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Pajama Games: Getting Children to Bed

By Ron Huxley, LMFT

They know every excuse in the book: I need a drink of water. I forgot to
give you a hug goodnight. I heard a noise outside my window. Bedtime can be
a nightly power struggle for parents when children do not want to go to bed
resulting in no winners. Here are some ways parents and children have both won the pajama game:

* Provide a “bedtime friend.” Michael refused to sleep unless his mother lay down next to him every night. At first, this was a comforting experience for both parent and child. But, over time, it took Michael longer and longer to go to sleep and he would cry whenever his mother tried to get up to go to bed herself. His mother quickly recognized that Michael needed a
transitional object or “bedtime friend” that would substitute the feelings of comfort that she provided him and would allow him to go to sleep alone.

Together they went and bought a stuffed animal that Michael found warm and
comforting. His mother talked with him before the trip about finding a “bedtime fiend” and what its purpose would be. After the purchase, she spoke to the stuffed animal, in front of Michael, and told it that it had “a very important job” to help Michael go to sleep. This employed Michael’s young
imagination and helped to transfer the comforting qualities of his mother to
the animal. Of course the transition from parent to transitional object was
not an easy one and Michael resisted the change at first. But with a lot of
patience and perseverance, Michael was able to sleep on his own, with his
new “bedtime friend.”

* Celebrate a good nights sleep. Even the most difficult sleeper has an occasional good nights sleep. Perhaps it was only due to exhaustion that a child didn’t get back up with a bedtime excuse. Celebrate it anyway! In the morning prepare the child’s favorite meal. Sing, dance, or do whatever it takes to give the child positive attention to the basic fact of having a no-excuse, sleep-filled night. Too many parents do their “song and dance routines” at night after the excuses have been given, reinforcing the very problem parents want to stop. During these stress times, ignore the irritating please for water or the annoying claims of nighttime terrors. Instead, redirect the child back to bed with a minimum amount of words or actions. This will rechannel the power struggle and increase the percentage
for successful bedtime routines.

* Discourage scary stories or television show. Sarah complained of monsters
under the bed, ghosts in the closet, and killers outside her window. Nothing
her parents did got rid of their daughter’s fears. Finally they found the root of the problem: Sarah had been watching scary movie at a friends house on a recent sleep over and had been exchanging scary stories with friends at school. Her parents talked to the other parents and convinced Sarah to stop the tales of terror. Within a week she was going to bed without any problems.

* Make a bedtime routine. Being a single mother and working a full time job
forced Eleanor to use a babysitter for her son Ben in the evenings. Ben had
developed a custom of waiting up for his mother and spends some “time together” before going to bed. Eleanor knew he should be going to bed earlier but felt guilty about leaving Ben with someone else and not being with him more. Once, on a very quilt-filled night, after yelling at him
before school, she brought home ice cream for them to share together. After that, Ben expected a treat every night. In addition, his late night routine got later and later. It stopped being simply about waiting for mom to not wanting to go to bed at all. The final straw was when Ben’s teacher called
and informed Eleanor that Ben was falling in sleep in class. She resolved to change the nighttime routine.

She arranged to have more time in the mornings before he had to go to school
to spend together. She enlisted the support of the babysitter to put him in his room and turn off the lights even if he didn’t go to sleep. He was to go through the motions of bedtime regardless. When she came home there were no treats and their interaction was simple and quick: a kiss, a hug, and a tuck into bed with the lights quickly out. It took some doing but Eleanor was able to get Ben to settle into a bedtime routine.

* Share the workload. Getting Tasha to bed was work! Her mother did everything she could think of to get Tasha to stay in bed but after a long day her mother just didn’t have the patience of the energy for a big fight. And Tasha knew all the right buttons to push on mom to make her mad and
manipulate her into giving her what she wanted (even after being told no).
Finally, Tasha’s mother recruited the father to back her up or take over when the mother felt like she was weakening. The parents agreed to a plan of action prior to the bedtime battle and they consistently enforced it, winning the war. Tasha would try and divide and conquer but the greater
numbers and the parental teamwork held firm and Tasha finally stayed in bed.

