Do you feel like that’s just the way it is? If your kids don’t do what you say and you’ve asked nicely more than once and they continue to “push your buttons” and “test your patience”, do you feel justified in your yelling? Or threatening? Your counting down? Your infliction of pain on their bodies (aka “spanking”)?

Or do you sense there’s another way?

From what I can gather, this is what parents seem desperate to know:

• How can I get my kid to clean up the playroom?
• How can I get my kid to brush his teeth?
• How can I get my kid not to hit me?
• How can I get my kid to “listen” to me?
• How can I get my kid to cooperate?

Essentially:

How can I get my kid to DO WHAT I SAY …

so that I don’t get upset and yell at or threaten to take away toys or hit my kid. And then regret it. Or not. 

(It continues to shock me that parents think hitting a child will teach the lesson that they shouldn’t hit. Am I missing something?)

If THEY would only listen, all would be well with the world.

(Those little snot-nosed fucks.)

Here’s my message. Be forewarned: You’re not going to like it.

 It’s not your kids. IT’S YOU.

You can’t self regulate.

You can’t self-regulate because your parents couldn’t. You were not given the tools. You don’t know any better. I’m not blaming you, but it is still you. And you are the adult in the relationship and so it is up to you to calm yourself so that you don’t take your anger (likely derived from fear, fear of being late, fear of being disrespected, fear of whatever) out on your kid.

You want them to stop and clean up. You want them to stop and put their shoes on. You want them to do this and do that because you said so and yet YOU can’t stop and breathe. YOU can’t say “Honey, I need a  minute. I’m getting flooded. My brain has too much cortisol in it to respond to you in the way that you and all humans deserve. I need to get a glass of water.”

And I get why.

BECAUSE SELF-REGULATING IS HARD AS HELL.

You have to become aware of your triggers. You have to do some work.

As my friend Michelle put it:

“Yelling is an addiction. It gives me a sense of how hard it must be to break patterns of drinking drugs etc… Your body just goes there.” 

Michelle no longer tries to justify her yelling. She knows that when she can self-regulate, that when she can make time to be with each of her children, that when they are struggling, she empathizes, there is no need to yell.

But it is still a struggle.

Struggles are great. We all struggle when we try to make changes in our lives.

But I just so desperately want parents to move on to the struggling to self-regulate part of parenting and to give up the justifications for yelling at and threatening and hitting their darling, young children who so desperately need to express their feelings and to be heard and loved.

If you think a child stopping playing and cleaning up on a dime is the be all to end all, I’d like to share with you a different perspective.

Compliant kids are kids who don’t stand up for themselves. Their need for love and approval is so strong that they just do what they are told. I know lots of people who do what they are told regardless of what it is. (Hell six million Jews were killed because people obediently followed orders.)

I don’t want a child who isn’t passionate about their lives. Their friends. Their buildings. Their playing. Their love of staying awake and living life. Or their need for autonomy. I wouldn’t want a kid who doesn’t try to stick up for themselves and their point of view. Their joy in what they’re doing should be a good sign, a sign of total engagement, not a bad one.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have limits.

But if we can focus on their feelings, remarkably the limit that we’re trying to set (no hitting! no name calling!) dissipates.

Not allowing your child to express their feelings for as long as they need to, to get them out of their bodies is not healthy and borders on abusive. Why? Because stress leads to anxiety, depression, heart disease etc.

What our kids need is to EXPRESS THEIR FEELINGS.

Many many many parents worry that their empathizing will go on forever as if their children have an endless ability to wallow.

Okay, I’ve empathized. I know you’re upset. I’m sorry you feel that way. Now let’s get in the car. Enough is enough. I’ve got to get to work! You’re gonna get me fired!

IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY.

