Connected Parenting founder Jennifer Kolari was honored to be asked to be part of Jacqueline Green’s week-long online Parenting Summit that starts tomorrow, Friday, March 19. The Summit covers a wide variety of topics that are very important to parents who want to know how to help their kids thrive.

Jennifer is looking forward to discussing how to deal with sensitive or anxious children. Other experts include Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks, who along with her husband has written best-selling books on conscious relationships, teen parenting expert Vanessa Van Petten who shares her perspective on how to connect and protect teens, and blended and step family author Shirley Crees Dudley who will discuss how to get a great start to your new family and how to deal with common issues.

Visit The Parenting Summit for free registration and for more information. Jennifer’s portion will air on Friday, March 26 at 12:00 p.m. EST.  Hope you can listen in.

[Originally posted at Just the Facts, Baby]

There has been much media coverage lately about helicopter parenting and its effect on the development of our children. The CBC aired a great documentary a few weeks ago called “Hyper Parents and Coddled Kids.” It revealed how a generation of kids parented this way are faring—and it’s not well.

One might think kids who have been protected, chauffeured, tutored and celebrated more than any generation before would be confident, secure and happy. What research shows, however, is that they are anxious, stressed out, and more emotionally fragile than any generation before them. I would go so far as to call it “tip toe parenting” with many parents worried about upsetting their kids and going to great lengths to work around their children’s moods and going out of their way to accommodate their children needs and wishes. This has left many parents afraid of their child’s next meltdown and utterly exhausted.

So what do we do? How can we tell the difference between helicopter parenting and strong healthy attachment? We don’t want to go backwards to a time when kids were seen and not heard, but what’s happening now isn’t really working for parents, or for kids. We have to find a way, as parents, to balance attachment and nurturing with limit setting and exposure to natural consequences. In our well-meaning attempts to give our children positive experiences and in our striving for fairness, we have missed out on the value of a little adversity. Life is so good for many children in our part of the world that they are losing the gift of perspective.

The brain organizes our experiences often in terms of good and bad. If all experiences are positive, then the less positive ones begin to feel negative–it’s all relative. We want our children to be happy and successful, but being overly protective can give children a false sense of reality and may hinder their achievements later in life. They begin to lack the emotional hardware to handle adversity and may become anxious, overwhelmed and struggle to cope with their emotions.

We don’t need to go the other way and create negative situations for our children so they can toughen up, nor do we want to remove our empathy and support, but we do want to give them messages of competence and let them know they can, and will, get through negative experiences. Negative experiences are inevitable and no matter how hard we try to shield our children from them, we can’t. It’s much better to teach them how to handle these experiences and how to learn from them.

Constantly advocating for our children every time there is trouble, running to school with forgotten gym clothes or lunches, staying up late at night helping kids finish assignments in the long run is not helpful at all. We must let children try, fail, and then cope with the natural consequences of their failures. Listening, being empathic and helping children understand and learn from these experiences is vital, so is giving them the message that you believe they will be okay. When we enable children to fully experience the winning and the losing sides of life, we give them the gift of balance that will last a lifetime.

Here are some tips to help you with this balancing act.

1. Love them well

Strong family connections, with tons of unconditional love and consistent nurturing, will create positive attitudes and resilience. Listen to their feelings and empathize and problem-solve with them, then let them know that you believe they can get through any negative experiences.

2. Show yourself and encourage emotional ownership

Let your child see that you also make mistakes and that you feel sad or frustrated sometimes. He will connect with you and recognize his own power to overcome adversity.

3. Praise effort, not results

Compliment your child on her efforts and encourage her to measure herself against her own achievements.

4. Don’t be a fixer: allow mistakes

If your child is upset or angry, do not rush to fix the situation. Listen as he expresses his feelings and then calmly demonstrate that it’s okay to feel that way sometimes. Then you can work on problem-solving. If your child procrastinates and leaves an assignment to the last minute and loses marks for lateness, do not interfere. The negative result is a natural consequence of his choices, and will help him concretely understand cause and effect.

5. Stay neutral and avoid punishment

When your child does something wrong, make sure you listen to her point of view before you discipline–then choose natural consequences. Yelling and punishing will lead the child to focus more on your behavior than her own.

* Other posts about Helicopter Parenting:
Helicopter Parents – Are You Stressing Out Your Child
CBC Explores “Helicopter” Parenting

It was a Saturday morning in mid-February, and both my sons had the pallor of vampires and the energy levels of sloths. Charlie and Harrison had been fine all week at school, but this weekend morning they woke up sick. There were swimming lessons and birthday parties to attend, not to mention shopping for new, better-fitting shoes. But, it was bitterly cold outside and there was a Jim Carrey movie marathon on television. I needed to make a decision.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes when our responsibilities lessen during a holiday or weekend, crazy fatigue or an awful flu rear up and incapacitate us like a tsunami? “Just my luck to get sick during my time off,” we might think, but maybe a more apt reaction should be gratitude that we possess bodies with minds of their own.

Often, our physical selves figure out what’s wrong with us or what we need long before our brains do, and they don’t try to sugarcoat the problem. Getting sick or feeling the physical effects of anxiety can be a body’s way of saying: slow down, relax, remove some stress, I’m warning you.

When I was thirty-four, I worked and played with gusto, but one night I woke up breathing erratically, my heart threatening to leap out of my chest. The dread in the pit of my stomach was so deep that I couldn’t even stand up straight. I felt that I could die at any moment and that moving too far from my bed could put me in mortal danger. I remember my husband convinced me to come outside for a walk. I held on to his arm for dear life and refused to go around the block – I needed to keep our house in sight; I needed to see my safe place. After nearly a whole hour during which the symptoms refused to subside, we drove to a hospital emergency room, where calm is as alien as bacon at a bar mitzvah. Once it was ascertained that I was not having a heart attack, my husband and I settled in for a long wait and a lively sideshow of humanity, watching sick people brought in on stretchers and in handcuffs.

Eventually, the attending physician, a calm, pony-tailed man wearing clogs, examined me and explained that I was merely, merely, suffering from a panic attack. He asked me if I was experiencing any particularly disturbing stresses in my life. I felt puzzled. There were issues at work, arguments with friends, nothing unusual. He gave me a pill called Atavin, a short-term medication that fends off the effects of anxiety. I was instantly relieved — until the next time.

After visiting my family doctor and procuring a prescription for my new go-to drug, I became a semi-functioning victim of free-floating anxiety. I did not understand what was causing this ugly beast to jump out of the shadows and I never knew when it was going to pounce. I spent gross amounts of energy working to hide my struggle from colleagues and to downplay it with family and friends.

The unpredictable attacks prompted me to take Atavin before situations during which a panic attack would be difficult to hide or explain. If I had to attend a big meeting or a family function, I took a pill just in case, a preemptive strike against the possibility of anxiety. By all objective measures, I was an intelligent woman, and yet, I shrugged off concern about my growing psychological addiction to medication. I acted as if my panic attacks were part of a phase that would run its course like puberty or a love of flannel shirts.

My body knew what was wrong with me, but like a dog that barks at a seemingly empty yard, it couldn’t tell my brain exactly what the problem was. Finally, after a year of this nerve-wracking condition, I attended a seminar by a pioneer in holistic health education. When Jack Schwarz (google him; you won’t be sorry!) stated that “all of your body is in your mind but not all of your mind is in your body, I began to learn how to pay attention to myself. I braked for the red stop lights illuminating my insides and realized that I needed to leave my career in book publishing. The politics and pace had become too stressful and the personal rewards had vanished. I also realized that I needed to try to have a baby because time was galloping on and the fear of not trying was literally making my body crazy. Fortunately, my husband’s income allowed me to resign from my job in order to have time to reflect on these realizations. I quit the pills cold turkey, dug up our back yard, built a garden, and six months later I became pregnant with our first son. My panic attacks stopped.

These days, I am very mindful of my body’s warnings and the warnings that come from the bodies of my children. Every cell in us has intelligence to which we should listen. When either of my boys becomes sick, they take time off school and I resolutely feed them chicken soup and love. I occasionally cancel their extra-curricular activities for a few weeks and focus on hanging out at home, creating opportunities for down-time and not worrying about what they’re missing. They have caught the stress bug and I try to give them what their bodies already know they require, time to be still and time to recover. That Saturday in February, we all stayed home and watched Jim Carrey contort his facial features. We laughed and made nachos. Wrestled and nestled. I am hopeful that the lessons I learned as an adult can be passed on to my sons now so that heeding their own bodies’ warnings will be the only medicine they ever need.

Today’s Globe & Mail reports on a new study published in the journal Child Development that shows that children who are highly reactive to stress do worse than their peers at school if they come from a home where there’s lots of stress but do better than their peers at school, both academically and socially, when they have a stable and nurturing home.

This finding supports the Orchid Hypothesis (described at length by David Dobbs in The Atlantic late last year) which speculates that certain genes that have been tied to vulnerability to anxiety, depression, hyperactivity and behavioral problems may in fact simply make their carriers more sensitive to both positive and negative environmental influences. Under this hypothesis, people who are hyper-sensitive to their environment often respond so well to positive interventions that they surpass their less sensitive peers.

Click here to read the Child Development paper discussed in the Globe and check out our other posts about Orchid and Dandelion Children:

New Theory Suggests that Overly Sensitive Children Have Over-sized Potential,
More on Orchid and Dandelion Children,
Following the Orchid and Dandelion Discussion

[Originally posted at Just the Facts, Baby]

My husband and I took our five-year old skating the other day and what a pleasure it was. She listened to our instructions, put them into action and stuck to it. She fell and got up, fell and got up again. She tried and tried until she was skating on her own. It made for a happy outing and a wonderful achievement for her.

This was not how it went years ago when we first took our older son skating. He is sixteen now, happy and successful at almost everything he tries but, back when he was five, this kind of outing would have been a nightmare. Two minutes on the ice and he would have been crying and demanding to go home. It was the same with bike riding, basketball or anything new that he tried. As parents, we would fluctuate between being angry and very sad for him. He was a perfectionist and the second he couldn’t do something right, he quit in a fury.

Anxious children and often gifted kids seem to have this trait. It’s as if they have it all figured out and feel they should be able to easily master it. Then, as soon as they realize they can’t, they are devastated and refuse to try further.

These same kids often have difficulty losing and will quit games with peers as soon as things don’t go their way. It is very hard to know how to deal with this and as a parent you either find yourself getting incredibly angry or just giving in because the fight is simply too much. It can also be embarrassing when your child is the one storming off the soccer field or lying in the middle of the ice rink.

Here’s what to do:

• Stay Neutral. This is very hard, but threatening and getting angry do not work with a child like this. Neither do bribes.

• Empathize. This is a hard one, but try to empathize with their frustration and then give them some space. Sometimes staying there and trying to talk them into it only fuels the episode. Go on with what you’re doing and don’t stop the activity, check in from time to time to see if he is ready to try again and repeat if not.

• Don’t lecture. If they completely refuse and will not try, don’t go on and on about it. Make a statement about how hard it must be when their frustration gets in the way of their fun and how much you would like to see them push through these feelings. Then try to walk away.

• Don’t have a parade. If they do decide to try again, don’t go overboard saying “Oh that’s so great, look he’s back!” This will embarrass your child and raise the stakes, often making him quit again. Calmly, and in a neutral way, welcome him back, but don’t make a big deal about it.

• Watch your agenda. Be certain that it is not your need for them to be interested in, or good at, this activity that is driving the issue. If your child senses this is more about you, it can add to his anxiety and fuel the desire to quit.

• Don’t compare. Try not to compare your child to siblings who have mastered the same activity. This can lead to shame and further shut down.

• Acknowledge the effort, not the outcome. Focusing too much on achievement and end results can leave kids stressed and afraid they won’t be able to do it again. Praise even the smallest attempt at the activity.

• Talk about their brain. When they want to quit because they can’t master a skill fast enough, tell them that it takes time for their muscles to learn how to do it. The brain knows how but it takes time to get that information to the muscles. This can really help kids who give up too quickly

Check out Jennifer Kolari’s latest post at My Child Feels discussing childhood anxiety, what to watch for, and what to do if your child is anxious.

You may also be interested in Jennifer’s recent post about Swine Flu Anxiety.

[Originally posted at Just the Facts, Baby]

This week it seems fitting to talk about anxiety. There’s a lot of talk these days about the H1N1 virus and all of the media coverage and discussion has led parents to a place of increased anxiety, even panic.

I am not going to talk about the virus or the vaccine–there’s enough of that in the newspapers and on TV, but I will talk about anxiety.