Getting children to go and stay in bed is no easy task. Parents face he limitless excuses and untiring energy of children who know how to maneuver around their parents with amazing ease. In order for both parties to win the pajama game, parents must use some special bedtime tactics to even the odds. But none of these things will prevail if parents are not consistent and provide positive attention to good nighttime behavior. How parents cope with the bedtime disruptions is as important (maybe more) that what they do to get their children to bed.

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The Four Hour Parent

By Ron Huxley, LMFT

I recently picked up my copy of Tim Ferriss book “The Four-Hour Chef.”  The author has been listed as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People of 2007”, Forbes Magazine’s “Names You Need to Know in 2011,” and the wildly successful author of “The Four-Hour Work Week” and “The Four-Hour Body”.  Although “The Four-Hour Chef” sounds like another cook book, it is far more than that. It spells out the recipe for how to learn any skill, regardless of your age or how hard the task. The book’s subtitle is “Learning anything, and living the good life.” Who doesn’t want more of that?

The premise behind the Four-Hour Ethos is help you have more control over your own life by doing more of what you enjoy and less of what you don’t. In the example of cooking, many of us love to cook (and eat, of course) but few of us love to shop for the food, do all the prep work or clean up after. Tim Feriss uses the metaphor of cooking to describe his step-by-step process of “meta-learning”. That’s the real recipe for parents.

His idea of meta-learning refers to the Zen concept: “before you can learn to cook, you must learn to learn.” I think this has a lot of relevance for parents who need to learn how to learn before they learn to parent. Parenting education has been around for some time. You can read attend classes, read books, search the internet, watch programs, and listen to podcasts. There is plenty of parenting information out there but still we strive for more. Or are we striving for the “recipe”? Are we looking for that secret ingredient on how to get a teen to do their homework or stop an ongoing sibling rivalry? Perhaps what really need is to first learn how to learn to be a parent.

One step toward this meta-parenting-learning skill is to ask ourselves: “What is one parenting skill I would like to master today or perhaps, one skill I have given up hope of learning with my children?” Ferriss would then suggest we deconstruct this skill to its simple components and reapplies the laws of learning to truly become its master.  

Ferriss describe a deconstruction tool to help us called the 80/20 Principle. This is also known as Pareto’s principle or the law of the vital few and it states that roughly 80% of the effects of an event come from just 20% of the causes. Taking cleaning up the house: 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people, probably mom. This applies to other areas of life, such as, 80% of the sales of a business comes from 20% of the clients. Or, 80% of the world’s wealth is owned by 20% of the people.

This economic principle works well in many parenting situations and I have used it for years to describe how 80% of the parenting issues that come up in my consulting office can be answered by 20% of my parenting tools. Most parents have similar struggles:  getting homework done or picking up after themselves or talking back or putting their feet on the furniture. There are typical problems that come up by developmental stages. Two year olds and teens are defiant. Five year olds have short attention spans, etc. It is the other 20% that is creates the big challenges and creative solutions. Dealing with a divorce or say, stealing items from a store. These are more serious issues really only occurs 20% of the time but make up 80% of my clientele. Who needs to see a child therapist for not picking up the dog poop or some other chore, really?

As a personal example, I have four adult children and two grandchildren and the skill I would like to master is how to maintain on-going communication with them spread out over various states. I want to do this in a way that feels warm and fuzzy despite the distance. Applying Pareto’s principle to my communication issue, I realized that regularly scheduled phone calls and text messages (20% effort) could result in my perceived sense of connection (80% effect). I also started being more diligent about traveling two hours away to my grandson’s early Saturday morning baseball games. It was a  drive and there was a cost of gasoline but the level of connection and my parenting needs were met with this minimal effort once a month.

