Tips of the Month — Families

Is it ever easy to connect with our children, to get them to open up about their lives? Surprisingly, it’s what they yearn for — to be truly seen and heard in all their authentic dreams and hopes and fears. It’s what we all desire, but kids need it differently than we do. It’s how they form healthy identities, discovering who they are through the mirror that we hold up to them when we reflect back the feelings and hopes and dreams that we hear them talk about.

Is the old adage true — ‘tis better to give than to receive? In this holiday season, which for many children represents an annual Get-Fest, it’s worth thinking about the virtues of giving versus receiving.

Life is a balancing act as we apportion energy across family, career, personal time, social life, and more. We know we’d drive ourselves crazy if everything we do needed to measure up literally to our “best.” And yet it’s hard to find a parent who doesn’t regularly tell their children, especially when it comes to schoolwork or athletics: always do your best. Not sometimes, not often, but always!

In moments of frustration, many of us use self-demeaning expressions. Or we sigh and our face transmits the deep disappointment we’re feeling toward ourselves. In those moments, we’re failing to offer ourselves compassion — the kindness, caring and understanding we might offer a friend or even a stranger. We’re forgetting when we put ourselves down that imperfection is part of being human, that mistakes don’t define us or make us less worthy than others.

Do you let your four-year-old always win at CandyLand, or your eight-year-old at Monopoly? Do you fake fatigue at tennis so your twelve-year-old comes out ahead? Many well-intentioned parents purposely dumb down their game in the belief that it will be more fun for the youngsters if they come out the winner — and maybe, through all those victories, enjoy a boost to their self-esteem. It’s a short-sighted strategy.

Many parents have been seduced by the appealing but dangerous notion of parent-as-friend. The generation gap that existed forty or fifty years ago has narrowed as parents have adopted youthful ways of dress, of lifestyle, of thinking, making the demarcation between generations harder to find nowadays — and making it easier to pursue the idea of friendship with our kids.

Our children are bombarded by toxic messages — from media and television, from peers and perhaps from us — about what’s required in order to be acceptable, in order to be fully loved: be smarter, be thinner, be stronger, be more popular, do more, do better, do your best … It’s an endless stream of prerequisites to feeling worthy. The underbelly of those messages is the unspoken take-away: I’m not enough just as I am. I’m not smart enough, thin enough, strong enough, popular…

If you’ve ever reminded your kids to “sit up straight” when they slouched at the dining table, you probably had no idea how very wise a suggestion it was. Research in recent years has revealed multiple benefits from moving through life with good posture — and it makes sense for children to establish this habit when they’re young.