Is Your Youngest Child Spoiled?

Tags: birth order, challenges, spoiled, spoiled children

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A very frightening thing occurred in our home. I found out that I had failed to teach my youngest (age 8) how to vacuum the carpets. I had visions of birth order prophecies coming to fruition, and shivers up my spine about “spoiled” younger siblings.

The 3 boys had just finished cleaning their room and I asked my youngest to vacuum the carpet. He willingly grabbed the central vacuum and began, but started shouting over the hum how amazing it was that it was self-propelled. It was when he yelled, “This is so cool! Why didn’t you show me how to do this before?” that I realized my serious errors. I had no good answer for him, other than that I am probably using too much of a top-down approach when it comes to the expectations and activities I give my children (and that sounds too boring to tell him). It is not that he was just sitting around and not helping – I admit I was probably choosing easier tasks for the younger siblings.

Can We Spoil Our Children?

Yes. I am not referring to the pampered, indulged child who receives everything she asks for before she even asks. I am talking about spoiling our children, particularly the younger ones, because we fail to acknowledge all of their capabilities in light of other siblings in the home. We spoil for them the opportunities to shine and try new challenges.

I think it might be an automatic response to give older children the more complicated or time consuming responsibilities, but I think it is a disservice to fall prey to the age game. It is one of the dangers of the sibling effects that are written about and studied. While I don’t buy into all of the theories about birth order, I do see how birth order can impact development, experiences, and world-perspectives. Now I am making more efforts to be certain that my youngest, or any of my children for that matter, aren’t given experiences based on the pecking order in the house.

What does birth order have to do with it?

Authors on the topic of birth order claim that children are almost destined to develop certain characteristics based on their birth order. Dr. Leman also discusses the differences between calendar birth order and psychological birth order.

If we believe birth order theory proponents, the youngest children have great people skills, are very social, and are risk takers. They also fear rejection and are more likely to be self-centered than their older siblings. These characteristics of fear of rejection and ego-centered behaviors are what I find dangerous possibilities when using a top-down approach in parenting. Who can blame our kids if they grow up to feel inadequate or feel they don’t have to do the same as others around them if we don’t give them the opportunities to try?

How can we make sure we don’t spoil opportunities for our kids?

I have been giving this idea much thought and energy recently and working to implement a different approach in our home that doesn’t rely on older, stronger, or more experienced as factors for assigning chores or offering opportunities.

• Make certain that opportunities are available for everyone – and yes, vacuuming is an opportunity.
• Refrain from going for the easy fix. Yes, it would be faster and I might feel safer about cleaning supplies being used if the two older kids cleaned the kids’ bathroom, but there really is no legitimate reason why the younger two can’t share in the duty equally.
• Ask the kids what they want to do, and do it in no particular order each time. Everyone gets a voice and gets their fair share.
• Remind myself of the differences between fair and equal.
• Let the younger kids teach the older kids. This can be a board game, sport, or how to make a special dessert. Putting the youngest in the driver seat builds self-confidence and independence.

My new goals are derived from looking at the activities from a different approach – to give responsibilities that are challenging to my younger children, even if that means the teenagers don’t have to do much that particular time. This is not in an effort to give an easy ride to the older kids, but in order to pave a smoother way for all of my children. I need to give them all opportunities for everything from vacuuming to snow skiing, especially if I’m going to prove the birth order theories wrong! 

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The skills needed to do well in college are most often not taught in high school. More than half-way through her first year of college my daughter has been learning a valuable lesson: success in college isn’t guaranteed by the credits and course descriptions on a high school transcript. In fact, professors on her campus openly and repeatedly tell students that there are certain characteristics and types of students who are the most successful:

1. Homeschooled students
2. Post-secondary enrollment option students
3. Students who play musical instruments

No matter which type of classroom she enters, my daughter has been met with this same sentiment from instructors. Part of me cringes when I hear her report this back because I don’t want her to think that she will have an easy ride (she fits the bill on all three). However, I know that what these professors tell their students is true – in order to succeed in college it takes a unique skill set that public and many private high schools simply do not provide for students. College is no longer the absolute key to a successful future. In fact, far too many students feel they simply need to go to college because that has been the long-standing expectation. College does not guarantee anything, other than debt for most, and it does require skills that aren’t on any high school class syllabi. This article is not about the merit of a college education – the arguments both ways are long and just. However, for students like my daughter who have passions and end goals that do require a college degree (as in the medical field – we don’t need undertrained yuppies with scalpels), achieving those goals in higher education can be challenging. There are several key sets of skills that college students need to develop before they enter their first campus classroom if this educational journey is to be of any value.

1. Self-awareness
2. Self-monitoring skills
3. Financial literacy
4. Real study habits
5. Questioning minds
6. Real world work skills
7. Academic adeptness

Self-Awareness

It is so sad to hear students talk about the fact that they truly don’t know why they are in college (other than Mom and Dad said to go) and they aren’t really pursuing a passion. I wouldn’t even spend $45 on a pair of jeans if I didn’t love them, why would you consider thousands on classes you don’t know will help support your dreams? College can be a great decision for those who have a directed passion that requires the degree, but can also be a complete drain of time and finances for students who are “maybe thinking about being in business” as I recently heard one kid say. College isn’t the time to think about passions – it is the place to pursue them, especially at today’s costs. Before checking out the dorms or buying books, students should:

• Know how the degree will or won’t help support their careers
• Know how versatile their degree might be
• Know if this is their own passion or if college is on someone else’s list of goals

Self-Monitoring Skills

College is less structured than typical high schools, leading to some of the biggest problems for college freshmen. Students must be able to get to class on time, attend class (novel idea for some), and prepare for class as if it is really helping them reach their goals. All too often public high schools don’t require students to truly be responsible for their own behaviors. Schools send virtual notes to parents about everything from late papers to who is running low on glue-sticks, and students are rarely actually in charge of their own high school courses. They are tracked, placed in classes, and handed a 4 year-plan without consultation. College is suddenly a freedom they can’t handle.