This was a useful parenting tool with my clients as well. Ten minutes of one-on-one contact in the morning before school and ten minutes on getting home from school dramatically improved many families gauge of the amount of respect and cooperation. Sibling fights and morning tantrums decreased as well. It would seem that there isn’t an extra ten minutes in the morning routine to give to a child but really, how long were those tantrums occurring? How long does it take to make a U-turn back to the house to get the forgotten lunch or homework sitting on the kitchen table? A lot longer than the ten minutes it took to have some one-on-one. And parents and children felt so much more connected all day long.  

Another way of getting at this core parenting skills is to ask yourself if I only had 20 minutes to spend with my child each day – you couldn’t see or interact with them at any other time during the day – how would I best spend that time? Do more of that parenting behavior and witness the 80% effect from that minimal parenting activity. I am just guessing but that 20 minutes would be spent doing laundry or watching television together.  

Parenting Action Plan:

Take a few moments and ask yourselves these questions above. Start focusing on how to better manage your time with your child this next week. Start deconstructing what makes up the core elements of your parenting day and concentrate on the main ingredients behind what really makes a good family recipe. It is different for everyone so don’t look at the neighbor parenting activities. Start with works for you. Let us know how it goes by leaving a comment or sharing on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/parentingtoolbox

Take are 10 Day Parenting Challenge to build even more skills at home by clicking here http://parentingtoolbox.tumblr.com/10DayChallenge

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How’s your engine today?

An occupational therapist friend of mine likes to ask her kids, when she greets them, how’s your engine today? What she is referring to is are they feeling/behaving fast or slow? Are they a little on the hyper side or sluggish? Manic or depressed? You get the idea…

It is a simple gauge of where she needs to go in treatment. If they say it is running fast then she engages them in activities to bring that engine down to a more resting baseline where she can do more introverted or detailed work. Every try to get a child to sit still and concentrate when thy are hyper? That’s a good way for everyone to be frustrated.

Use this at home by talking about a train engine that can run really fast or very slow. Connect it to stimulating events (fuel) that goes into their engines (mind/body/emotions) or lack of stimulation that causes them to be bored or “tired” or sluggish. Plan some interventions to bring them back to a mid-line energy level. Don’t try to do homework if they aren’t in the “zone”. You will be glad you took the time to modify their energy.

Share your thoughts on this parenting tool by leaving a comment or posting on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/parentingtoolbox

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A new spin on “Parents Day”?

Quick survey: What if we turned the tables on our kids for Mothers and Fathers Day and sent them a card or gave them a gift sharing our positive hopes for their lives and speak INTO them the gifting and destinies we see in them. I know, this sounds very “spiritual” and perhaps, to a few, just stupid. Perhaps it is both and I am not wanting to deny anyone their breakfast in bed or super cute hand drawn mothers/fathers day card. You still deserve those.

Over the years, however, as I look at parenting and family relationship I see the amount of entitlement we have around these days. Do they really have to be performed in the way that American culture dictates they should be on the Hallmark commercials? Can we use our parenting powers for good and take this day as an open door into our children’s hearts and characters? 

What would this look like and what are some creative ways to execute this in our parent/child relationships? 

Share your thoughts here by leaving a comment or post on http://www.facebook.com/parentingtoolbox

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White Sugar, Brown Sugar Blog shares some balance views of open adoption options…

We have a range of open adoption experiences and of birth parents.    In one case, both birth parents are involved in an ongoing relationship.  In one case, it’s a biological brother and his adoptive family, with occasional contact with birth mom.  In one case, we have contact with birth mom and some extended birth family.   

No one-size-fits-all.

My motto in adoption is this:   don’t make choices out of fear; make them out of education.   

I have gobs of resources listed on this blog and in my book.  I hope you’ll check them out.

When we are asked why we chose open adoption, I often share these things:

1:  Who are we to keep our children from their biological family members when these individuals pose no harm to our children?

