Inside Out Empowerment

A Mother's Love

I find it hard to believe that 26 years ago today, I gave birth to my first-born child, Dave Thomas Olver, Jr. This child has turned into a man I couldn't be prouder of.

He has just built a house and handled all the details that went along with that. He has a sales job where he makes great money. He has excellent credit. He is a kind dog owner. He loves his brother. He helps his grandparents. He is cautious with women, knowing what he wants in life.

He has amazing traits. He can talk to anyone. I've seen him with young children, elderly folks and everyone in between. He has a gift. He is sensitive and cares about people. He will help anyone in need. He is a constant support to me.

On this day, and every day, I want him to know how proud I am of him and how very much I love and respect him. He is a wonderful man who deserves all the good life has to offer. Happy Birthday, Dave!

Parenting Q & A

Q: My son has quite a penchant for telling stories. His vocabulary is amazing, not just for his age but for any adult! This is not just motherly pride talking, he truly has a gift. I encourage him to write but he tells me he hates to write. Any ideas on what I should do?

A: Without speaking to your son, I have a couple of ideas. First of all, you need to evaluate whether this “gift” is one your son wants to use or is it one he wants to put up on a shelf somewhere? Many times, parents notice a creativity or strength in their child and push them to develop it further, only to create a resistance in the child. I remember being forced to practice the piano and I hated it. I lost my excitement for reading when I went to college and had loads of assigned, what I thought boring, reading assignments. (Thankfully, I found it again.) My husband was good at fixing cars and decided to do it for a living, only to learn doing it for others took the joy out of it.

So if you determine, this is more a desire of yours rather than your son’s, then let it go. If you think he might like to pursue it, you may suggest that he speak his stories into a digital voice recorder and then you or someone else can transcribe them into the written word. With today’s technology, if he uses an MP3 recorder, he could even tell his stories and then burn them onto a CD that you can listen to in the car and give out to friends and family as gifts. Play to his strengths. I know many authors who speak their work and pay to have it transcribed.

Please, let me know how this turns out. It’s an interesting situation. Thank you.

Developing Win/Win Outcomes

Fighting with or attempting to control through restriction or other means is usually ineffective and it costs you, your child and your relationship.

In a previous post, I spoke of the child who wants more computer time and the mother who is attempting to keep her daughter safe and healthy. Neither of them was wrong—whose needs should be most important? Some will says the child’s, some will say the parent’s but I say neither one. Both individual’s needs are equally important.

When parents decide that their needs are more important than their child’s, they damage their child’s self-esteem and often create a situation where the child is still driven to get her needs met by frequently choosing a less desirable way. If the parent decides the child’s needs are more important, that runs the risk of creating a self-indulgent child.

How do we strike a balance? By creating a win/win solution. Parents need to really listen to their child and what need they are attempting to meet. Then they must clearly communicate their own needs, concerns and worries to their child. Together they work toward creating a situation where both parties can equally have their needs met.

To learn more about negotiating win/win outcomes, check out our Empowerment Parenting Home Study Course.

Book Review: Heartful Parenting

Heartful Parenting: Connected
Parenting & Emotional Intelligence
by David E. Myers, Ph.D.

A couple months ago, Dr. Myers sent me his book to review and I promised him I would review it in my Parenting Newsletter. I would recommend this book to parents who want to give their children perhaps the most important gift they can—heightened emotional intelligence.

Research has been done that shows emotional intelligence is more predictive of life success and happiness than intellectual intelligence. You can be very book smart but if you aren’t in tune with people, you are less likely to succeed than if you are in tune with yourself and others emotionally.

He makes some excellent points that I wholeheartedly agree with. For example on page 98, Dr. Myers writes, “In an all-out war between parents and child, the child will win, usually at a great cost to her.” This is so true. He also provides excellent advice for things to do and things to avoid as a parent. He focuses on the importance of having a positive relationship with your child and distinguishes between discipline as teaching and discipline as punishment. He has a chapter dedicated to communication and provides good guidelines for how to communicate with your child.