Financial Literacy

On my daughter’s campus there is a huge discrepancy between the students who have financial literacy and those who don’t. It is a private college and either the students are there with financial support from parents, or they understand the value of their dollar and want to make sure it is used to the very last fraction of a cent. However, financial literacy goes beyond understanding the cost/benefit ratio of college expenses. It is directly related to students truly knowing about the nuts and bolts of paying bills, investing, and what to really do with a paycheck. High schools often fail to teach these skills because the classes are taught on textbooks, not real life. It is left the parents to teach these skills, and they are often relying on home economics classes to get the job done. If you want to teach your child about financial literacy, be open about real financial decisions within the family and introduce them to people in their potential fields of interest who can let them know what to expect. Better yet – make sure your kids are in charge of their money – it is too easy to spend Dad’s and not think much about it.

Real Study Habits

This one seems to really exemplify why professors would call on homeschoolers and musicians. They have developed skills largely independent of constant direction and are capable of self-directed learning because they really have no other choices. In our homeschool the goal is to learn how to learn – and that doesn’t come from following state standards on boxed curriculum sets. That is called regurgitation.

Questioning Minds

By the time a typical student graduates from high school, he has probably been told thousands of times precisely how to complete the homework and accumulate the necessary information. College strips that away and presents students with broad concepts, but doesn’t tell them everything they need to know each step of the way. In order to really gleam knowledge in college students need to know how to ask questions and become partners in learning instead of passive bodies in the desks.

Real-World Work Skills

Communicating with people of all ages, abilities, and from all walks of life isn’t a skill that is imprinted in high school where students are segregated by age and social classes. Teachers are amazing people, but they just can’t be everything to every student. If a high school student is interested in broadcast journalism (like my son), sitting in a classroom with a teacher who has never done this trade can’t provide those real-world skills. Instead, parents need to help their kids find mentors and opportunities to grow these skills outside of the high school classroom.

Academic Adeptness

Let’s be real – it is really hard to get into a good college with failing or substandard high school grades. However, the classes on the transcript aren’t the only things admission offices look at for acceptance. In fact, one of the prevailing guidelines my daughter faced when applying was minimum test scores on college entrance exams. High school grades were never really a factor. For this one instance, studying how to take a test well can pay off (although it is my absolute least favorite criteria).

Getting into college can be like a game, and staying in it can be like a race. If our kids don’t know where the finish line is for the race there really seems no point in running them ragged to get there. Parents need to proactively find ways for their kids to acquire these 7 skills outside of typical high school walls (and quit assuming everything is addressed by graduation). For more ideas on how to prepare your children well, check out some of these ideas.

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It isn’t my mother’s nursery, that’s for certain! The modern gadgets and trends of 2012 for welcoming Baby home from the hospital probably seem quite foreign to many grandparents. Some are valuable tools for parents of newborns, while others are additions to the long list of non-necessities that are just fun to try.

Bedding
Gone are the days of frilly bumper pads and thick matching quilts. The new baby bedding trends are about safety. Bumper pads are no longer recommended as they can pose strangulation and entrapment dangers for babies, and the American Academy of Pediatrics warns parents not to place blankets or stuffed animals in the cribs as well. All of the new moms who dreamed of beautiful crib ensembles don’t have to settle for just plan sheets, however. On the list of fun to try pieces are new fitted sheets like these that have added designs on the sides to mimic a lower look of a bumper pad, but it can also alert you to whether or not the sheet is fitted properly.

Bottles
Gone are the old days of glass bottles that wouldn’t survive a day at baby gym glass. If you are considering bottle-feeding, even part of the time, you also may have heard about the risks of using plastic bottles. There are many studies that question the safety of BPA (Bisphenol A), a compound found in many plastics, including baby bottles. There are current debates about the health and safety of infants exposed to this chemical through bottles.

The new look for babies and parents are stainless steel baby bottles. The push for these is across several levels, including the “green” choice of the product that can be recycled, the durability of the material, and the freedom from BPA found in plastics. Stainless steel bottles and sippy cups can also be easier to clean and safer in the long-run because their scratch-resistant surfaces don’t allow for areas in which bacteria can grow.

Induced Lactation
Adoptions and surrogate parents bring joy to parents and help create new families, but often did not offer the possibilities of non-birth parents breastfeeding. Now some pediatricians offer cocktails of hormones and supplements that are designed to mimic the hormones of pregnancy. Also known as adoptive breast-feeding, the general idea is derived from the wet nurses of centuries gone by. Not all parents are opting for the prescription pad when it comes to this feeding option, as some lactation consultants recommend herbal teas and round the clock breast pumping to stimulate breast-milk production. This, however, is usually not as successful in producing the quantity of milk necessary to sustain feeding a healthy newborn, but it does provide parents with the ability to form this close bond as well as pass along helpful antibodies.