2:  Why shouldn’t our children have access to as much information as they will want/need in the future, information we, as their adoptive parents, cannot provide them?

3:  Why should we not have access to family health history which can help us better meet our children’s needs?

4:  Why should our kids’ birth families not have access to updated information and photos of the children they gave life to and love?

Also, something to consider, is that if you, as an adoptive parent, are insecure in your position in your child’s life, that is unhealthy for your child and unhealthy for your emotional health.    Your child will eventually understand that you were the gatekeeper in his/her life, either fostering or diminishing the access the child could have to his/her biological family.

So ask yourself:

1:  Will the birth parents cause harm to the child?   

2:  Are the birth parents supportive of you as the adoptive parent (meaning, they respect your role as the child’s primary parents)?

3:  What is going on with me, emotionally, that I’m holding back from open adoption (and anything, really, adoption related)?   Where can I seek help for these issues?

4:  Does the child want a relationship with his/her biological parent?   Or, if my child is very young, would the birth parent knowing information/seeing the child bring the birth parent joy, peace, and assurance?

Open adoption is not an easy option.  In fact, it can be quite uncomfortable for everyone involved at times, or even for many seasons.  But …

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When Children Lie

By Ron Huxley, LMFT

A difficult problem for parents is when a child lies. Lying may mean your child has an active imagination, wants to please you, or is seeking attention. Parents can cope with a child who lies by following these simple parenting tools:

1. Provide opportunities for your child to express his 
imagination without lying.

2. Point out the differences between fact and fantasy.

3. Practice telling the truth yourself so that your child 
does not imitate you lying.

4. Don’t overreact to lying. Point out the need to tell the 
truth and allow your child to do so without feelings ashamed.

5. Don’t push for confessions. These usually lead to bigger lies and more punishment. 

6. Look for ways your child can get what they want without lying and reward him for not lying.

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7 Amazing Ways to Be Creative Like a Child

Creativity is like the ebb and flow of waves in an ocean.

There are periods in your life when you may feel very creative.

But there may be other periods where you experience the creative doldrums.

Ideas stop coming to you.

You attempt to sit down with pen and paper but it seems like an exercise in frustration.

If you are like me, you might have wondered how to jump-start the creative process.

If you want to find a source of how to be endlessly creative and find inspiration when none is to be found, rediscover the child inside of yourself with these 7 actionable ideas.

1.  Reconnect with Amazement and Wonder

 “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” ― Socrates

One of the major lessons in creativity that you can learn from a child is being repeatedly amazed at the beauty and joy of life. Children are endlessly curious. As you grow up, you lose some of that child-like wonder and begin acting more like an adult.

Amazement and wonder transform into habitual motion through life. I challenge you to do a small exercise right now. For a few minutes, look at your surroundings and at life through the lens of a child.

Bring back some of that wonder and amazement and the wide-eyed surprise and joy of navigating through life.

Allow yourself to experience great lengths of curiosity. Ask yourself and others questions that you would otherwise not ask as an adult. Allow yourself the joy of looking at the ever-changing landscape of life through a filter of wonder. Be unabashedly curious.

Journal your ideas and the outcome of wearing the curiosity filter. Set up an idea box where you get to gather different sources of information that inspire your creative process.

2. Believe that the impossible is possible

 “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, In the expert’s mind there are few.” ~ Zen Master Shunryo Suzuki

Why is it that when you grow up and become an adult, your possibilities narrow down to almost nothing? There was a time when you were a child and believed that anything was possible. You believed that you could be anything, create anything, sing anything and make anything.

But then life happened to you and people kept saying what you should do and what you should not do.

Slowly but surely you became inhibited and stopped dancing in front of others. You began believing that your song should not be shared with the world and that it is not safe to be you.

So you pretended.

When you were a child, you pretended to be whatever you wanted to be. As you grew up, you pretended to be what others wanted you to be. The sparkle in the eyes slowly faded away to transform into worry and fear.

