Parenting Toolbox–A is for Authoritative
 A fine balance By Laura Kastner, Ph.D.
When Henry got home from school, he went straight to his room to post a music review on his Facebook page, check ESPN for scores and watch some YouTube videos. Since the family rule is that there is to be no “play” or social time on the computer until homework is done, Mom’s blood started boiling the minute she heard Henry crooning along with his favorite hip hop artist. To cool herself off, she invoked her favorite mantra in meltdown moments: “You might be right, but are you effective?” She knew that to maintain her authoritative credibility, she needed to keep herself calm, firm and level-headed. Instead of barging into Henry’s room and yelling at him about the rule violation, she tried a different approach.
“Henry, what’s up with your breaking the homework rule?” Henry replied, “Mom, I’m downloading my history chapter, so chill out. God, you’re on me like a vulture.” Mom ignored the snarky reply and said, “Henry, I appreciate that you are downloading history text, but I expect you to turn off everything else anyway. You know the rule. I know that you can handle the independence of using your laptop in your room if you try hard enough. By the way, your voice is way better than that dude you’re listening to.” Then she made herself smile and exit. She heard him groan, exclaim and click off his fun stuff.
Henry’s mom is demonstrating authoritative parenting, which predicts adolescent achievement, emotional adjustment, competence and self-reliance in adolescents. If you did your own web search, you’d find that it’s the optimal parenting style for raising the kids that successfully launch to college at age 18. Authoritative parenting is composed of three critical dimensions (consider them the crown jewels of parenting): (more…)
A-Z Toolbox for Successful Parenting–the Roll out!
By Laura Kastner, Ph.D.
In this article, I’m going to present my A-Z Toolbox for Successful Parenting. Each tool in the list will be (or has been) described in an article posted in the www.gettingtocalm.com blog section. Here is my alphabet list of parent tools:
Authoritative parenting
Boundaries and independence
Competence building (2/16/10)
Dinners, structure and routines
Emotional and social learning (posted 5/10/10)
Family fun without screens or money (posted 12/15/09)
Getting to calm skills (posted 7/28/09; 8/27/09; 10/26/09; 4/6/10)
Health maintenance-yours and theirs
Intellectual and academic development
Judgment calls in discipline
Kindness, humor and happiness quotients (posted 11/9/09; 1/3/10)
Limitations on risk-taking behaviors
Money management and resisting indulgence and entitlement
Negotiation skills and avoiding arguments
Optimizing secure attachment
Peers, friends and healthful relationship support
Questioning yourself enough to stay open-minded
Role model resilience and other qualities and virtues
Socratic Method with challenging subjects (posted 7/17/10)
Temperaments—working with them, not against them
Understanding and accepting child development
Values clarification and the moral compass
Wise mind—integrating emotional and cognitive brain power
X-Box, media, cell phone, social networking and electronic LIMITS!
Yearnings management
Zeal for life pursuits
Just like any toolbox, the parenting tools can sit there in the toolbox list without their functions discovered, understood, or utilized. My goal in upcoming articles is to show the importance of these family strengths in successful family functioning and inspire parents to refine their skills where need be.
Although most of the topics are mentioned in one form or another in our book Getting to Calm, this toolbox will be applicable to all ages of children and a super-easy way to review your parenting strengths. But Getting to Calm shows parents how to interact with their children successfully, so it should be considered the comprehensive training program for the toolbox list!
After seeing families in university, agency and private practice settings for over thirty years, I still have endless fascination for how families blend these qualities (or not) to create their own particular family system. My hope is that by reviewing the list, parents can decide which tools they might want to acquire, learn, practice or sharpen.
Before I get started on the tools, I want to offer a few explainers for the user’s manual. (more…)
Parent Toolbox for Teens: The Socratic Method
 Can you ask questions that your teen wants to answer? By Laura Kastner, Ph.D.
