It is oddly troubling to discover that not only is teen suicide a problem in our community but that it strikes so many others as well. My heart goes out to each community, each school, each family which has to survive this. But recently, Dr. Adam Strassberg, a psychiatrist in Palo Alto offered excellent tips which parents can implement RIGHT NOW to help their kids be more risk averse. I don’t necessarily agree with each of his points but I have found myself mulling them over this week so they are definitely thought-provoking.

I encourage you to read his entire blog but will summarize his points just in case. Here’s his link:

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/16/guest-opinion-keep-calm-and-parent-on#.VQhG8S8A8-0.facebook  

There is no single cause of suicide but many factors including biological, environmental, social, psychological, situational. Experts differentiate between “attempted” suicides and “completed” suicides. It is a grim but important detail that one of the main contributing factors to completed suicides (in every age group) is the availability of guns.  It is easy to understand that a teen’s fleeting downturn becomes more deadly with a gun than by taking too many pills or cutting her wrist.

Dr. Strassberg suggests that in the wake of teen suicides, parents need to remain calm and parent on. He offers these seven tips:

1. Make your teen sleep (yes, I know, “Impossible!” One of the first comments to his blog had to do with this challenge) – Depression and troubled thinking frequently go along with decline in sleep. Prisoners of war are often tortured with sleep deprivation to break down their resolve and ability to reason. We can explain to our kids and we can model good sleep practices. At least once a week (and hopefully more), every teen should be allowed to sleep until he wakes up on his own.

2. Talk with your teen about suicide – It is a confounding topic for adults; imagine how difficult it is to make sense of for a kid. You may want to include in your conversation something about the impact on others of someone’s untimely death…how would his sister feel? How about the last person who spoke with him?

Develop a way to signal each other in your family when you are having a hard time, psychologically. It may be as simple as, “I’m having a hard time right now.” This equals a “stop everything and pay attention to me, help me now!” message.

3. Model mental health treatment for your teen – I hate the notion that “I cannot teach what I cannot do.” But the truth is, our kids watch us. So, if we want them to eat right, sleep right, manage stress well, enjoy good relationships…we must be able to do those things and demonstrate how it’s done…including seeking professional help when we need it and even speaking about that so our kids know that’s what people do when they’re having a hard time.

4. Want the best for your child, not for your child to be the best – The word “best” is eating our kids alive. “Just do your best,” makes me want to rant. I’d ask, do we always do our best? At EVERYTHING? A much more balanced approach is to consider, what is worthy of my best? What IS my best, anyway? This tip from Dr. Strassberg reminds me of the adage, “We’re not meant to prepare the road for our kids but to prepare our kids for the road.”

5. It’s you and the teachers versus your teen, not you and your teen versus the teachers – In our efforts to be supportive, to seek the best for our kids, to assure them that every step, every interaction is superlative, we adults have begun to shred the teaching profession. A teacher friend of mine says it’s gone from being helicopter parents to being lawn mower parents! What a different picture than just a generation or so ago when educators were the esteemed among us. While we may be the experts on our kid, let’s approach the teacher as the expert on teaching. Our experience with, let’s say, sixteen year olds is pretty limited. How much more perspective would we have if we interacted with 150-200 a year!

6. Get a pet – Our cuddly animal companions make excellent therapists: accepting, good at listening, responsive, available, attentive, willing to hear it all! I remember my daughter screeching at me, stomping off to her bedroom but whisking up the cat to take along on her sulk! What a great friend he was to her during turbulent times with friends and parents.

7. Keep calm – While a teen suicide strikes our deepest fear, we forget that we hold many of the remedies within our grasp. Our job as parents is to help our kids make sense of life. Author Scott Peck calls it helping them “create a road map of reality.” Part of the road map includes valleys, shadows of death, sadness, and despair. When teens first encounter such darkness, it can feel overwhelming. I recall a friend being shot down in Viet Nam when I was seventeen. I felt stunned and swept away by the loss. My mother’s steady, tender understanding echoes through the years even now, “Life goes on.” How solid her certainty felt to me when I had no way to know that.

Strassberg closes with,

We must “Keep Calm.” But that does not mean we must do nothing.

