Monthly Archives: May 2012

The Parent-Child Baggage Cycle

Ever wonder why you yell at your kids, take away privileges and put them in time out and nothing seems to change? It’s because you are spinning the endless cycle of action and reaction instead of stopping it. You are expecting your child to make the change and be the grown-up first.

A father I am working with has established a deep cycle of resistance with his eight year old daughter, who is a very strong-willed child and says things to her father like, “You don’t love me”, “You’re mean”, and “It’s unfair”. She has a little brother who is easy and flexible and gets his parents approval because of it.

Dad complains, “She says no to everything, even something she knows is coming up and she is supposed to do. For instance, I told her when we got home it was time to go up to bed – twice. Calmly. But when we walked in the door, she went directly over to the table and started to draw. That started it.”

When this dad, like so many parents, is

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A Breastfeeding War?

Is this the age of guilty parents? Have mothers always felt this guilty? I don’t think guilt was part of my mother’s generation of parenting—even though she felt plenty guilty…but we won’t go there.

Revolution requires a pendulum swing. We know so much more in the past two decades about brain development and children’s needs that our current revolution is fighting hard to banish traditional parenting modes of fear, pain and suffering to get desired behavior.

It is the extreme ends of the continuum that are needed to push our buttons into action. Let’s hope we can learn what we need to as a parenting culture from these polarities and not get mired in blame, shame, and guilt.

The singular idea of a mother breastfeeding her 3 year old doesn’t provoke much emotion anymore. It’s the captured attitude of this casual, hot, hand-on-hip mother breastfeeding a child who looks eight that throws the pendulum and raises all kinds of issues and ideologies (evidenced by the comments on my facebook page).

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