Overall, I liked this book and would recommend it for parents seeking to be better than “good enough” parents.

Click here to order this book.

Kids and Computers

This week, a mother contacted me about her child disobeying her limits with the home computer and sneaking time beyond her allowed limit.

In this situation, the mother had a need to protect and nurture  her child. She wants to be able to loosely supervise her daughter’s time on the computer to possibly prevent her from falling prey to adults who victimize children by finding their victims on the Internet. She also wants to support her child’s need for physical activity so she restricts her computer usage and encourage outside physical activities instead. Is this mother wrong? Absolutely not.

Her daughter, on the other hand, has a desire to be on the computer. All her friends are on there and want to know why she isn’t. They don’t have limits while this girl does. This girl is quite accomplished on the computer and can build website pages for her friends. She also has a high need for freedom and doesn’t like being restricted and the computer is plain fun to her. She gets her love & belonging, power, freedom and fun needs met with the computer. Is she wrong? Absolutely not.

How does it get resolved? I think the way to resolve this issue is for the mother and daughter to sit down and talk about what each other needs and wants in the situation. If the child can convince her mother that she has the skills and knowledge necessary to protect herself from predators and she agrees to engage in other healthy activities each day, then her mother could relax her restriction on the amount of time she has on the computer.

In this case, and many others like it, the daughter wouldn’t be able to meet her freedom need with the computer if there wasn’t a rule to break. Sometimes we create the very behavior we are trying to stop with the rules we make. When a person has a high need for freedom, they will inevitably break the rules, particularly the ones they don’t like or that don’t make sense.

Has that ever happened to you or someone you know?

Want more information about Empowerment Parenting? Check out our Empowerment Parenting Home Study Course. You can get it in 20 weekly email lessons, or a complete ebook. Your choice.

Kids and Anger Management

I spoke with a woman over the weekend whose son is 10 years-old and she says has anger management issues. We didn’t really get into his specific behaviors but it caused me to reflect on some inherent differences between males and females.

I think that from very early on, boys and girls deal with their anger differently. As a general rule, girls need to talk about it to feel better, while boys need to work it out physically.

So if you have daughters, you want to teach them verbal skills to be able to work out their frustrations but with boys, you will need to provide opportunities for them to work out their anger physically—maybe with a punching bag, racquetball, running, or martial arts. The list of possibilities is truly endless but don’t expect your boys to “talk about it,” at least not until they’ve had the opportunity to release the anger in a safe physical manner.

Kids and ADHD

I’m not sure why, maybe because it’s getting warmer outside, I’m getting a lot of questions and stories about kids and energy. I’ll put them all under that broad category but there have been several different subcategories discussed: kids and ADHD, kids and anger management, and kids and computers.

Kids and ADHD

Let’s start with kids and ADHD. There seems to be a big trend here in the US of drugging our children so they can “control” their behavior in school. I am NOT in favor of this practice.

Why is there such an epidemic of ADHD diagnoses in our children? I don’t want to oversimplify but I believe one reason is that our children don’t have the opportunities they had in previous generations to run around and expend their energy.

In years past, kids got to play in the parks, in the streets and in their own yards. Today, that happens less and less. Parents are too afraid to allow their children to be outside unsupervised, and rightly so! There are predators out there who would do your children harm. However, kids still need to expend their energy, somehow.

So, many times the activities available to them at home are sedentary, such as playing video games, watching television, talking on their cell phones or using the home computer. None of this provides opportunity to release energy, unless your children are like my niece who paces vigorously while talking on the phone!

Then we send them to school and expect them to sit down and be quiet. In addition, many schools are reducing the amount of physical education time for our kids and I’ve even seen recently that some schools forbid children to run at recess or use certain playground equipment because they fear a physical injury lawsuit. Is it any wonder our children are having difficulty?

Now I know there are parents and teachers out there who have stories of children who have been helped immensely by the addition of Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta or Dexedrine to their daily diet. If you know a child who is being helped by his or her medication, I’m not saying to discontinue it but for every child who is being helped, I believe there are at least three others who are still exhibiting all the ADHD behavior the medication was designed to reduce.