I love how Teresa Brett, author of Parenting For Social Change talks about this:

 In a culture that normalizes power-over and control of others, especially children, how a child communicates and expresses herself can become a battleground… Even when we accept the need for the expression of emotions, we may want to limit its length. At some point we think the child should feel better or that the expression is no longer authentic. I have often heard adults tell a child who has cried for a period of time, “Okay, you’ve cried enough; it’s time to stop.” This is another form of trivialization. The root of trivialization is anger: we are angry that the child is burdening us with her emotional expression “for no reason at all.” Notice that all of these reactions are based on the feelings that are triggered in the adult by the child’s emotional expression. We feel sad, uncomfortable, or angry, and our response to those feelings is a desire to control the emotions of the child so that we ourselves can be more comfortable. In fact, we make the child responsible for our own emotions.

I repeat:

“We make the child responsible for our own emotions.”

The buck has to stop with us.

We have to take responsibility for ourselves. We have to learn to self-regulate. We have to be empathetic. We have to let our children express themselves. We have to make sure they feel heard and understood. Again, we can set limits. But they don’t have to take those limits lying down. They can scream and cry. (And if you have to be at work, let them scream and cry in the car!)

“You seem angry that you can’t buy the toy….You love it so much. Your friend has one. You want one too. Me not buying it for you is making you scream and yell. It’s hard, I know…”

If we can’t stop the yelling, if we can’t start empathizing, we must seek help.

Therapy. Echo Parenting Classes. Reading Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting. Googling “self-regulation.”

You CAN learn to handle the screaming and the tears. You can handle their anger because you are their calm anchor in a chaotic world.

You can.

You can.

You are their Little Engine That Could.

This post was inspired by a talk on ANGER by Ruth Beaglehole, director and founder of Echo Parenting & Education on May 7th @ The Oaks School in Hollywood.

Filed under: Uncategorized by Jennifer on 05/08/2012
72 Comments »

It was a gorgeous, clear Southern California morning. An easter egg hunt had just commenced. Life was good.

Except…

My son wasn’t looking for the eggs.  He was fascinated by the cat door to our friend’s house or maybe he was fascinated by the cat. From where I was standing, I couldn’t quite tell what had struck his fancy. Whatever the case, he wasn’t looking for eggs like the other kids. And our dear friend, who’d been so lovely to set the whole thing up, didn’t want him to miss out on the fun. So he said,

“Hudson! There are no eggs there…come and look over here.”

Hudson stayed where he was. And continued to do whatever it was that he was doing.

Intervening gently I said, “Are you interested in the little door, Hudson? Do you see the cat?”

I was trying to show our friend that he had found something of interest to him, it may not be on the agenda, but he was enjoying himself. Everything was okay. I was on it.

Our friend didn’t quite get what I was indirectly trying to say and told Hudson once again that there were no eggs by him and that the hunt was over yonder. He even went over to him to steer him in the right direction.

I steeled myself.

Hudson slowly turned around and crumpled. Tears streamed down his face.

He said he wanted to go home. Over and over again. I took this to mean that he wasn’t feeling welcome here as he was, that being someone who was looking at a cat door and not for eggs.

I carried him over to a quiet area and acknowledged what he was saying.

“You want to go home Hudson. You were looking at something and weren’t ready to look for eggs, is that right?”

Our friend finally understood what happened and apologized to Hudson. Which was so lovely of him to do. Usually people just explain to me how they didn’t do anything wrong. Not that it’s about right and wrong…

Anyway, Hudson continued to cry for a while. I held him and I went over what happened a couple of more times.  ”You want to go home….You loved looking at the door. You weren’t ready for the hunt…” etc.

Then the crying stopped. He felt understood and the feelings were out of his body. He saw an egg and off he went. He showed it to our friend. No hard feelings!

My point?

There is no need to replace their agenda with ours.

I totally understand that our friend didn’t want him to miss out on the experience. On the fun! That he didn’t want all of the eggs to be gone. He meant so well. And what he had told Hudson  was seemingly so helpful. And yet, it wasn’t. It was really a form of controlling him and invalidating his experience. His interests.

Hudson may have wondered why he was being told to do something other than what he was doing.

Why, he may have wondered, was looking for an egg better than looking at a cat?

Good question!

I have to say I was proud that he’s someone who knows what his interests are, that he isn’t swayed by others and doesn’t feel pressure to conform.