Today in my office, a 15 year old teen taunted his mom by saying, “Colton is my hero—he outran ‘The Man’!” She had been commenting on an article in our local paper in which I likened the barefoot bandit to a modern day Jesse James. Perfectly on cue, his provocative statement incited the mom to lecture about moral turpitude and the horrors of living a life of crime. Do you imagine that her son absorbed any moral lessons while he laughed in her face?
When your teen declares that marijuana should be legalized, college is a waste of time, or manners are stupid, how do you reply? Do you respond with comments about (and criticisms of) the particular topic at hand? Or do you take a few seconds and breaths for “getting to calm”, so that you can figure out the best approach for discussing important matters with your teen?
We called our book “Getting to Calm: Cool-headed strategies for parenting tweens and teens” because teens push parents’ emotional buttons so easily, frequently and intensely. When we are upset by our kids, we fall into the trap of reacting rather than responding wisely. Even though we know that negative responses—like criticism, sarcasm, lecturing, ridicule, contradiction, and dismissiveness—are likely to lead to blow-ups or shutdowns, they are common reactions when our children express ideas that make us worried about their health and welfare.
In my next series of articles posted here, I am going to describe some tools that parents can use with some of the classic challenges we face while parenting teenagers. The first tool to be discussed here addresses the situation in which a teen throws out an idea we think is hare-brained, if not potentially harmful. I call it the “Socratic Method” because it enhances analytic thinking, helps parents understand their teens’ internal worlds and avoids power struggles. Here’s how it works— (more…)
In pursuit of super-excellence in everything
 By Laura Kastner, Ph.D.
Don’t we all want our children to be high-achievers? How do we know what dose of activities—like team sports, music lessons and extra reading—is the right amount for our child? Or when we should ratchet down? Or maybe we should allow our children to pile on even more activities because they seem hungry for engagement? And are those kids really hungry—or is it our narcissistic, anxious and ambitious mega-me’s inside of us rationalizing the elimination of play time and hang time because we are insecure about the future for our kids?
By now we’ve all read or heard about hyper-parented, overscheduled, hot-housed, and helicoptered children who suffer from pressured child-rearing. We’ve reached the 25th anniversary of the hurried child syndrome. Experts implore parents to dial down their zeal for activity-overload with research and cautionary tales about stressed out, depressed, anxious, and substance-abusing kids.
The message in these books and articles is that extreme parenting is harmful. Even if some children are propelled successfully to the top brackets of achievement, some will end up withering on the vine, developing character deficits or suffering mental health problems. Despite decades of warnings, the extreme parenting trend seems to be alive and well, with anxious parents scrambling to figure out the right formula for optimizing advantages for their babies, children and teens. Recently, the recession and 21st century global competitiveness seem to have just fired up the trend further. After I confess to you that I see no end to this trend, I’m going to refer you to a website where you can rant and comment and maybe even let your inner writer loose to help confront this childhood-harming parenting syndrome. (more…)
Social and Emotional Learning in Families—Hot Commodity
by Laura Kastner, Ph.D.
NEWS FLASH! Twenty years of research has established that emotional intelligence—social and emotional skills—truly does foster success in kids. Parents should be craving this stuff for their kids more than perfect SAT’s and Olympic level athletic skills! In fact, it’s so integral to educational achievement and mental health that congress is funding “social and emotional” learning programs for school classrooms and war veterans.
Why aren’t parents buzzing about this? Why is there still more obsession with grades, AP class enrollment and talent development than sharing intimate and positive moments in the family? Is emotional intelligence just “too mushy” a concept, since you can’t measure it as easily? Perhaps—but I think the big rub is that it is best developed in the home. Many parents would rather go “buy a package” than be accountable themselves for demonstrating healthy social and emotional behaviors for…hmmm…a couple of decades.
What is the parenting package that helps to develop this vital essence?
I have created an acronym (RELATE) to identify the emotional and social skills we want to model and encourage in the home. These skills predict higher achievement, better emotional adjustment and more successful relationships in your child’s future.