High Tech Baby Monitors
There is an app for everything! My first baby monitor could double as low-budget eavesdropping technology as it picked up conversations of other moms and kids in the neighborhood. Now parents can plug in their iPads and phones and use them as baby monitors at a moment’s notice. Not all apps have video, but as long as you can hear your little one snoozing or screaming, it probably doesn’t matter in the long run. This means one less thing to pack for the trip to Grandma’s, too.

The Extras

• Apps for keeping tabs on the ins and outs – the milk and the poo – so you will never have to ask yourself again, “When was the last time he…?”
• Ear scopes that parents can safely use to check for the source of that screaming pain, such as this one, can provide back-up in the middle of the night when you just aren’t sure. After watching one son suffer through tremendous ear problems, I know that gadgets like these can help get to the source quickly (but always check with your doctor with questions!).
• Attachments for your strollers just for your phone so your beverage holder doesn’t get lonely!

At the end of the day, so many of the gadgets and gizmos we surround our babies with don’t give what they really need most – our time and attention. There is no app for the nurturing bonds we can provide as we snuggle with our babes, listen to their heartbeats in person, and pay attention to the subtle signals they give us for their needs. If they ever make apps to replace those moments, I don’t want one anyway!

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For many parents it is a goal to raise their children to be strong, full of integrity, nurturing, and resilient. We want our children to be able to withstand the tough times and fight through obstacles confidently. But how do we go about doing this in a modern world that is filled with opportunities and challenges, some of which are even too great for us? Authors Robert Brooks, Ph.D. and Sam Goldstein, Ph.D. help to give insight to parents in their book Raising Resilient Children. Before you roll your eyes and think Great, another bunch of “experts” giving me another round of advice, consider their premises for how to raise children who develop resilient mindsets. Their ideas are sound enough to give me pause, and reasonable enough to incorporate into real-world positive parenting.

Nurturing Islands of Competence

According to Brooks and Goldstein, “islands of competence” help to build confidence, successes, and resilient mindsets in our children. I usually don’t get too excited about catch phrases when it comes to parenting advice, but something about the visual this phrase islands of competence brings to mind resonates with me. If we imagine a vast body of water (the opportunities and challenges we all face in life), it seems much more daunting without any of these islands of competence on which we can rely for support. These islands do not emerge because someone else put them there, but because we build them for ourselves.

For our children, islands of competence come in many forms. In a very simple analogy, consider a toddler who is desperately trying to master the ladder and slide at the park (this is the vast body of water – the opportunity with challenges). Each time the toddler can make it up just a few stairs independently, she is building her own islands of competence. She might fall occasionally, but as she experiences more independent successes, the overall challenge isn’t as daunting and her confidence builds. She is becoming resilient to the falls and accepting of the challenges.

5 Principles for Nurturing Islands of Competence

Raising resilient children is not easy if our first instincts are to rescue and protect them, or perhaps direct their every move. Brooks and Goldstein outline 5 principles that they say will help our children develop skills that are essential for foundations of success and resilient mindsets.

1. Openly Enjoy and Celebrate Your Children’s Accomplishment
2. Emphasize Your Children’s Input in Creating Success
3. Identify and Reinforce Your Child’s Islands of Competence by Engaging in Environmental Engineering
4. Give Strengths Time to Develop
5. Accept the Unique Strengths and Success of Each Child

Celebrating Accomplishments
If you read my post yesterday or have ever heard of Alfie Kohn, you know that he must be cringing at this thought. Kohn would argue that celebrating successes means that we demonstrate that we love our children more when they do well. Brooks and Goldstein, however, argue that “children will feel more successful when their achievements are acknowledged and appreciated by significant people in their lives.” The small steps our children take, whether when riding a two-wheeler for the first time or swinging the bat in Little League, are opportunities for parents to reinforce the accomplishments of their children, and recognize the small islands of competence that are emerging.

This is probably one of the more difficult principles to know how to incorporate. There seems to be a fine line between acknowledging our children’s successes and praising them to the point where the successes are measured by others (us), and not inwardly by our children.

Emphasizing Input
This is probably one of my favorite principles outlined by the authors, and one that I have seen to be successful with my own children. It is the hands-on approach we take as homeschoolers, where our children supply their unique ideas and we don’t do the tasks for them. If my 10 year old son wants to cook dinner (my chef in the making), it is so intrinsically better for him to do it his way, than to have me hovering and showing him how to do it the way I would. Brooks and Goldstein write that “…children with a resilient mindset assume realistic credit for their successes.”

Engaging in Environmental Engineering
No – you don’t need a formal degree for this. This is the wonderful idea that recognizes that children have different talents, abilities, and inclinations, and encourages parents to support them in their endeavors. Brooks and Goldstein give a great example of traditional education plans that most often address the weaknesses of students – the subject in which they need to improve – and the goals are about improving the weaknesses, but rarely about supporting the strengths. Children who are constantly reminded of their weaknesses are at risk for “swimming in a self-perceived ocean of inadequacy” according to the authors. We need to work with our children to support their strengths and allow them opportunities to pursue these, which in turn often improves their weaknesses naturally.

Give it Time
Every child has an internal timetable and we need to honor the difference they have, as they mature cognitively, emotionally, and physically. All of these developmental phases contribute to just when our kids are ready for various activities or challenges, and some of them just can’t be altered, no matter what we do.

Accept Uniqueness
Brooks and Goldstein suggest an activity for parents. Make one list of the islands of competence you see in your child. Make another list of those that you wish your child exhibited. There will likely be differences. However, we need to be extremely careful that we don’t somehow impress on our children that those differences equate to disappointments we feel in them. This is where Kohn and these authors would agree – if we fail to accept the unique strengths and successes of our children, we risk teaching them that we love them conditionally.

Fight the Good Fight

There is such a thing as a good fight – the kind where perserverence and resiliency pay off and challenges are overcome. It is not easy to let our children try and fail or to see them frightened and unsure, but allowing them to move through these phases gives them the tools they need to develop confidence (their islands of competency). Let them fight the good fight – it is the only way they will know what victory feels like.

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What are the worst things I have ever heard my children say? Anything that sounds like me in a bad parenting moment – the echoes of my own words. That impatient tone they get when frustrated with each other or the refusal to share a toy because “last time you lost mine”, I know somewhere along the way they learned these tones and issuances of consequences from their parents. In those parenting moments I probably did everything wrong according to Alfie Kohn in Unconditional Parenting.

However, after reading Unconditional Parenting, and swallowing hard through a good chunk of it, I understand why Kohn would frown on my bad moments. I’m just not sure I’m ready to throw out the rest of what does seem to really work with my children and that Kohn feels is so innately disabling for them.

What is Unconditional Parenting?

Alfie Kohn, author on human behavior, has written Unconditional Parenting, where he takes apart most of the conventional parenting methods and tries to show why they just don’t do what we truly want them to do. His premise is that modern parenting approaches – like time-outs – are only ways in which we try to control our children, not truly show them love unconditionally.

According to Kohn, in order to demonstrate unconditional love, we need to build relationships built on trust and loving communication, where we empower our children to think for themselves. In order to do this, we need to get rid of time-outs, praising and rewarding our children, and dishing out consequences. These, in Kohn’s eyes, are all ways that we manipulate their feelings. He refers to these as moments of “love withdrawal” where we might think we are teaching our children how to behave, but we are actually teaching them that we are in control and that they are more loved when better behaved.

What Works from Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting?

Kohn pulls at my parental strings with his descriptions of moments I have had with my children, where I have dictated what must be done and how it needs to be done. He asks parents to consider if we would consider talking with our adult peers in the same manners we speak with our children? I doubt it. But I don’t know if it is as simple as parents failing to show unconditional love to their children. I don’t get the same stern look on my face when talking with my friend because my friend isn’t throwing crayons on the floor to prove her point.

The long-term goals we have as parents are what Kohn says we need to focus on as we commit to parenting. Are we trying to teach our children how to conform because they feel more love from us when they do, or are we trying to teach our children to be thoughtful, compassionate, and driven? Kohn does an amazing job at challenging us as parents to rethink how some of our strategies might work in the short term (issuing a time-out might elicit the immediately needed response), but they fail to teach long term better behaviors, all the while teaching our children that we love them less when they misbehave.

Some of the strategies encouraged by Kohn that I have also found to improve my own children’s behaviors and improve our family dynamics include:

• Getting to eye level with my children when speaking with them, especially if they are or I am upset.
• Asking my children what I can do to help – even when I might not feel like it.
• Letting my children experience natural consequences for their behaviors.
• Treating my children the same, whether they win or lose.
• Treating my children as real people with their own perceptions, needs, and ideas, even if they don’t always align with my own.

Is Unconditional Parenting Possible in the Real World?

Unconditional parenting, especially when viewed form Kohn’s vantage point, is challenging at best. Even for a non-conformist homeschooling parent like myself, I think there is some value to the things Kohn cites as detrimental to our children. I see value in rewards when implemented well. I think there is value in and need of discipline.

However, yes, I would like to do less instituting of consequences and have fewer moments where I feel the kids are only making decisions based on extrinsic outcomes. I think Kohn’s strategies can help achieve this.

That being said, if I take all of Kohn’s ideas and try to apply them to parenting my four children, I just don’t see how eliminating some of the traditional strategies of parenting will truly and honestly be possible. We don’t live in a world where kids aren’t graded, don’t join competitive teams, aren’t responsible for following seemingly rigid rules, and don’t face consequences. More importantly, when our children do grow to be adults, they will be faced with competition in the job market, rewards and consequences in social circles and higher levels of education. That is the real world.

In a utopian society Kohn’s plans for parenting and raising children might work, but in the real world, I think the best we can do is try with all our abilities to demonstrate unconditional love. His ideas for stopping and asking ourselves about our long-term goals for our children are absolutely valid. His premises for showing unconditional love are sound. Pulling all of these ideas together to work is the challenging part – but no one ever said this job was easy.

If you are ready to challenge your ideas of parenting and how to raise children who feel unconditionally loved, explore Kohn’s ideas in Unconditional Parenting. There are no punishments or rewards if you do or don’t!

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Parenting is tiring, and is sometimes absolutely exhausting – especially if you are trying hard enough. One of the biggest dangers of overscheduled parents is that the exhaustion can turn into a collapse of everything you have been working so hard to teach, share with, and learn from your children. This balance beam of working hard as a parent and falling asleep and crashing at the wheel is one of my personal demons I have faced as a parent, and have finally found some solutions.

Find the Quiet in Your Days

While I don’t recommend trying this one first, it does highlight the need for parents to experience quiet. I recently asked my husband to just leave me to bask in the winter sunshine of the surprisingly warm cab of his truck parked in our driveway so that I could take a nap, or at least steal a few quiet moments before the barrage of “What’s for dinner? Want to see me yo-yo? Where is my hat?” began. My husband smiled and said sure. I sat for a few moments and then eventually meandered my way to the door, and the barrage. Even those beautiful moments curled on the seat gave me reprieve, but there are some even more practical ways to find quiet in your days.

1. Make a Do Not Disturb sign for the door. If your kids are old enough to monitor themselves for even 15 minutes while you are in a nearby room, clearly explain that when this sign is on the door, this means that Mom needs 15 minutes of quiet. Use it to take an uninterrupted bath, sit on your bed and read a book, or talk on the phone with a friend. Don’t overuse the sign and be sure to give your kids positive attention when you emerge – they will learn that Mom comes out of her personal time-out refreshed and happy.

2. Swap driving time with friends. Sometimes the best quiet time is behind the wheel of the mini-van, driving along and singing to whatever radio station I choose, or just being content with my own thoughts. If you deliver a vanload of children to an activity and then another parent brings them home, you both saved yourself gas money and time, and bought yourself a quiet ride home.

3. Find an errand buddy. This is a great plan, especially because it is valuable from the time your kids are babes until much older (and louder). Set aside a few hours each week where you take turns with each other’s children, perhaps you taking hers on Monday from 2-4 and she takes yours on Thursday from 9-11. You get to grocery shop, go to hair appointments, or just breathe.

4. Install the feet off the floor rule, courtesy of my 92-year-old grandmother. Until her children were graduated she instituted this rule each summer they were home from school, just so she had 30 minutes to an hour of quiet time each afternoon. The rule was that the kids didn’t have to nap, but they had to keep their feet off the floor. Grab a book, a sketch pad, or anything else, and get busy getting quiet. I have used this and it is a great way to get the kids to slow down their own frantic pace as well, I don’t hear the constant thundering in the house, and we all feel recharged afterward.

Become Your Own Best Friend

One of the most important and influential relationships you will ever have is the one you create with yourself. If you feel exhausted, ragged, and worn down, it is really challenging to move from that place to one that has energy for positive parenting, and a negative cycle can easily suck you into frustrated outbursts, arguments, and short-tempers. Begin by giving yourself what you need to be the kind of person you want to be around, and your family will be better able to honor that special person who you are.

5. Define you – and accept your partner’s definition of himself. Think about what makes you tick and what gets your mind excited. My husband and I recently had a great conversation about the differences he and I have about this. He needs more time alone than I do, and has very specific ways he wants to spend this time – hunting (which he does do with the boys), working on his truck, exercising, and watching movies I just don’t get. On the other hand, I thrive on spending time with my kids as they participate in activities, gardening and yard-work, writing, and trying new recipes in the kitchen.

6. Exercise. Sigh. I know it sounds mundane, but hear me out. Exercise is great for your body, can improve your self-image, will give you more energy (in the long-run), and sets a great example for your kids. When I exercise also don’t have to carry on conversations about things like the reasons why we are not using the stairs for an indoor sledding hill – I’m puffing and grunting too much to make conversing worthwhile for anyone. Bonus!

7. Treat yourself in small ways each day. I treat myself with a cup (or 5) of tea, phone calls and emails with friends, and a hot bath on a cold MN night, new favorite book in hand. Some days I even go wild and crazy and leave my kids in the children’s wing of the library and go to the adult section and find what I would love for my own bedtime story. Find small ways that give you what you need each day to help you remain true to yourself, and your children will have a calmer, more loving and capable parent.

My parents once told me about a décor sign that made them chuckle – parenting is like being pecked to death by a chicken. Some days it just feels like that! All parents, whether working full-time outside of the home, stay-at-home mammas, or work-at-home dads, need to recharge. I hope I won’t have to resort to requesting quiet time in the cab of the truck anytime soon, but you never know!

How do you recharge as a parent?

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Working at home as a mother and pursuing a career can be a challenging mix. You don’t have the constant buzz all day of new and innovative opportunities floating around you, but you do have the constant buzz of your family and your life at home. In the background are deadlines, calls to be returned, and no secretary to file your paperwork that awaits at your desk. In order to remain current and informed, encouraged on this journey, and capable of succeeding I have found these 5 resources that support me as I meander through the challenges of being a work-at-home mom.

WAHM.com

WAHM.com is one of the most popular sites for work-at-home moms, and it covers a wide variety of employment types, from cloud commuting in the business world to running home day-cares. One of the perks of this site is for work-at-home moms who want to find out whether or not an online job is legitimate or not. Moms can ask questions and get feedback before pursuing questionable jobs, and there are also recommended jobs available. It provides a great way to connect with other WAHMs and find useful tips for networking.

Home Business Magazine

The Home Business Magazine is a valuable resources available both in print and digital form, and includes articles about real people working from home. While it is not specifically geared toward work-at-home moms, but adults in general, it does include extensive information on everything from technology know-how to financing options to ways to balance it all at home.

Volunteer Opportunities

This one might puzzle you, but don’t be too skeptical. If you are a work-at-home mom or want to pursue that path, volunteering in the community serves three great purposes. The first is that it gives you an endeavor outside of the home where you can feel you are contributing to the community and it gives you a humbling way to recharge your batteries. The second is less obvious. It is an amazing way to network and learn more about opportunities in your area, often with professionals in your community. The boards and donators of many local non-profits are also often established business owners and managers. The third benefit of volunteering for work-at-home moms is that you can keep your skills fresh or learn new ones to add to your resume. As a writer and editor I use my skills to help non-profits with publishing, but the possibilities are endless with whatever career you are pursuing.

Larger Local Businesses

Connecting to larger local businesses in your area as a business person is not only valuable for networking, but can provide you with more options for outsourced work and telecommuting. Sometimes it is just a matter of letting someone within the company know you are available to work from home by completing a formal job application and indicating so. Businesses can benefit from outsourcing because they save on insurance costs and you don’t require your own office space.

Comrades at Home

Birds of a feather flock together, and this is sometimes epitomized when moms get together and their “real jobs” are discussed. I’ve been all 3 – a working mom, a stay-at-home mom, and a work-at-home mom. Currently I homeschool my children, am the domestic engineer of our household (it even says so on my coffee cup), and work part-time at home as a writer and editor. Having worn all three hats at some point in my mothering journey, I can attest that moms can be quite defensive and judgmental when it comes to the definition of work. I feel fortunate that I have wandered all of these roads at some point so that I have the perspectives I have now. But no matter which path you choose as a mom, it is important to have allies.

Work-at-home moms need thick skins and good friends. It is almost impossible for someone who hasn’t taken on this type of role to understand how it feels to intertwine business and family. The lines of a home office can become very blurred, and it is important to have allies who know what it is like to have children waiting outside the door while you finish a phone call, or the immense peace that comes over you when it is finally quiet at 11:00p.m and you can get some work done. If you are a work-at-home mom, make sure you surround yourself with supportive friends who share similar challenges and triumphs.

• Attend chamber meetings and small business meetings in your community to meet others.
• Join online forums where you can discuss anything from how to get dinner ready while preparing invoices or how to type with one hand and snuggle a baby with the other.
• Hang a notice at your local library inviting other work-at-home moms to meet for coffee once a month.
• Trade off with other work-at-home moms on things like driving the kids or a quiet afternoon once a week to do errands or work.
• Be supportive – of all moms.

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Do You Get a Passing Grade as a Parent?

Tags: parenting for success, parenting styles, success, successful children, successful kids

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When you hear the word success, does you mind immediately go to money, status, and material items? The cheers from my old high school ring in my ears: S-U-C-C-E-S-S, That’s the way we spell success! Great – so we know how to spell it, but can we achieve it as parents? Parenting for success is more reliant on the definition than how it is spelled, and while each of us has varying definitions, there are certain common characteristics of parenting for success.

Sometimes there is debate over parenting for success is whether or not success is a measurement of the child, the parent, or the relationship between the two? Parenting for success means raising a child who is capable of living his most extraordinary life – of reaching goals and creating a life of limitless possibilities. For him – not us. We are just the launching pad. If we can raise our children to be successful with this definition, then we can call our parenting a success.

 5 Ingredients for Parenting for Success

There are many ways to parent for success, and these 5 specific ways help lead me in the right direction. There are tangible, reliable ways to incorporate these ingredients into your parenting styles as you parent for success. Just keep in mind you are the launch pad, not the flight attendant who is there to serve or the pilot who takes control.

1. Emotion coaching. If you haven’t heard of it and it sounds like something from a hyped-up talk show, don’t dismiss the idea. Emotion coaching is just one parenting style, but its effectiveness is one of a kind. It is centered on the idea that teaching our children to identify and positively deal with and communicate about emotions is the best way to prepare them for life.
2. Social teaching. We live in a social world. An extremely important part of emotion coaching is laying the foundation on which social teaching can occur. Social teaching includes helping our children develop empathy and the ability to relate to others in our world. If you think of successful people in your life, most likely have the abilities to interact with others confidently and draw others into their ideas. It means teaching our kids to pay attention to social cues, listen to others, and be able to communicate their own needs and thoughts.
3. Intellectual advancement. At their current levels, most public schools are not equipped to offer amazing opportunities for intellectual advancement. This doesn’t mean you need to find a private school in order to raise a successful child, but you do need to be proactive in your child’s education. Surround them with opportunities to learn more about the things they love, and make sure they have the foundational skills necessary to achieve academically.
4. Open doors. Just because your neighbor’s son found success by attending the private school and participating in every sport under the son does not mean this is the equation for success. It is imperative that we pay attention to the interests of our kids and then encourage them to open doors in those directions. If your daughter loves art, find ways to help her surround herself with people, environments, and opportunities to further these passions.
5. Will power. True success isn’t handed to you on a platter, but achieved through hard work and determination. One of the most important things we can do is teach our children how to prevail and replace self-doubt with self-confidence. Don’t do things for your kids that they can safely do for themselves, and don’t freak out when they have minor bumps along the way. A child who falls and is “rescued” by a parent learns to rely on someone else to pick him up and set him right. Instead, calmly observe to see that he is physically OK, and then let him figure out how to get back on his feet.