If you don’t accept me for who I am, I want to go home! Of course he wanted to be there, but he wanted to be accepted for who he was.

Hudson is, as Alfie Kohn might say, “intrinsically” motivated.

The eggs could wait, he’d found something that was fascinating and he was pursuing it!

And if he had missed the egg hunt, we could have hidden some more eggs.

We had the resources and the time.

We all mean so well.And yet we control kids all the time. In the most benign ways.  And most kids, I fear, have become immune to it. They’re used to being told what to do and when to do it.

I hope Hudson can hold onto himself…as painful as it may be sometimes.

It’ll be worth it.

Filed under: Uncategorized by Jennifer on 04/16/2012
28 Comments »



Noun: Prolonged unjust treatment or control.

eat this before that.

put on a sweater.

give your grandma a kiss.

say thank you.

say please.

wave bye bye.

give dad a hug.

stop crying.

go to your room.

behave.

do your homework.

sit down.

stand up.

say you’re sorry.

time out.

just one more bite.

you can’t wear that.

wear this.

don’t do that.

don’t touch that.

do. don’t. do. don’t. do. don’t. do. don’t. do. don’t. do. don’t.

GOOD JOB!

Filed under: Uncategorized by Jennifer on 03/13/2012
19 Comments »

“The Stormtroopers came first in their white armor and then there was smoke and Darth Vader rose up from underneath the stage holding his light sabor and…” my Aunt recalled to a group of us about the live show she’d seen with her with her grandchildren at Disneyland. And exactly one of us was riveted.

My son Hudson. Three and a half.

Did she just say Dark Vader? Held a…a… light saver?

“Mom! tell her to talk again about the dark guy….”

“Aunt Shari, can you tell Hudson about Darth Vader’s entrance again?”

“Oh sure,” she said. “Actually I shot some of the show on my phone. I’ll show you.”

Ka’ching. Ka’ching. Ka’ching.

I don’t need to take my child to Disneyland or to the movies or to turn on the tv for them to fall prey to the all-powerful marketers that be. Thanks to Steve Jobs genius (that I “enjoy” every day) my kids, like your kids, are easier than ever to find. And me, as someone way out of the key demo, I’m merely a pawn whose job it is to do my kids’ bidding until they can do it themselves. That is, if they can amp up “the nag factor” high enough.

Which they have because it’s their business to make sure kids beg, plead and whine enough to convince their parents that this purchase is the key to their happiness. (I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that teams of psychologists are retained by these enormous corporations so they know just how to manipulate kids to manipulate their parents. Ethical! Fun!)

So while I’m sure thanks to a carefully-honed nag factor, many a light sabor and stormtrooper costume were purchased minutes after the exciting, smoke filled, light sabor beaming show, I never thought that their trip to Disneyland would result in me hitting “confirm order” for a Darth Vader mask on amazon.

Yes! I could have said “no”!

But my son loves himself some dress up. One day he’s a dog. Then a frog. Then Elvis. Dracula. A monkey. A knight. Spiderman. An astronaut. A lovebird. A rabbi. Even a frog dressed as Santa Claus. Some costumes he puts together with what we have around the house and some are bought on Amazon. By me.

When I started the amazon costume-purchasing thing, I didn’t quite realize I was opening a dangerously expensive and addicting door. I kind of felt the slippery slope but I didn’t focus on it.

But then Susan Linn focused me.

The day after Hudson learned who Darth Vader was and his mask was being shipped to our door via UPS, I happened to go hear Susan Linn, author of The Case For Make Believe (2012) and Consuming Kids (2004) at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena. Her talk was called (I believe!) Commercializing Childhood: The Corporate Takeover of Kids’ Lives. It’s Susan Linn, the director and founder of the national  coalition Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood that we all have to thank for getting Disney to admit that their claims that Baby Einstein made kids smarter were entirely false. That indeed they were running a highly profitable scam. And it was Susan who wouldn’t accept a plea bargain that settled for anything less than Disney offering a full refund. Thank you Susan Linn!