In his TED talk, celebrated Korean novelist Young-ha Kim challenges you to invoke and unleash your inner child and makes a call to action: “Be an artist, right now!”

I challenge you to believe that the dream of yours that you have been imagining is certainly possible. Grasp the notion that you may have lived a life to please others so far but you can still sing your own song.

You can choose to step into the field of possibility and embrace true creative abundance.

Reconnect with your inner playful child and begin to believe that the impossible is possible. When you approach creativity from the standpoint of endless possibility, you have a better chance to crack the creative lull.

3. Work is play

We have all seen children play together. They have the incredible ability to make daily life look like play and infuse it with laughter and joy.

Do you remember how playful you were as a child? As you grew into an adult, you trained yourself to be serious and control your natural inclination for joy and laughter.

In an attempt to bring play back into work, many big companies such as Google have begun incorporating concepts of a playful workspace.

You might have trained yourself to be very serious at work but if you lighten up and be relaxed, it is a lot more pleasurable. Children have the ability to get together in groups and infuse the area with lightness and play.

Creating a light hearted and joyful working environment will certainly make the experience of work more enjoyable and I am willing to take a guess that your productivity may also go up.

In Dr. Tina Seelig’s creativity classes at Stanford University, the classroom resembles a pre-school with manipulatives and crayons and students sitting on the floor in small groups. This opens up the imagination and sets the tone and mood for a ripe session of unbridled creativity.

You are expected to be highly creative at the workplace and come up with solutions but the mood and the cubicles do little to set the imagination in motion. In fact, even standing up and moving around breaks the monotony of working at the desk and gets the creative energy flowing.

Have you seen children sit perfectly still at a bench and work for extended periods of time? Left to their devices, children move around and express their magic in motion and in art.

Make some time to set up your work area to inspire your creativity and not to suffocate it.

4. Connect and combine

Children have the amazing ability to connect and combine things and aspects of their experience in amazingly creative ways. They can come up with combinations that seem outrageous at the outset but this precise ability is vastly lost as we become adults.

Often creative solutions emerge by the synthesis and mixing and matching of different aspects. This is demonstrated by the power of mind mapping, a technique invented and popularized by Tony Buzan.

Beginning in the center of an empty sheet of paper with a central idea, mind maps pictorially or graphically radiate outwards and sideways. As the mind map makes associations, it develops second and third levels with curved branches connecting them.

These associations connect and combine different levels together and make new levels of synthesis of information and ideas possible.

How can you combine different elements and mix and match them to come to a creative solution?

5. Simplicity and focus

 “Truly wonderful the mind of a child is.” ~ Master Yoda in the movie Star Wars-Episode II – Attack of the Clones

Children exhibit the qualities of simplicity and focus quite abundantly. They frequently seem to come up with brilliantly simple and elegant solutions to complicated problems. When you were a child, you were not yet trained that simple and elegant solutions were not beautiful or effective.

As we grew up, our thinking brain calibrated itself to ignore solutions that seem too simple to be true.
You talk yourself out of what might be a seemingly simple solution and instead you may dabble around in unnecessary complexity.

You may get caught up in the quagmire of complexity and hence the required action is not taken and things just sit on the back burner.

The attention that children bring to the table is focused engagement. As you grew up, you become overly focused on the outcome of an event and that lead to a tunnel vision of choices.

Children are more interested to engage their attention in the journey and usually seem less concerned with the outcome.

When we open ourselves to the state of being open to the different outcomes, we open our tunnel vision up and get up on a cliff to see and savor the scenery.

The reason that children exude the simple brilliance is because they are constantly testing things out for themselves to see if they like the experience or not. Their thought process remains fluid, flexible and simple.

Allow the flexibility and fluidity of the simple thought process. If you allow yourself the flexibility of thinking like a child, you open up to more possibilities.