Do not overreact _ please DO react. Please “Parent On.”

This is NOT a blog about teen suicide.

On the front page of The Dallas Morning News today, April 4, 2015, Saturday, the title on  the lead article reads, “You can’t take back the words you say…teen’s family says relentless bullying led to his death.” It appears that a group of older guys from Raymond Howell’s high school came to his home, jumped out and fought him, capturing the event on video cell phone before posting it online. Another similar video was filmed and posted from a fight at school. The boy could take it no longer and ended his life…on Good Friday.

There has been the predictable outpouring of flowers and candlelight vigils. No doubt, there’ll be the predictable school assembly on bullying and predictable show of mourning at his funeral. Counselors will be available at the school, almost certainly.

But I must say that if I were his parents, his sister, his family, I’d wonder, “Where were those earnest ‘good’ kids last week?” Surely, surely some of them saw this. Surely some of them must have known this boy was suffering. I’m sorry to confess that if I were his mom or sister or dad and kids came to hug me, to offer flowers, to send a card of sympathy, I might greet them with rage, furious that they would offer what my son needed so desperately just days before…when he was invisible to them.

John Wesley, founder of the Methodist church, is known for his three simple rules for life:

• Do no harm
• Do good
• Stay in love with God

Wesley is quite specific under the rule of “do no harm” that we can do harm with our silence, with our inaction as well as with our action.

This week, won’t you take the opportunity to talk about this situation with your teens? Most of us will never have a child who is the fighter who video tapes the fight and posts it online. But all of us will be the parent whose child sees the harm happening and has to decide what he or she can do. Discuss this with your kids; practice possibilities; encourage them to look toward someone else’s well-being, to an entire family who will never live a normal day again in their lives.

May that young man rest in peace and may his loved ones find comfort and peace as they go forward.

I don’t know about you, but I just LOVE to learn new things. Especially things which explain life and help me get a more positive understanding.
You may not know the name Martin Seligman, a professor at U Penn and the founder of “positive psychology.” Make no mistake, Dr. Seligman is not a la-la kind of psychologist. But his fascination is with questions like:

• why do some folks thrive;
• who flourishes and why;
• how can we not just avoid despair but how can we savor a joy-filled, meaning-filled life?

He’s my kind of guy!

Anyway, recently, Dr. Seligman was retained by the U.S. Army to study post-traumatic stress among our soldiers. Undertaking a study of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, Dr. Seligman arrived at a stunning conclusion. Imagine a Bell curve. . . you know the kind where “typical” is depicted at the height of the curve and represents about 68% of any given population (the red part in the graph below). Now imagine a “tail” to the left and a “tail” to the right (the green and blue parts of the graph below).

What Dr. Seligman found is that, indeed, there is a group of soldiers who suffer “post traumatic stress,” represented by the left-hand tail (about 16% of returning vets). The majority of folks, that 68% in the middle of the Bell, actually return to their previous level of well-being about 3-6 months post-combat.

But here’s the really interesting part: the portion of soldiers represented by the right-hand tail actually experience what Seligman has termed, “post-traumatic growth!” They come home BETTER than when they went to war. Their experiences have led them to believe that they’re better leaders than they knew . . . or that they’re cool hands under fire . . . or that they can help people go on during difficult times. One way or the other, trauma has led them to grow. It’s such a simple concept, I wonder why I hadn’t realized it before!

So, how does that apply to our kids? Oh, let me count the ways!!! Other girls treat her meanly and instead of becoming depressed, she becomes compassionate. He doesn’t make the team and instead goes out for the play and finds he is excellent onstage. She doesn’t get into the college or grad school of her choice so she re-doubles her efforts and, wonder of wonders, gets in the following year!

Sometimes, we FORGET about our terrific potential for growth!
Share this reminder with your kids today!
It’s their nature to grow, to become stronger. WOW!

(A re-post by popular request) We’ve been considering how to help our kids come out on the “high side” after they experience a difficulty in life (being bullied, not making the basketball team, not getting into the college they’d hoped, etc.). Dr. Martin Seligman from U Penn has identified the opposite of post-traumatic stress as being “post-traumatic growth” when someone goes through a hard time and emerges more than they were to begin with. They learn they are good leaders or have great patience or that they have great humor or compassion. Of course, we’d  like that for our kids…and for ourselves. Seligman goes on to say that five traits are associated with post-traumatic growth: a sense of hope, gratitude, bravery, kindness and religious belief. (see previous blogs for other topics)

As we consider kindness, it’s helpful to begin with a bit of brain research. Human beings have a keen ability to learn behavior through what are called, “mirror neurons.” This marvelous capability allows children to watch behavior and mimic it. Researchers believe that children learn to be kind and empathetic in such a way, sort of a “do unto others as it’s been done unto you.” So, a first core concept for parents is that we MODEL KINDNESS; understand that for kids to be kind, they need to have been treated kindly.

It’s also helpful for us to think of kindness, empathy and tolerance as first cousins, all related by feeling FOR others. We can TEACH KINDNESS and empathy, or at least the framework laid, by engaging the questions with your teen, “What might that other person be thinking, feeling, wanting?” It’s best to use this question in a not-hot situation, that is, NOT when your teen is angry with a friend or disappointed in a grade. Begin with a situation when someone else is feeling something strongly: little sister who’s left behind by her friends on Friday night, crying. “Gosh,” you might say quietly to her teen brother, “I wonder what Suzy might be thinking, feeling, wanting? Do you have any ideas about what might help her feel better?”

This works nicely with another tip: NOTICE KINDNESS, call it to the attention of your kids. “You were really kind to wait for her so she could  get ready to go with you. You’re such a thoughtful guy.” Help them name kindness and appreciate it in themselves and others.

PRACTICE KINDNESS as a family*. One family I know, let’s call them The Smiths, selected a family they knew who had younger children. At Christmas, The Smith kids challenged each other to come up with small gifts they could leave on the doorstep of the other family’s home, gifts from “Snowflake” and “Holly,” imaginary elves. They further challenged themselves to devise the gifts for less than $5! Though both sets of kids are now young adults, The Smiths have never divulged their Christmas identities, preferring the pleasure of a shared family secret!

Finally, TEACH KINDNESS as self care. When I was a teen suffering from some anguish or another, my mother (unsympathetically I was sure!) would insist that if I wanted to feel better, I just needed to go do something for someone else. Invariably, I went grumbling out the door. Invariably, I got distracted from my own misery and got caught up in the needs of someone else. Invariably, they appreciated my kindness and I’d come home feeling better about myself and the world! Kindness in these circumstances was certainly self-serving…but so what?

If you need a little kindness inspiration, find the book Random Acts of Kindness. Know that by teaching and practicing kindness in your home, you’re actually giving your kids a tool they’ll need when Life is unkind to them!

*For more ideas on kindness, visit http://www.thekindnessprojectblog.com/p/the-kindness-project.html

When you read the stats on teen driving during the summer, it really gets your attention. This just in from AAA (American Automobile Association):

Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, an average of 10 people die across the U.S. as a result of injuries in crashes involving teen drivers! Research indicates that 60% of those wrecks involve “distraction” to the young drivers including

• 15% talking with or interacting with others in the car
• 12% talking, texting or using cell phone
• 10% attending to something inside the car

To help your teen deal with those distractions of course the most important tip is to model good focus and self-control when you drive.  Also, just talking about the surprising statistics above helps begin to increase their awareness of a problem. Finally, you might want to toss out a couple of scenarios you can imagine and talk through “what would you do if….”

A little special attention to this issue will make summer driving sunnier for all! 

(Photo from Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2013)

At a time when I hear many more young women (teens) drinking more and more, it was surprising to read this article’s title, “Why She Drinks” in The Wall Street Journal June 22, 2013. You may want to go online and read the entire article. Though this article is four years old, alas, it is still worth considering.

I’ve been thinking about what to make of the drinking trend in teen girls for a number of years. When statistics tell us that drinking goes hand-in-hand with everything we DON’T want for our daughters, how are they “making sense” of doing it anyway, and in record amounts? I wonder if among her reasons might be that

• it’s a move toward “keeping up with the boys” like she does in sports;
• she feels so “equal” that she is ignorant of her physical differences which make drinking’s impact different for her;
• she is feeling so much more pressure to “make something” of her life that getting drunk feels like a welcome relief;
• she feels shy and uncertain and alcohol offers “liquid confidence”;
• she’s been encouraged to take risks, to venture out, and that binging is a new risk.

But one thing I didn’t really think about is the possible role that her mom’s or aunt’s drinking example might be playing. So this article on the change of drinking patterns in women provided a whole new perspective. Give this a thought:

• In the nine years between 1998 and 2007, the number of women arrested for drunken driving rose 30%, while male arrests dropped more than 7%;
• Between 1999 and 2008, the number of young women who showed up in emergency rooms for being dangerously intoxicated rose by 52%. The rate for young men rose just 9%;
• Binge drinking is having four or more drinks for women or five or more for men within two hours;
• While the greatest number, 24%, of binge-drinking women are college-age, 10% of women between 45 and 64 said they binge drink— so did 3% of women older than 65;
• Women are more vulnerable than men to alcohol’s toxic effects. Their bodies have more fat, which retains alcohol, and less water, which dilutes it, so women drinking the same amount as men their size and weight become intoxicated more quickly;
• One half of rape cases occur when the young victim is drunk; “too intoxicated to give consent” is the chilling description.

So, how do we help our daughters? Let’s begin by facing squarely our own (adults) changing behaviors, acknowledging our impact as role models. We need to take a long, analytical look at stress and expectations on us and on our daughters, asking “at what cost?” Next, let’s remember that our very biology as women makes drinking different/riskier for us…this is NOT an issue of equality but of basic biochemistry. Finally, we need to speak with our girls about their safety, about sobriety’s notable contribution. Maybe our conversation includes a story since most of us have valuable experience in the department.

Alas, the question, “Why she drinks,” is as much about us as it is about our girls.

As ever, I welcome your comments.

It is oddly troubling to discover that not only is teen suicide a problem in our community but that it strikes so many others as well. My heart goes out to each community, each school, each family which has to survive this. But recently, Dr. Adam Strassberg, a psychiatrist in Palo Alto offered excellent tips which parents can implement RIGHT NOW to help their kids be more risk averse. I don’t necessarily agree with each of his points but I have found myself mulling them over this week so they are definitely thought-provoking.

I encourage you to read his entire blog but will summarize his points just in case. Here’s his link:

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/16/guest-opinion-keep-calm-and-parent-on#.VQhG8S8A8-0.facebook  

There is no single cause of suicide but many factors including biological, environmental, social, psychological, situational. Experts differentiate between “attempted” suicides and “completed” suicides. It is a grim but important detail that one of the main contributing factors to completed suicides (in every age group) is the availability of guns.  It is easy to understand that a teen’s fleeting downturn becomes more deadly with a gun than by taking too many pills or cutting her wrist.

Dr. Strassberg suggests that in the wake of teen suicides, parents need to remain calm and parent on. He offers these seven tips:

1. Make your teen sleep (yes, I know, “Impossible!” One of the first comments to his blog had to do with this challenge) – Depression and troubled thinking frequently go along with decline in sleep. Prisoners of war are often tortured with sleep deprivation to break down their resolve and ability to reason. We can explain to our kids and we can model good sleep practices. At least once a week (and hopefully more), every teen should be allowed to sleep until he wakes up on his own.

2. Talk with your teen about suicide – It is a confounding topic for adults; imagine how difficult it is to make sense of for a kid. You may want to include in your conversation something about the impact on others of someone’s untimely death…how would his sister feel? How about the last person who spoke with him?

Develop a way to signal each other in your family when you are having a hard time, psychologically. It may be as simple as, “I’m having a hard time right now.” This equals a “stop everything and pay attention to me, help me now!” message.

3. Model mental health treatment for your teen – I hate the notion that “I cannot teach what I cannot do.” But the truth is, our kids watch us. So, if we want them to eat right, sleep right, manage stress well, enjoy good relationships…we must be able to do those things and demonstrate how it’s done…including seeking professional help when we need it and even speaking about that so our kids know that’s what people do when they’re having a hard time.

