveness that’s pouring down on young kids. The store-bought choices are highly sexualized and play on adult fantasies, bringing porn to mind, rather than kids’ imaginations and wide horizons.

This is a terrible loss for girls. Instead of using their own fantastic imaginations to come up with, and even make, a costume, they’re marketed the message that they should just be something sexy.Two parts of this are awful:

  • Girls are told to be some “thing” rather than some “one.” It makes them into objects, not people.
  • Girls’ imaginations are crippled by the narrow, outdated, powerless roles the costumes imply.

Try a few on for size. The Monster High costume that Peggy Orenstein found at Toys R Us. Or the Convict Cutie Dr. Jennifer Shewmaker saw in her local costume shop.

Then, just for a breather, get inspired by wonderful costume ideas on SheHeroes and the idea of an Astronaut Makeover on Princess Free Zone. Those sound like they’d be actual fun to me, not the cause of a difficult conversation about why sexy isn’t appropriate for a girl’s costume.

To talk with other parents about how we can help our kids understand, and successfully fight back against the marketing of sexualized costumes for kids, join me and four other awesome advocates for girls on October 13.

Thursday October 13  at 9pm est/8 cst/7 mst/6 pst for a chat on Twitter. Follow hash tag  #girlsnow. Add it to the end of your tweet so we can see your question or comment. 

Before the chat  follow @Nancy_Newmoon, @PigtailPals, @BeABetterWoman, @AudreyBrashich, @DrRobyn .

If you’re not on Twitter you can still participate live on my blog. We want to hear from you!

If you can’t make it live, the transcript will be available afterward at my blog.

My c0-advocates are:

Amy Harman of Becoming A Better Woman

Dr. Robyn Silverman, author of Good Girls Don’t Get Fat

Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals

Audrey Brashich, author of All Made Up

 

Filed Under: Communication, Creativity & Girls, Family Life, Health & Safety Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Forgive and Begin Again in Love

August 6, 2011 By

One of the hardest things for me is to forgive myself when I screw up. I also can have trouble forgiving others–the two issues go hand-in-hand. That’s why I was touched and captivated by an e-book about forgiveness a New Moon Girls member posted in her online room recently. Of course I want to be the best parent I can be and I know what a huge effect I have on my daughters’ lives. But the pressure I put on myself to be a perfect mom was terribly oppressive and not good for me or them. Meg Hunter’s guest post is a wonderful story about forgiving, and teaching our daughters to do it too. Meg is raising three daughters for the 21st century while also teaching  graphic design and marketing to technical college students.

On our refrigerator is a pink and purple sign that reads “We forgive ourselves; we forgive each other; and we begin again in love.”  As a mother of three daughters, Rachel (13), Lauren (11) and Caitlin (9) it is something I refer to often.

The sign originated from a Unitarian service about Yom Kippur and the Days of Turning. The Days of Turning are a time to consider your life and the things that might be keeping you from having good relationships with your friends, family and neighbors.  After the service we created the sign to help remember the lesson.

One of the most important phrases for our kids is “we forgive ourselves”.  Our youngest, Caitlin, sometimes gets in to a spiral of bad behavior that is hard to get out of.  She will say things she doesn’t mean at home and on the playground.  We found that when she learned to forgive herself, forgiving others became easier.

Our middle daughter, Lauren, can be very hard on herself.  She expects perfection in everything she does. If she gets a “B” in any subject we give her a cake because letting go and being OK with a “B” is an achievement for her! For her, forgiving herself is about accepting mistakes and knowing she did the best she could.

Sometimes the tables get turned and my children teach me a lesson. 

Recently, one of my daughters had an issue with a coach for her soccer team.  I contacted the coach and requested a meeting. Instead of meeting with me, the coach and her assistant pulled my daughter aside and chose to ask her a series of questions about the issue.

The coach emailed me and let me know she met with my daughter.  I was furious, disappointed and felt horrible that I had put my daughter in that situation.

When she arrived home, I told her how sorry I was.  I told her I would have never requested the meeting if I thought she would be put in a situation with two adults confronting her alone. By this time, I had tears running down my face.

Lauren looked at me and said, “Mom, I need you to do something for me.”

I said, “Of course, what is it?”

She said, “I need you to do what you always tell us,”

“What is that?” I asked,

“Forgive yourself, forgive each other and begin again in love.  I need you to forgive Coach Klein.  The coach has a lot of responsibility, a lot of kids and parents who depend on her and she has a new baby. Can you forgive Coach Klein?”

I wiped away my tears, smiled and said, “Yes, I can.”

As a parent, I try to provide my children with a strong foundation. It is nice to know that sometime the lessons my husband and I have tried to teach get applied to their everyday lives.  Especially when you are the student and your child is the teacher. Thank you Rachel, Lauren and Caitlin for the lessons you have taught me. You are all wise beyond your years and I am so blessed to be your mother.

Thankfully, it’s become easier to forgive myself and others by seeing my daughters bounce back from bad decisions and mistakes I’ve made as their mom. It turns out they didn’t need me to be perfect in order for them to become wonderful adults. How lucky for them and me, both! Remembering how resilient all kids are helps me keep things in perspective. And, I keep working out my “forgiving muscle” to make it stronger. How do you strengthen your and your daughters’ forgiving muscle?

Filed Under: Communication, Creativity & Girls, Family Life Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
«Older Posts
%d bloggers like this: