Explanations

By: Carol Maxym, Ph.D.

I know that lots of experts tell you to explain to your child what you are doing to prove that it makes sense, is better, smarter, more efficient...  I know that there is a belief that if kids only understand, they’ll be okay with what you say.  Sadly that is just plain wrong. 

This does make adult sense.  Kids don’t think like adults.  Kids need and actually want for you to know what is right and good and helpful and just teach it to them.  Guide, direct, teach. Explaining and explaining, clarifying, saying in other words has many downsides.

Firstly, kids turn off quite rapidly when you are doing it (often because they just get lost in the rational explanation) and secondly (this is really important for the future!), you teach your kids that if you use a lot of words and explain and explain, whatever it is becomes okay (because that is the kid understanding of your long explanation).   

You may be thinking how much you would have appreciated explanations when you were a kid.  If only my parents had told me why I should do this or not do that…But again, you are thinking this as an adult and like an adult.    

Kids need and want direction.  Really.  They are kids.  They don’t know stuff.  They depend on YOU to tell them what to do, when to do, how to do.  You are the parent.  It’s what is expected.

Here’s a little anecdote:  On a cold March day in New York city, a very intelligent and educated mother asked her daughter of 2.5 if she would like to put on her coat.  The little girl said no.  So the mom explained and explained articulately, thoughtfully, explaining the advantages of wearing a coat in the cold weather, the disadvantages of not wearing a coat in cold weather… and the girl kept on saying NO.  This was going nowhere.  I must admit to having intervened to tell the little girl she was wearing a coat, it was put on, and off we went.  Later I talked with the mother who told me that he daughter was two and a half and had opinions.  I told her that her daughter needed her to know things, to guide, direct, teach.  I explained that the burden to the child of expecting her know and decide that which she cannot know or decide is unfair and creates anxiety.  The mom understood.  I hope she has changed her way of dealing with her daughter.

Long, detailed, thoughtful, cogent explanations confuse little kids…and bigger kids.  

Say 50% of what you were planning to say, and you will have said twice as much.

What I Learned From the Keynote Speaker

By: Robert Schmidt, M.A.

I was at a mental health agency event in Massachusetts last week where I heard a wonderful keynote speaker who really got my mind thinking about how therapy is supposed to work. This guy shared a really heartfelt story about his difficult childhood in Chicago and his process of change through treatment. 

He’s now working in the mental health field and making a pretty significant impact on his community. He’s is also starting on his doctoral work in the fall. He provided a great example of how therapy can make all the difference for people. When he was done sharing the story someone asked him to describe his therapist, and his reaction was funny: he kind of froze. All he could say about her was that she was very short. He made a joke about it and it seemed to satisfy the person who asked the question but I thought that was really amazing. Here’s this guy who is without question a different/better person because of treatment experience he had when he was young, and yet it was almost impossible for him to talk about the person who helped him make that change or what they did with him to make that change happen.

I think this is a fairly common phenomenon. People don’t always know what it is that their therapists do for them even though they want to give the therapists credit for the positive changes they experience. I think in the case of this keynote speaker, his inability to put a finger on his therapist’s approach was because his treatment process was fairly extensive and he could not have given a sincere answer to a question like “what was the one thing your therapist did that made you?... 

Those sorts of questions are built on false premises. To think that recovery comes from a single moment or a single relationship or a single critical realization is in most cases an oversimplification. We hear all kinds of stories like that on tv or in books but I don’t think they’re genuine. 

I don’t think many people have their minds changed forever by a single moment. Instead, I think that mental health/recovery/change comes from when major realizations get piled on top of one another and tested out in lived experience over time. I think that’s why 28 day rehabs rarely help people, they just don’t allow enough time for recovery to take root.

I like to think of my own recovery as the sum total of the contributions made by many people over a long period of time, and I enjoy thinking about the contributions that each of them made.  I have a file cabinet in my mind of people who were instrumental in my early recovery. It seems to me like each of them just showed up at different times and added different ingredients to the stew that I am now. I’m so glad that I met all of them and that I was given enough time in treatment for each of them to pass through it with me. 