R Remain calm so that you can interact with loved ones in respectful ways.
E Express emotions appropriate to the situation and the child’s age.
L Label emotions, giving your children a broad vocabulary for expressing their own.
A Acknowledge the cause of your emotions, without blaming, just describing.
T Take responsibility for managing your negative emotions, especially while in conflict.
E Empathize with your child’s feelings genuinely.
Remember that empathy does not imply agreement or giving into a child’s rage, protest or demands. Capable and authoritative parents are compassionate, but they don’t spoil their kids. They appreciate that children can be wildly intense, disappointed, anxious, angry and irritable, but they don’t react to these emotions. They hold the line on behavioral expectations, but accept that children have messy feelings.
Kids can be quite disrespectful when they experience their messy and negative feelings. Even tweens and teens can’t regulate their emotions consistently due to the immaturity of the prefrontal cortex (the “thinking” and “impulse control” center of the brain). Neurobiological maturation is a long term project that takes over twenty years. As the parent, you are the one who is supposed to have self management skills up and running, not them. Being patient and skillful with children who truly are “works in progress” is what our book, Getting to Calm, is all about.
What is “good enough” parenting and why is it harder to achieve these days? (more…)
7 Parenting Tips for Managing the Meltdowns of Easily Distressed Children
 By Laura Kastner, Ph.D.
For Dora, it was yet another meltdown morning. She skulked into my office, treating it like a confessional, and reviewed the school scene that just happened with Sammy, her seven year old. He dawdled through getting dressed, and then things went from bad to worse when he screamed about his seat belt, threatened to throw up and refused to go into his classroom. She shared how her exasperation and efforts to cajole him intensified his meltdown. Dora said this was business as usual.
Highly sensitive children have an inborn temperament that renders them reactive to internal and external experiences. These children are called “anxious”, “difficult”, “easily distressed”, “explosive” and “highly emotional”. Parents often find them rigid and inflexible. They usually have a tough time with transitions, unfamiliar circumstances, new activities and even mild stressors. They can’t help it. But what’s a parent to do?
Imagine a scale, a “distress-o-meter”, of 1 to 10. What stresses the average child (like becoming physically uncomfortable, excluded, frustrated with a task) and registers on the meter as the orange zone of “6” or “7” is experienced by your child as an “8, 9, or 10” which is the red zone. Your child will be hysterical, irrational, screaming, resistive, and absolutely out of control. Getting mad at the child in the red zone is like throwing grease on a fire. Better to be in the green, cool zone yourself. How? Stay tuned. (more…)
Checklist For Parents of Tweens: A dozen do’s and don’ts
 checked your list? by Laura Kastner, Ph.D.
I was preparing a keynote speech for the 180th North Pacific Pediatric Society today and it occurred to me that I should share the highpoints directly with parents. Have you read about the research which shows how much medical care can be improved in intensive care units when checklists are followed? With the complex and emotional realities of home lives, why should we expect raising rascals to be any less mentally taxing than the average surgery?
Research has documented that most teens will experience more moodiness, emotional reactivity and risk-taking, all of which can be very challenging for parents. Tweens and teens can drive their parents crazy with the way they argue for the sake of arguing, lapse into illogical thinking and dramatic interpretations of their plights, have meltdowns over what seem like small inconveniences, find fault with everything (especially their parents), and become maddeningly self-centered. Power struggles and arguments mushroom on the home-front, and parents wonder where their sweet child disappeared to.
I want to provide parents with a checklist of parenting strengths (of which there is an expanded version in my co-authored book, Getting to Calm) which is associated with academic, social and emotional competence in maturing teens. My hope is that parents of 4th and 5th graders can institute as many of these practices as possible as they ready themselves for the “molting age.” (more…)
Talking about Haiti (and other disasters) with your kids
Every parent has the experience of trying to figure out how to interpret and respond to disasters that occur during their children’s lives. Whether they are acts of war, terrorism or nature, children may view images on television or learn about tragedies from friends, media or other sources, all of which can be very disturbing for adults and children alike.