Anxiety is a part of being a parent and you need a certain amount to keep your children safe, but too much can have a negative impact on your parenting, your child and on you. I have had so many moms in the last few weeks tell me how anxious they are about this virus and how they feel more anxious in general as a result. Anxiety is an awful feeling and once it is turned on, it can be hard to turn off. It can also make us uncomfortable, irritable and unreasonable. So what can we do about it?

First of all, it is really important to have a sense of control over your anxiety because it can be such an uncomfortable and powerful emotion. When someone is anxious the pathways to logical thought are temporally severed and as soon as your body detects you are worried, it errs on the side of caution and puts you in fight or flight mode. This is great if you are a caveman or on the battlefield, not so great if you are a mom just trying to cope.

Here is what you can do. If you can control you breathing and your heart rate, you can control that fight or flight response. So when you hear a frightening newsflash about the swine flu, first break the connection by turning off the TV or asking your friend not to tell you anymore. Then, slowly breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. When your breathing slows down, your heart will calm down too and your brain will register that and say “OK, this is not life threatening.”

Think of a scale from one to 10. One is when you are the most relaxed and calm, 10 is when you feel a sense of panic. Learn to rate your anxiety and monitor yourself throughout the day. If you feel higher than a five, you need to get that number lower by breathing or by thinking of happy or funny things. Try not to talk too much about the things that are making you anxious–this fuels anxiety and can put you right back in fight or flight mode. If you find yourself having real difficulty with sleeping or panic attacks, call your doctor or a therapist trained in helping people with anxiety–getting help to manage your anxiety can really help.

Feeling that you control your anxiety, instead of your anxiety controlling you, is the best way to find balance and peace of mind.

It’s officially here.  Today marked the first day of school for most kids across the country, and with that comes a lot of excitement, fears and sometimes anxiety.

I was recently interviewed by CityTV’s Cynthia Mulligan about back to school anxiety, and how parents can help their kids through this transition.

To read my tips, check out Cynthia’s blog.

We are all born hardwired for how we handle anxiety, some of us are not anxious at all – some of us are very anxious. In addition to that hardwiring Life events and experiences push us up or down the continuum. Some anxiety is good safe choices but we want to make sure that our children control their anxiety so it doesn’t control them. We don’t want their worries and fears to get in the way of enjoying and participating fully in their lives.

The best way to determine if your child has a problem with anxiety is to think about whether it is stopping them from doing the things they want to. Does it make them feel badly about themselves? Do they spend a lot of time clinging and crying or if they’re older withdrawing. DO they feel great distress when separating from you? Do they worry way in advance about things that have not happened yet? Do they constantly complain of headaches, stomache aches or dizziness? Any physical symptoms should be checked out by a Doctor but you can ask your child’s paediatrician to investigate anxiety if this is a theme for your child.

Parents should also understand that some children are happy even though they tend to stand on the sidelines. It is not always anxiety some children prefer to observe and take things in tackling tasks or activities when they are ready. It’s important to know when it’s our issue versus theirs.

Children don’t always show the typical or obvious signs of anxiety that we might think of, sometimes demanding behaviour, extreme bossiness temper tantrums and sleep disturbances can all be symptoms of anxiety.

Here’s what to do:

Get Connected: spend more cuddle time with young children and spend more alone time with teenagers. Children feel safe and more secure when they feel deeply loved.

Fight or Flight Response: When a child is feeling anxious, their fight or flight instincts might kick in. This means their brain is not letting them think rationally, so when a parent tries to rationalize the situation, the child feels like they aren’t being listened to. Instead, ask lots of questions about how they are feeling, and put some urgency in your voice, without sounding anxious yourself. This will show you get that they are worried, and will help them get back to a place where they can hear the logical things you have to say.

Give it a Name: Don’t talk about your child being afraid, because this makes it seem like something that they can’t fix. Give it a name, like the “worry bug” for older kids or teens just refer to it as the worry that gets in the way. Then you can work together to come up with ways to reduce it. This helps kids to control their emotions.

Get the Control back: Kids are exposed to a lot of adults themes – and they are not socially or emotionally prepared to deal with these. Set limits on behaviour and the things you kids are exposed to. When kids see that parents don’t have control they get nervous about who will take care of them, this aggravates anxiety.

Scaling: get your kids to rate their anxiety and use deep breathing or positive imagery to bring the number down.

Calm yourself: Sometimes children come by there anxiety honestly. Use the same techniques to make sure you are calm. Kids often gauge their responses based on ours.