There have been studies done on placebo medications that show that in double blind studies, when neither the patient nor the doctor knew whether the patient was getting the actual drug or the placebo, the ones getting the placebo actually did better. Is it possible there is a placebo effect with some children?

If your child displays what you or the teachers believe is an excessive amount of energy, do your best to create situations where that child can expend energy. I have two boys who could both have been diagnosed with ADHD as children. They were very physical. Luckily, I lived in the country during a time when parents sent their kids out the door to simply “play.” I also spent a lot of my spare time running them around to different athletic events—YMCA soccer, wrestling, flag football, T-ball, basketball, you get the idea. This definitely helps.

Parenting is one of the hardest jobs you’ll ever do and the stakes are incredibly high. We all do the best we can and hope for good results. Fortunately, when we have good intentions are kids generally survive and even thrive.

Parenting Q & A

Q: When I was growing up, my parents were really strict and I didn’t DARE go against their wishes. I knew it just wouldn’t be worth it. They definitely controlled my behavior and that is exactly the way I intend to raise my daughter. How can you say that my parents didn’t control me and that I can’t control my kids?

A: Sometimes what happens is that parents have children who are high in the need for love & belonging. When this occurs, these children are predominantly motivated to create and maintain positive relationships with those people who are important to them. They tend to avoid conflict. So, if you have child high in love & belonging, he or she is motivated by trying to please you and probably will follow your guidance.

However, if that child has only followed your rules so he or she can gain your approval, what do you think will happen when he or she get out on their own? Typically, that is when things get out of control. If they have been ignoring their needs for power and freedom in favor of satisfying their need for love & belonging, then when they are out from under your strict hand, they will most likely try all the things they weren’t previously allowed to do. And, if they had no practice managing difficult situations, then they will be ill-equipped to manage their new-found freedom.

Sometimes parents have to give up what they want now (compliance) in favor of what they really want (a child who knows how to independently, successfully function in the world).

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Book Review: Raising Happy Kids

Raising Happy Kids by Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer

Raising Happy Kids is a book that espouses conventional wisdom about democratic parenting. It measures whether or not something is effective with kids by whether it will increase self-esteem, self-confidence and self-reliance. It speaks in favor of parents retaining their parental role and providing boundaries for their children. It also is in favor of helping kids get their needs met.

Where this book departs from Empowerment Parenting is that it basically says that parents’ needs are more important than the child’s and that parents sometimes must exert their will over their child’s simply because they are in charge and they are the parents. Many parents operate under this assumption.

What Empowerment Parenting says is that every person, parents and children alike, must get their needs met in some way. If parents decide that their needs are more important than their child’s in a certain situation and impose their will, then that child’s need goes unmet. This sets up opportunity for all kinds of problematic behavior to occur simply because the child is attempting to get his or her needs met in that situation.

Occasionally, parents will need to impose their will particularly when a child’s safety is at risk. Sometimes parents will choose to make their needs more important when they are pressed for time. This will most likely be all right as long as it doesn’t become a regular routine. However, parents must be prepared to manage the fall out.

Raising children is one of the hardest jobs you will ever undertake and there is no instruction manual. We just do the best we can. Working together with your children so you can both get what you need in a responsible way is the primary message of Empowerment Parenting. It will take more time and require more patience, but the reward of cooperative children far outweighs the effort.

Click here to order this book.

Success Quote

"You miss a 100 percent of the shots you don’t take."

- Wayne Gretzky

I know that when we are parenting, we have our good days and our bad. When we are in a down period, we begin to feel as if we are drowning and will latch on to any life vest thrown our way. However, then things begin to get better and we convince ourselves that things really aren’t so bad. We begin to think that we CAN do it on our own.

Maximize the possibilities for success by taking the action you know is needed. Don’t wait until you are under water and going down for the third time. Make a conscious decision to get the help you need when things are going well. You won’t regret it.

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