Disasters like the one in Haiti may arouse interest, fear, confusion, stress–and perhaps even symptoms like sleeplessness, anxiety and deep sadness. On the other hand, disasters are part of life, and parents can help their children cope with their feelings about difficult realities. They can also learn about empathy and charitable giving.
Here are some tips for communicating with your children:
1. Age and temperament should determine how you talk to your children about disasters. Young children or anxious children of any age should have minimal exposure to TV or media with graphic images.
2. Talk about the disaster and share your values about helping others in times of need. Explore feelings that may surface; the disaster may “trigger” other worries, concerns or past experiences.
3. Make sure you don’t “over-talk.” Gauge the level of the information you provide to your child’s needs and comprehension capacity, not to your enthusiasm for sharing and teaching.
4. Prioritize making your child feel safe and secure. In your reassurance, make sure to that you don’t use dismissive, minimizing language (e.g. “Don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll be fine.”) Instead, validate feelings of sadness and grief (e.g. “You feel awful that these children have lost their moms and dads. I do too.”) and encourage coping responses (e.g. “Let’s go look on the Net for organizations that we want to give to.”)
5. Role model your own feelings and coping approaches. Maybe you’ll even haul your teenager along to your neighborhood school where people are packing first aid supplies for the Red Cross.
6. Emphasize the importance of taking action, whether the disaster is near or far. People who become activated around crises always cope better than those who surrender to hopelessness, helplessness and passive vulnerability. (more…)
Happiness research distilled for parents: Top Ten Take Homes
 happy is good when it's real “I just want my child to be happy.” How often have you heard this line? But don’t you want your kid to also be kind, moral, industrious and loving?
What makes Americans so obsessed with the pursuit of happiness? Is it the Declaration of Independence? The recession? Or have we merely arrived at a unique moment in our history, because we have “data” on such topics as happiness? Despite decades of economic growth since WWII, research has documented that Americans are not happier, even though Europeans are.
As a parent, how much focus on happiness should figure into your parenting priorities? Since I am a psychologist specializing in children and families, I want to address this last question here.
Controversy abounds in the fields of research on positivity, optimism and happiness. Over 4,000 books have been published on the subjects in the last decade! Does too much happiness make us soft, egocentric and less conscientious? Does too little harm our chances for health, wealth, good relationships and success at reaching future goals? Even if we think in terms of “balance”, we’re left with questions about how to apply all this theory and research to real-live, hurly burly family life. And since around 50% of our potential for happiness is genetically determined, how much should we focus on it anyway?
Happiness research findings do have important implications for how we lead our lives and how we parent. Here are some nuggets for my “Top Ten Take Homes”: (more…)
An epidemic of F.A.D.D. (Family Attention Deficit Disorder)
 by Laura Kastner, Ph.D.
Oh, no! Another shrink identifying a deficit syndrome! Yeah, well, it’s true. We have a severe shortage of quality time filled with fun, laughter and engaged family interactions without screens. Teens report that they want more time with their families. But they say the same thing about sex ed. And yet when parents kick start either agenda, teens will roll their eyes, groan and try all kinds of avoidance. It takes a huge commitment to overcome teen resistance and create good times at home without screens, but it’s worth it. Here’s why…
Research studies on the parent-child love bond have associated “warmth”, “cohesiveness”, “secure attachment” and “connectedness” with healthy child development. Loss of this “good feeling glue” exposes your kids to all sorts of problems. Once the reservoir of good feelings in a family dries up, everything else starts shriveling up too—like children’s cooperation, self esteem, academic achievement, resistance to negative peer influence, and the impact of your discipline.
While boundaries, discipline and other resources are also related to optimal healthy development, the parent child relationship is critical, and it needs to be nourished with good times together. The parent role of civilizing kids is so onerous that we must have happy times to compensate for all the drudgery!
So, what are some ideas for how to spend quality time with tweens and teens?
(more…)
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