So Susan told us that back in 1983 (the good old days) American companies only spent 100 million dollars on what they call “the kid market.” Today they spend….

17 BILLION DOLLARS.

Why?

Because it’s well worth it. They get their profits back in spades.

Advertisers’ goal is nothing short of creating what they so endearingly call “cradle to casket” brand loyalty. Invading kids’ brains as early as possible is the key because you know, before 13 or some say 9, kids can’t contextualize what they’re seeing. They can’t be critical about it. So even if it is unethical to take advantage of their still developing brains, it’s not illegal! Here.

Yes, something so egregious is illegal in many countries. Just not in the United States of Capitalism at Any Cost.

Just fyi, the European Union has some guidelines for its member countries:

Advertising shall not cause moral or physical detriment to minors, and shall therefore comply with the following criteria for their protection:

a. it shall not directly exhort minors to buy a product or a service by exploiting their inexperience or credulity;

b. it shall not directly encourage minors to persuade their parents or others to purchase the goods or services being advertised;

c. it shall not exploit the special trust minors place in parents, teachers or other persons;

d. it shall not unreasonably show minors in dangerous situations

In addition:

e. Children’s programmes may only be interrupted if the scheduled duration is longer than 30 minutes

f. Product placement is not allowed in children’s programmes.

g. The Member States and the Commission should encourage audiovisual media service providers to develop codes of conduct regarding the advertising of certain foods in children’s programmes.

Here in the U.S. we have no  such guidelines. Regulation, schemegulation. Here, it is up to us parents to micromanage everything they see and to just simply say no when they ask for everything under the sun.

“All of my friends have it!!!”

Who are we to go up against the carefully researched “nag factor” combined with 17 billion dollars combined with smartphones and smartwatches and smartheadrests in the car and video billboards that means screens are everywhere our kids look.

No generation of parents, Susan explained, has ever had it so tough.

Are we just totally fucked?

If it was only that our pocketbooks were being raided, that would be one thing. But something far more precious is being taken from our children when they truly believe that if they don’t have a particular toy or a particular character they will NEVER BE HAPPY. When they believe that pleasure comes from things, not from within us. They’re being sold a false promise of happiness.

And not only that!

Their natural desire for make believe play is being taken from them.  When children’s play is so deeply influenced by clearly defined characters that follow a specific story line, they’re not working through their own stuff, they are enacting someone else’s.

Susan told us just why make believe play is so damned important for a  a child’s emotional, social intelligence and health. She explained that it is through make believe that children

• Problem solve
• Think constructively
• Self-regulate
• Wrestle with life
• Make meaning of their world

So as I’m sure you can imagine I came home worked up.

And the next day, with my new resolve, I had a different response to Hudson’s “request” that I open my computer and buy him a “light saver.”

I told him I wasn’t going to buy it right now. And then I winced as he dove headfirst into begging, crying, writhing, kicking and screaming.

God help the mother up against the nag factor.

I tried so hard to  remind myself that He doesn’t neeeeed it. He can enjoy playing without it. Material objects don’t buy happiness. Relationships, time, attention, imagination do.

More Begging. Pleading. Crying. Rolling around. Kicking.

Fuck, it’s only a lightsaber. It’s not like he’s ever seen the movies, so his play is still his own. Oh God how long is this going to go on? What can I do? What should I do?

And then, I had an idea.

“Would you like to go make a light sabor right now?”

On a dime the writhing stopped.

“Huh?”

My heart raced. Was this gonna work?

“Let’s go downstairs and get some foil. We’ll also need some toilet paper holders. And some tape”

Minutes later he was telling me where to cut the foil because lightsabers aren’t as long as I think they are.

And then he was gone.

In the backyard. Happy. Doing stuff with his lightsaber that George Lucas never could have dreamed of.

And really who needs the money more, me, Matel or George?

Meeeeeee!

And yes, I’ll still buy him stuff. But we can make stuff. And he can make stuff. And he can see his joy isn’t dependent on the shape of some plastic that is covering his head.

I hope.

Filed under: Uncategorized by Jennifer on 02/14/2012
19 Comments »