4. Want the best for your child, not for your child to be the best – The word “best” is eating our kids alive. “Just do your best,” makes me want to rant. I’d ask, do we always do our best? At EVERYTHING? A much more balanced approach is to consider, what is worthy of my best? What IS my best, anyway? This tip from Dr. Strassberg reminds me of the adage, “We’re not meant to prepare the road for our kids but to prepare our kids for the road.”

5. It’s you and the teachers versus your teen, not you and your teen versus the teachers – In our efforts to be supportive, to seek the best for our kids, to assure them that every step, every interaction is superlative, we adults have begun to shred the teaching profession. A teacher friend of mine says it’s gone from being helicopter parents to being lawn mower parents! What a different picture than just a generation or so ago when educators were the esteemed among us. While we may be the experts on our kid, let’s approach the teacher as the expert on teaching. Our experience with, let’s say, sixteen year olds is pretty limited. How much more perspective would we have if we interacted with 150-200 a year!

6. Get a pet – Our cuddly animal companions make excellent therapists: accepting, good at listening, responsive, available, attentive, willing to hear it all! I remember my daughter screeching at me, stomping off to her bedroom but whisking up the cat to take along on her sulk! What a great friend he was to her during turbulent times with friends and parents.

7. Keep calm – While a teen suicide strikes our deepest fear, we forget that we hold many of the remedies within our grasp. Our job as parents is to help our kids make sense of life. Author Scott Peck calls it helping them “create a road map of reality.” Part of the road map includes valleys, shadows of death, sadness, and despair. When teens first encounter such darkness, it can feel overwhelming. I recall a friend being shot down in Viet Nam when I was seventeen. I felt stunned and swept away by the loss. My mother’s steady, tender understanding echoes through the years even now, “Life goes on.” How solid her certainty felt to me when I had no way to know that.

Strassberg closes with,

We must “Keep Calm.” But that does not mean we must do nothing.

Do not overreact _ please DO react. Please “Parent On.”

In last week’s blog I offered a list of some REAL questions I’ve received from REAL parents. You may have noticed that they were quite broad-ranging! That’s because during the parenting of teens, we’re putting the “finishing touches” on kids…for a lifetime (mostly)! And, there’s SOOO much they need to know to make it in the bigger world. The broad categories of questions were:

A zillion social lessons; if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again?

All quiet on the home front?

Navigating a budding world of romance and sexuality

And, about dealing with those adults!

THE Biggest Question of All

The questions can be grouped in several ways. We’ll be unpacking them in these categories over the next few weeks. Let’s begin with the social lessons which teens have to learn.

A zillion lessons in social interactions; if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again?

If you think of the social differences between a 10-year old and a 20-year old, it’s easy to see all the social maturation which has happened. There are two key developmental tasks underway in teens:

• The first is figuring out “Who am I?” (Identity);
• The second is “How will I be in relationships with other people?” (Intimacy)

As most middle school kids round the bend from childhood to adolescence, their positive sense of self seems to evaporate. She used to be so bold but now her clothing can cause a complete meltdown, “I CAN’T go…I have nothing to wear!” Before she figures out “who am I?”, her sense of self, her sense of identity is very fragile. She (or he) may often derive identity from the group she belongs to: I’m a volleyball kid; I do choir; I am one who sits at this lunch table. Belonging gives her a sense of who she is while she figures out her more unique, singular identity. That critical growth period may feel a little like a crab who’s outgrown and shed its shell: fragile, vulnerable and unprotected. If something happens to rock the group-boat (which it almost ALWAYS does), our kid can topple out…leaving her feeling left out, excluded. For a while, she can feel pretty desperate…which of course, makes her less socially attractive. Likewise, she may feel a loss of resilience and a bit anxious to venture out again socially.

Watching from the sidelines can be an “invitation” to parents to return to old, often-buried feelings of middle school insecurity from their own past. We ache because we KNOW how that feels. But, and here’s the good part, we also know some stuff about how to solve or at least endure it. If I were to ask you right now, how did you make it through a similar period of social suffering and growth, I’ll bet you’d have some wisdom. Add your wisdom to these tips:

1. NOTICE, really notice others. You can help your kid learn to take the focus off themselves and notice others by offering coaching questions:

• What are they (the other kids) thinking, feeling, wanting?
• Do you notice they have moments of hesitation, insecurities?
• Some kids learn to cover their own insecurities… Is being mean or exclusionary ever self-protective?
• Does it work in the end?
• As you notice the kids around you, are there some others who may be feeling like you do…who might be open to friendship?

