Tag Archives: temperament

Our Living Legacies or Baggage We Can Drop

We live our lives, choose our experiences and relationships, believe in ourselves, and raise our children according to how we were raised. Many do not connect the dots to form the connection. Many swear they are nothing like their parents and would never make the same choices. Yet even in our resistance or rejection, we resist and reject in ways provoked by these experiences—unconsciously. Until we recognize the connections and change our consciousness.

As small children, we are receptors of what is in our experience and environment. We do not yet have the cognitive ability to deconstruct what someone says to us and decipher its meaning. Not until seven or eight do our brains develop enough to take in an experience and think, Dad didn’t really mean that, he’s just having a bad day. Or, Mom is being funny with her sarcastic remark. She’s just pretending to be mad at me. Or, That’s his problem. Before then, a young child’s psyche is just forming. Yelling, criticism, and blame is absorbed and processed as the truth. So when Mom gets

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For Mother’s Day: Is Mothering the Hardest Job?

Thanks to Hilary Rosen’s comment about Ann Romney never working a day in her life, the subject of mothering has come to the fore once again – just in time for Mother’s Day.

While I believe that parenting, whether done primarily by a mother or a father, is indeed the hardest and most important job anyone will ever undertake, I do not think that society as a whole gives mothering any more than lip service. On Mother’s Day we can give mothers that pat on the back fulfilling our obligation and then be done with it. If indeed it is the hardest job, why do we not feel the need to give parents every opportunity to do the job well?

We certainly consider doctoring a critically important job, hence the years of training necessary to do it. The same can be said of any job. We need education to drive a car, fly a plane, work in a bank, be a neighborhood watchman. But giving birth requires no education at all. We place so little value on the job of

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Nature/Nurture

I had a really interesting dinner conversation the other night. A friend asked me what ratio I would put on the old nature/nurture argument. Everyone chipped in their opinions, and it led to a very lively discussion. Even though the topic was the content of my masters thesis, I hadn’t thought about how I would rate each side’s importance in a child’s life. I quite quickly said 40%/60% nature to nurture. Even though how a child is born—whether shy or outgoing, aggressive or calm, introverted or extroverted, learning disabled, neurologically, physically or mentally challenged, gay or straight, etc., etc.—has all to do with how a person perceives the world. But how the world perceives him or her has all to do with how confident that person becomes. Someone born with musical talent for instance, will have way more of a struggle in life reaching his potential if his personal world devalues artistic achievement than one with support and encouragement. A child with ADHD will have a far easier time in life if her environment understands her innate tendencies and gives

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