6. Being present: the state of flow

 “May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Children just seem to be highly present in the moment. Children can effortlessly move with the grace of a ballerina and paint with the grace of a tiny Picasso.

As an adult, you might struggle to experience the state of flow and bring the state of heightened awareness and effortless action to your work and play.

But as a child, you were in a state of flow quite effortlessly. You did not have to struggle or make a massive attempt at it. You just were.

If you allow yourself to move through life with more ease and drop off some of the resistance, you begin to experience flow. Focus your attention and engage deeply with a project to experience the state of effortless being.

Sharpen your skills of observation by being present to the current moment. Live in the now and observe for solutions that you might otherwise miss.

7. Breaking assumptions

Children are constantly breaking assumptions about how something needs to be done. This may be because they have not yet trained their minds to automate their thinking and doing processes.

They can bring a fresh new perspective to a situation that appears to be a boring idea.

They naturally create novelty by breaking the assumptions about how things ought to be. It is in these seemingly useless but novel combinations that the essence of radical creativity lurks waiting to be tapped.

Your creativity is waiting for you to unleash your inner child. Are you ready?

What do you think that you can learn from a child about curiosity and creativity?

7 Amazing Ways to Be Creative Like a Child

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How to be a Positive Parent

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What is Positive Parenting?

Wouldn’t it be nice if children came with an instruction manual? The ways in which we are expected to parent our children today is often different from the way we were parented. Social attitudes have dramatically changed parenting expectations about work and family life, about discipline, about communication, about sibling rivalry, about homework and more. Without sufficient guidelines to help modern-day parents, they are left feeling helpless and frustrated.

To cope with these changes, parents need to adopt more positive parenting techniques. A positive parent provides children with structure and security, with love and limits,and with self-control and self-respect. Raised in this atmosphere, children will develop healthy attitudes about relationships, and they will be more responsible and have a healthier sense of self.

Positive Discipline

Because many parents were raised with punishment, they have a misunderstanding about how to get cooperation and teach respect without yelling, spanking or using time out. Positive parents understand the difference between discipline and punishment. Discipline engages children’s thinking brains and helps children make important choices about what is right and wrong. Punishment uses aggression, isolation and shame to coerce right behavior. Discipline models self-control and respect. Punishment creates fear.

‘Positive discipline’ parents encourage children to find their own solutions to problems while acting as a coach or emotional tutor. These parents act as a model of what they want their own children to be. They avoid “do it because I told you so” or “do what I say, not what I do,” because they know that children who hear this will behave when parents are around but do what they want when they’re alone or with peers.

Positive Parenting Tips

One of the simplest ways to be a positive parent is to offer children choices: “Do you want milk or juice with breakfast?” Two choices are enough! If your child says she wants soda, repeat the choices again. After going a couple of rounds without a choice, step in and make the decision for her. Don’t back down at this point; stand your ground and offer firm limits. Your child will be more ready to make a choice about drinks tomorrow. You can offer a lot of choices to your child throughout the day, so that making decisions becomes natural. After a while, your child will feel empowered about her ability to choose, so that the need for a power struggle decreases. This will help you as a parent to feel more competent about your skills as well.

Another positive parenting tip is to show lots of empathy for a problem your child brings up, such as a teacher who gave him a low test score. Quizzing your child about why he got such a low grade or pointing out that he didn’t study like he had been told to can turn into a fight rather than the chance to problem solve together. Instead, you can say, “You’re very upset about this score. You felt you should have gotten a better one.” Follow this empathetic response up with a positive brainstorming comment such as, “What could you do next time to get a better score?” At first children who hear these responses will defend themselves, but over time they will offer some ideas about the need to study more, prepare better, or perhaps get a tutor. Engaging in problem-solving conversations can help a child learn how to do better in school and life.

Making these positive parenting changes is not easy. Parents will fall back into old, negative patterns. That is just one more opportunity to model change. Be honest about the mistakes. Talk about how you will correct them next time, and let your child witness your transformation.