Guiding understanding with gentle “I wonder” or “I’ve noticed” statements/questions can lead kids to consider factors in friendship. Like, “I’ve noticed that some girls in your grade seem a little too eager to make friends, almost desperate. I wonder if other girls like that? How would they even spot a desperate kid? What behaviors say ‘I’m desperate?’ Why do other kids steer clear of those kids, I wonder.”

2. Experiment with auditioning friends. Kids often feel whipped around by the social choices of other kids. But what if we empower our kid to be in the drivers’ seat? It might start with a question like: What IS a good friend anyway? What do you look for in a friend? We may want to pursue that line and ask, If this is what being a good friend is, are YOU practicing doing that with others? In other words, are YOU a good friend?

By suggesting a friendship-audition, we help our kid lower the risk factor, “I can try to talk to him and if he is mean, I know I wouldn’t want him as a friend.” An “audition” also suggests that not everyone makes the cut! YOU get to choose who will treat you well, who you’d like to be around.

3. How will you recharge your social batteries to get out there and try again? We can liken home to a port in the storm. If our kid has been having a rough time at sea, it’s okay to return to harbor for a bit. Teaching kids to ask themselves, “What do I need right now?” is an excellent preliminary step toward managing their own mental health.  

Recharging your social batteries may include doing your favorite hobbies, going to visit a loving grandparent, playing with the dog. It may even include some conversation with your parents about anxiety and resilience.

First, let me say that anxiety is a GREAT thing: it’s meant to protect us from harm. Help your kid learn to examine their sense of anxiety and sort threats into: small; pay-attention-but-don’t-get-alarmed; and holy-smokes-get-outta-here-now. So many things they worry about are truly not threatening. Remind yourself (and them) that uncomfortable is do-able. Talk together about how to approach uncomfortable but do-able challenges. What do you, and they, know about that? What has worked in the past? How might you employ that tactic here? If you can, together come up with an experiment (Remember, an “experiment” is a low risk strategy. If it doesn’t work, oh well, I was just experimenting…now I know more) Agree to check in later to see how it went, what they learned, how they might want to refine it for next time. AND CONGRATULATE them for taking action…even the tiniest steps.

With so many social lessons during teen years, these steps may be ones you’ll return to again and again…and which they’ll learn to use to help themselves:

• Notice, REALLY notice what’s going on with others around you.
• Find a way to experiment with getting what you want.
• Figure out what you need to recharge your batteries in order to try again.

Next time we’ll consider questions about “Are things all quiet on the home front?” Not likely! Hope to see you then.

This mom is NOT the only one of us to think, “Wow! Am I raising a pack of over-indulged, snotty brats?!” ENTITLEMENT is the perfect word for it! And, as with so many things, GRATITUDE is just the right remedy. Take a listen to this. . .

Like me, I’ll bet one of the first things you noticed about The COVID Shutdown of Spring 2020 was that suddenly we weren’t so BUSY all the time. I observed families sitting outside, taking walks in the evening. . . with the whole family together. At first, it sort of felt like a Snow Day, you know the kind where beyond your control, you CAN’T go to work or school. . . so you just HAVE to lay around and sip coffee or take a nap or noodle around. The COVID Shutdown of Spring 2020 felt a bit like that! Then, as time went by, sports practices were cancelled; the school play was rescheduled; scout campouts were postponed. Teens began to catch up on their sleep and so did we. Altogether, it felt like a gear we didn’t know our families even HAD! Actually, sort of nice! Best of all, many parents reported to me that they saw a decrease in anxiety, stress, pressure. It took the absence of those to realize how overwrought our lives had become.