My mother has always given me great advice, including that we can’t define ourselves by the individual successes of our children, but whether or not they successfully live each day to their fullest extents. Parenting for success is focusing on specific ways to raise children who can independently think, act, and live with passion and integrity.

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Why Understanding the Need to Both Like and Love Your Child Is Crucial to Raising Healthy Families

Browsing through the stacks at the library recently my eyes caught the title of a book. Liking the Child You Love, by Jeffrey Bernstein, sat resting on the shelf, beckoning to me. Fortunately I haven’t hit a wall with my children where liking them as people is an issue. Do I like all of their decision? No. At first I thought I didn’t really need to read this book – no problems here. But then as I flipped through the pages I was struck by the similarities between the ideas in this book and emotion coaching parenting, and I knew I wanted to add to those ideas I try to utilize with my kids.

The Importance of Liking Our Kids

Even those parents who love their children with every fiber of their beings sometime struggle with liking their children. It doesn’t sound nice, comforting, or even very parental, but it is a reality. The importance of making sure our kids know we really like them (and really feeling it) is significant in our parenting. Dr. Bernstein points out that liking our kids is really much more difficult than loving them. Liking our kids is a direct relfection of how we parent them – so much of it is up to us.

The importance differentiation needs to be made between disliking our children and disliking their behaviors. All too often we get those confused. We start to assign their behaviors to their being – and we use ill logic. No – we wouldn’t probably choose friends who make poor choices to be primary influences and relationships in our lives, but our kids don’t get that choice. Parenting is a role you don’t get to assume just when it feels good.

Most importantly it is often our own reactions to the behaviors that are directly contributing to those negative thoughts about our kids. Consider a child who draws on the wall and two possible reactions and thought processes from parents.

1. Jimmy is so naughty! He never listens to the rules and he always finds a way to ruin something in the house!
2. Jimmy keeps breaking the rules I have set about the house. What do I need to do to clearly teach him to take care of our home and follow house rules?

In the first response, the feelings of the parent are all negative toward the child. It is a sweeping coloration of him as a young boy – and not a very nice one (and one that many parents can probably identify with feeling at one time). The second reaction is a balance. It acknowledges that Jimmy is not behaving appropriately, but it then also puts the responsibility on the parent for improved teaching.

Our children are very perceptive – imagine if Jimmy could hear those parental thoughts and how they might make him feel about himself? We don’t always have to say it out-loud. Our kids know what we are thinking about these things.

Dr. Bernstein’s 9 Toxic Thoughts

Dr. Bernstein outlines 9 toxic thoughts that parents have about their kids and that contribute to situations where parents don’t feel like they really like their kids. When we as parents let toxic thoughts rule our parenting style, we end of not liking our kids, or ourselves, very much.

1. Always or never trap: Susie always talks back. Johnny never listens. When we trap ourselves into labeling our kids we build on those toxic thoughts, and we trap our kids into the idea that they can’t change.
2. Label Gluing: Lazy, irresponsible, and careless are adjectives that don’t help your child improve. Along the lines of the always and never statements, labeling doesn’t build a healthy relationship and it doesn’t teach our children how to do better.
3. Seething Sarcasm: Aren’t you helpful (when the child clearly did not help with dishes) is not a tool of effective communication. Sarcasm can be funny when both parties are in on the joke, but with kids it can hurt feelings and teach them to hide their true emotions.
4. Smoldering Suspicions: When a child breaks our trust it can be hard to let them earn it back. However, constantly questioning them and labeling them as a liar, untrustworthy, or worse, only shows your dislike – it doesn’t teach them how to do better next time.
5. Detrimental Denial: Vastly different from the other examples, parental denial of a child’s misbehavior is just as thwarting of healthy parenting. It can be hard to admit when your child does something wrong, but denying it only sends the message to your child that they don’t need to take responsibility and that it is OK to manipulate others.
6. Emotional Overheating: Their misbehaviors keep building and suddenly you feel yourself losing control and lashing out at them. This is a common way parents vent frustrations, bursting out in anger, making threats, or using physical punishment. These emotionally charged outbursts fail to teach children how to deal with emotions.
7. Blame Blasting: You did it wrong again! You make me so mad! Blaming children for the emotional overheating or overreactions might make parents feel less to blame in the confrontation, but doesn’t solve anything. The focus needs to shift away from who did this to how can we resolve this in order to evoke positive changes.
8. “Should” Slamming: You should know this by now. Statements like this undermine our kids. Yes – we probably often feel like they should because we feel we have told them too many times already – but obviously we need to do something more. Parents need to be careful to spend more energy on why our kids are struggling than with the standards we think they should have met by now.
9. Dooming Conclusions: This is like hypochondriac parenting. One bad grade in school means that a child’s future is doomed. Dramatic and dooming conclusions don’t allow our children to make mistakes and move forward.

The 9 toxic thought parents have as outlined by Dr. Bernstein probably strike a nerve at least somewhere along the way with most parents. We are parents – not perfect people. I really found myself reading through this book and realizing it was a reflection of average parents’ bad days. The takeaway lesson for me was to heighten the efforts I make as a parent to do more than provide average reactions on bad days. My kids’ reactions and behaviors start with me – and when I infuse their behaviors with negative (toxic) thoughts and reactions, it is a combination that rarely leads to any good.

