Parenting in Santa Monica is just like anywhere else, here are some good Parenting Practices: Hold on to Your Kids
I had the honor and pleasure this past week to watch Gordon Neufeld being interviewed for the great new parenting site www.kidsinthehouse.com which will be launching this coming June. Gordon is the author of Hold on to Your Kids – a book that I consider to be one of the best parenting guides out there. His work revolves around the importance of parents retaining and/or regaining their positions of natural authority with their kids especially as they move into adolescence when the combination of peer pressures and the multi-billion dollar cultural marketing onslaught we all live in can effectively nullify any meaningful parental impact.
His antidote and remedy revolves around the primacy of relationship and attachment and he offers numerous practical guidelines for fostering and maintaining a strong emotional connection with your child or children. My favorite, and the one that I have perhaps incorporating the most into both my clinical work and my own parenting life, is the idea of ‘collecting’ your kids at the transitional moments of the day. Some examples of daily transitional moments are moving from sleep to awareness in the morning, moving from school to home at the end of the workday and then moving from wakefulness to sleep at the end of the day. At each of these points instead of the rushing that we all too easily get caught up in, take a moment, make eye contact – welcome your child into a new day; a hug would be an excellent idea. All of this only takes a few brief moments but can set the tone for hours afterward and, most importantly, builds and maintains a safe emotional refuge for both of you. It communicates on a daily basis that your relationship is rock solid and will be able to survive whatever comes its way.
I have included links to three youtube videos that are excerpted from some of Dr. Neufeld’s lectures – enjoy…
What makes a child easy to parent
Why we’re losing the context to parent
Are the frustrations of parenting overtaking the joys of having kids? If you need some new strategies please feel free to contact me for a consultation.
Image Credit: Smithsonian’s National Zoo