But, all good things come to an end**

(** I am NOT saying COVID has been good;

I’m saying that stepping out from under stress

and pressure has been good)

This fall, the first day of school felt especially significant probably because we realize how much we, and our kids, need to reconnect, to reestablish a routine, to get back on the path of growth and learning. Still, as glad as we all are to “return to normal”, many parents and even kids lament the return of busy-ness. Thankfully, Ellen Byron in her Wall Street Journal article (8/25/21) offers some excellent tips on coming up with “the right amount of busy.” I pass them along with a bit of tweaking for you to consider and to share with your family.

1. Have a family meeting – Gather your family and talk a bit about loading up again with busyness. How have they experienced the past year or so? What good parts might they like to carry forward? Katherine Wintsch (author of Slay Like a Mother) likens the process to putting stones into a jar: begin with the big ones, the ones that really matter; then, if there’s space, fill in with the little stuff. What is each family member’s “big stone” which they want to be sure gets included in the family’s schedule? This will establish priorities and make it easier to say “no thanks” to the stuff that’s less important.

2. Remember that you know your child best – The key to this is to have regular check-in with your kids about how they’re doing with regard to a work/play/rest balance. One of the questions we’d really like them to be able to figure out for themselves before they leave home is, “What do I need right now?” Learning what they need is the first step to that whole emotional toolkit I’ve written about before (“A Toolkit for Life”, Dec 5, 2020 at http://www.kathleenblog.com). As they learn to read their own needs, your knowledge and observation of them can be useful, like “I notice that you’ve been a little draggy lately, maybe tired? What do you need right now?”

3. Consider safety – And help them learn to consider safety too. Examples of less health-risky choices might be: activities with fewer people; activities which are held outdoors; ones where everybody will be wearing a mask; smaller groups of kids and even better if it’s their regular posse. For example, you might know that your teen really loves basketball but could choose to play neighborhood games at the park or on a school team in the gym…you get the drift. By asking them which choices might be less health-risky they begin to consider that for themselves, even if they don’t want to tell you that_ or to make the safer selection!

4. Skip short notice events – Short notice events, while often fun, can easily tip the busy-too-busy-balance. One mom observed that her kids really seemed to love their “new” downtime at home. Another teen girl even asked her mom to say “no” when a friend did a last minute get together. Helping kids get back onto a schedule provides predictability and planning ahead which can result in managing time better and feeling a bit more stable in uncertain times.

5. Manage uncertainty – Which brings us to that uneasy feeling that things really are NOT back to normal and can lead to some anxiety about what lies ahead. The key here is to “Think predictability”. What time is dinner? Do we have certain weekly events (movie night, pizza on Fridays, church on Sunday, coffee/ pancake breakfast w Dad on Saturdays)? When the news is filled with often-troubling situations, knowing things they can count on can really help steady kids. . . and grownups too!

6. Don’t forget self-care! –  You recall the oxygen mask instructions on the airplane: put your own on first. Keeping yourself nurtured and well is a bit like that. Even when we know better, it’s often hard to prioritize our own needs.  Still, a couple of things poke us to practice good self-care: first, we really do need to stay well, healthy, mentally strong because our families are counting on us. Secondly, our kids are watching and like all of life, learning important lessons from us like “how we do stress,” “how we deal with hard times,” “how we MAKE time for family, for self-care, for what is genuinely important.”

As with every crisis, the opportunity to learn is HUGE. May you and your family figure out the “good” part of this recent/ongoing crisis and learn how to keep that part and shuck the rest!

May you savor the Right Amount of Busy!

• alcohol
• Alcohol and our teen girls
• balancing for themselves
• bearing difficult times
• being a good mother
• being sexy
• building character
• building family connections
• chores
• College bound
• conflict
• cooking with kids
• COVID advice
• creativity and fun
• de-cluttering
• depression
• discovering identity
• driving safely
• Driving safely
• drug danger
• establishing respect
• family meals
• Fathers Day
• friendship building
• girl's high emotions
• goal setting
• Grandparents
• gratitude
• grit, resilience
• guiding boys toward manhood
• honoring a teen's privacy
• improving boy's behavior
• improving communication
• improving effort
• insight from younger people
• keeping a healthy perspective
• keeping Christmas
• managing hard feelings
• managing risky behavior
• Manners
• Mothers Day
• New Holiday Tradition
• new school year
• new year
• Parenting growth
• Parenting teens
• preventing anxiety
• project for dad and daughter
• project for mom and daughter
• protecting privacy virtually
• recognizing growth
• rewarding goal achievement
• romantic relationships
• sibling support
• suicide
• summer fun
• Talking for teaching kids
• tech use
• teen driving
• teen sexuality
• transitions
• true masculinity
• turning down conflict
• Uncategorized
• video gaming
• virtual life
• your family's definition of success