Parent Frustration Syndrome (PFS)

I really did appreciate the real-world examples in this parenting book, and feel that it did reflect emotion coaching and a parenting style that would encourage emotional intelligence in both me and my children. However, I have a hard time embracing one more syndrome. Dr. Bernstein coins the term Parent Frustration Syndrome (PFS) as a way to describe the overwhelming feelings of frustration that parents often face.

To me it seems a little redundant. Parenting does encompass frustration. It also encompasses joy, blessings, anxiety, and almost every other emotion known to man-kind. Bernstein describes this as a syndrome in part because if there is no problem, there is nothing for which to work. When we have an ailment, such as PFS, we seek treatments and strategies to get over the issue. Think of it as an ailment, think of it as a journey – just think of it and consider applying some of these techniques for teaching yourself how to parent and like the relationship with your child a little more.

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Snips and snails and puppy dog tails might have been how I once envisioned boys as I ran from them on the playground and dreaded standing next to one particularly rude young man in Super Choir. That was when I was 9 years old. Perhaps it was a combination of those experiences and the unknowns (me – a girl) I faced that as soon as my first son was born I began making fervent promises to him, to me, and to the world. I vowed to raise a kind, loving, caring, respectful, forgiving, empathetic young man. But how was I going to actually do that?

Then as I rocked my son early in his weeks of life I read John Gottman’s Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart of Parenting, and I found a parenting approach I felt drawn to specifically for my son. Gottman writes in this book about emotion coaching and why he feels this parenting approach is the most effective when it comes to raising children with healthy emotions who are more confident, able to handle changes, and better equipped to maneuver in the social world.

Let’s be real – boys are different from girls. When my first son was born I already had a 2-year old daughter. I felt I knew how to connect with her, teach her, and nurture her, and all biases aside, she was an amazingly adaptive and emotionally intelligent toddler. I just didn’t have the confidence that I would be able to raise a son, a boy, to be less like snips and snails and more like a human. Gottman’s book in a way taught me that the same techniques I was already intuitively using with my daughter would work with my son. More importantly, it showed me that not only could I use this approach with my son, but that it was imperative for me to do so in order to raise an emotionally intelligent son.

What is the Emotion Coaching Parenting Style?

Put into very basic terms, the emotion coaching parenting style is an approach to raising children that is founded on the ideas that in order to raise children who can live to their fullest, most positive selves, we need to teach them how to recognize and react to their own emotions and the emotions of others.

How Can Emotion Coaching Help Me Raise Amazing Sons?

I have now been blessed with 3 sons and have seen the results of using the emotion coaching parenting style in our own family, and feel that it is especially valuable for parents of boys, who like me, made promises to the world about raising amazing sons. Gottman’s observations of parents who used emotion coaching developed into 5 steps for the parenting approach. For each of the 5 steps there are ways that are especially helpful or useful to incorporate when raising sons.

1. Awareness of the emotions. This means seeing your son as an emotional human being, and recognizing his feelings, even those that aren’t always viewed as masculine in society.
2. Respect for the emotions. Kids learn quickly and will tell in less than a heartbeat if crying is not considered acceptable. We also need to be open to our son’s anger and not either dismiss it as “a guy thing” or push it aside and ignore it. We can’t help them learn to deal with emotions like anger if we don’t respectfully acknowledge how it impacts their lives.
3. Listen to and validate emotions. Ask your son how he is feeling, and truly listen to the answer. He might not be able to fully describe his emotions, but you can also pay attention to his body language and actions. If your son just pinched his sister and took away her toy, you might ask him if he was feeling jealous of the attention she sometimes gets as the youngest.
4. Help identify emotions. If you see your son trying to turn away and hide emotions, you could gently go to him and say “It looks like you might be feeling sad and frustrated because Dad missed your game. Do you think that might be what you are feeling?” Label different emotions and let them know that often we feel more than one emotion at a time.
5. Help find resolutions. Boys are often taught in society to hide their emotions or use aggression to work out their feelings. It is SO important that we teach them other ways to work through their feelings. This is perhaps the most important step when it comes to raising emotionally healthy sons. It is extremely important to be clear about the difference between accepting and acknowledging emotions and setting limits on their behaviors. Just because your son feels very mad at his brother doesn’t mean he gets to work that out through slugging him.

• Be clear that all emotions are acceptable and everyone experiences different emotions in different situations. Read books together and talk about the emotions the characters are feeling – it takes the pressure off of your son for being responsible for all of the emotions.
• Be clear about which reactions to emotions are acceptable. It is OK to feel sad. It is OK to cry. It is not OK to go wailing through WalMart lamenting the toy that wasn’t purchased.
• Help your son find healthy ways to find solutions. If his anger got the best of him and he hit his sister, help him develop empathy by finding a solution that acknowledges her pain and helps him learn to do better next time.
• Encourage your son to come up with solutions to problems that arise from emotions not handled well. He will learn to take ownership of his actions and find better ways to react.
• Share with your son how you have felt in similar situations and what you did to help improve them.

Sons are amazing humans to have the privilege to raise and lead. Sometimes there are moments when the testosterone levels in the house almost send me right out the windows, but emotion coaching for parenting has been my saving grace. Yes – boys will be boys. However, raising boys who are empathetic, respectful, and nurturing toward others is a gift that we give them as well as others in their lives.

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