Let’s give a big shout out to Nina Kraus for her article, “Hearing Too Much in a Noisy World,” in The Wall Street Journal on Sept 11, 2021. She calls our attention to something really important and gets us to thinking about what we can do to help us and our kids!

So, you may have had times in your life when a sound suddenly stopped…you realize you hadn’t even noticed it . . . until it was gone. Like when the crickets suddenly all stop at once. Another variation might be when you spent time in the summer at your grandmother’s farm and things were so quiet it seemed odd (like NOT what you were used to in the city).

Kraus points out in her article that in the Spring of 2020, we experienced what is called an “anthropause” in sound, that is, a ceasing of sound due to something caused by humans.  I recall the quiet feeling a bit like a snow day…all the normal sounds of kids heading out to school, neighbors heading out to work…stopped. It was oddly still.

It turns out that there can actually be two big ways that sound can impact our well-being. First is one most of us know: too loud. Like working near a jet engine or playing in a heavy metal band. But another much less known issue with sound is when sound is too pervasive. It’s the racket going on around us all the time. To clarify why that’s not so good for us, understanding our brains is helpful.

Our sense of hearing is like a security service which scans our environment constantly for a possible threats. The human brain orients, alerts, or goes on defensive mode for sound especially if unpredictable sound changes. What if a wild animal was trying to sniff around you in bed at night…think of the sound and how it would set you on the defensive. Most of all, the brain alerts to figure out if there is a dangerous sound which might need attention. If we live in the midst of a barrage of sound, our brain is on “alert” all the time, working and sorting and trying to figure out whether or not to alert us for danger. All that sound can have the impact of creating a low-level stress ALL THE TIME. And, while we may not be aware of it, too much sound is exhausting to our brain.

So how might that impact our kids…or us for that matter? Research followed reading scores on kids in schools near lots of traffic and inner-city noises compared to similar kids in quieter school settings. An 11-month reading gap was observed. Once efforts were made to decrease the constant barrage of sounds at the noisy schools, reading gaps disappeared.

In essence, the brain spends a lot of energy trying to sort a constant cacophony of sound…generally decreasing or exhausting mental clarity…whether we are aware of it or not. The COVID sound-rest was an opportunity to experience how things might be different. The stillness we had last year might encourage us to revert, at least a little bit, to previous levels without so much sound-assault.

It is interesting to me that taking a sound break may correlate with the whole notion of down-time. Experts in creativity and innovation remind us that we do our best creative work when we’re just a little bored and have un-booked time. At our house, we call it “noodling around” time. You may want to talk this over with your kids…to even experiment with it a bit.

Some experiments you and your kids might want to try, then talk about are:

1. Begin by observing how much time in your day gets filled by extraneous sound (a TV left playing even when you leave the room; the radio news playing in the background even if you’re not really listening; music left on behind other more thoughtful activities…like homework; even people interrupting one another, talking over each other). Years ago, I knew I was in trouble when my kids were little because Raffi songs were playing in the car even when they weren’t with me! So, start off by just noticing sound.

2. Intentionally setting aside some time each day for silence. Notice how that feels to you. Continue the practice for several days noting if it gets easier or harder. Do you find yourself looking forward to quiet times? Do you find you feel uneasy?

3. Challenging yourself to “laser speak” by thinking of ways to make your speaking clearer, briefer and more to the point.  Think what you want to say; say it; stop. How does it feel to you? Does it change the effectiveness of what you have to say? Do your boys respond to laser speak differently than your girls?

One of the positives from the COVID events of the past year is that they have highlighted some possibilities for making things better at home. Honoring down-time and quiet, thought-filled moments might be the start of something great.

Why not challenge yourself and your kids to a quiet little experiment?