I would encourage anybody who has a loved one in treatment to have as much patience as possible and to encourage their loved one to commit some time to the process, because it doesn’t really get better all at once, that’s not realistic. 

Defining Recovery

By: Robert Schmidt, M.A.

What do we mean when we use the word “recovery” in regards to substance abuse rehabilitation? Generally speaking, this word suggests something different than words like “sobriety” or “abstinence” do. Saying that an individual is in recovery usually implies that he or she is actively working some solution based program to help them heal. This underscores an important distinction between those who abstain and create new lives as a result and those who abstain and become “dry drunks.”

There are dry drunks in AA. These are people who quit using alcohol, yet continue to behave as if they are still actively drinking. Alcoholic behavior includes more than just drinking alcohol. It includes: lying, stealing, cheating, moodiness, laziness and various sundry other forms of overall nastiness. 

My tennis coach in college always used to shout “recover back to the middle” after I or a teammate would be forced by an opponent to chase a ball out wide.  I think this use of the word really gets at the heart of what is meant by “recovery” in substance abuse parlance. To recover back to the center of the court is to regain a previously held position of strength: and for our purposes, recovery from addiction is the same. An individual who is recovering from addiction is working to regain the things that have been lost or sacrificed in their selfish (hopeless) pursuit of satiation during their time as an active addict.   

So, what is it that addicts must recover? Relationships come to mind immediately. As do economic and legal viability, but that only covers the external features of addiction and recovery. What about the internal cost of addiction? What is it that needs to be recovered intrapersonally? 

As the cycles of addictive behavior become repetitive and automatic, individuals caught up inside these cycles’ losses a portion of their ability to exercise free will. In response to this they develop justifications for the behaviors, attempting to soften the impact of demoralization that comes from loss of control. Two things happen at the same time: there is a loss of governance over both behavior and thinking. 

I don’t know what an individual is beyond their thoughts and behaviors. To lose those things is to become something else; to lose your humanity. 

It is devastating for family members to look at their loved ones and see someone other than who they know and care about. This is what happens with addiction: it becomes like a shell that covers over the person. There is an individual encased inside, and that is what needs to be recovered. 

One Extra Moment

By: Carol Maxym, Ph.D.

I just finished writing a blog on boundaries.  I finished it by suggesting that when you have a moment—waiting at a red light, caught in traffic, on hold on the phone were some good times to think about your boundaries.  And I stand by that.  

But here’s what I thought next:  What I said about finding the moment in between busy-nesses probably describes a lot of your life.  And that is something to notice, perhaps an issue, maybe a problem.  Harassed people are never at their best, harassed parents are most definitely stressed, beleaguered—well, not at your best.  When your life really and truly is about finding moments in between moments to think about important matters, that makes life tough.  It makes mothering and fathering tough.

It doesn’t matter if you are a stay-at-home mom or dad or one who works or works two jobs, being rushed makes life feel chaotic because being in a constant hurry creates stress which creates chaos which creates stress.  Possibly it makes you feel that you don’t or can’t give enough thought to what your are doing as you mother or father.  And I imagine you are now thinking something like, “Well, yes.  Thanks for noticing.  I thought you were here to help, to give some tips, some advice.”  Yes, I am.  At least I try. It is the goal.  

Firstly, I think it is helpful to notice what goes on in your world.  To notice actively, not just try to keep the motion going or having it just keep going because it doesn’t stop.  Noticing is important.  Deep breath.  Notice what is going on around you.  Force yourself to slow down—even if only for a minute or two and notice.  In the rush of everyday life, it is so easy to lose track, to forget to notice with a moment’s distance.  Then there is noticing how you feel, how your day’s events, conversations, emotional collisions, emotional caresses. It isn’t necessary to analyze or interpret each and every event, conversation, collision, and caress.  Sometimes just noticing it, then running it through your mind (thinking about it) without any judgment at all.  Just noticing.  

Here is the next tip: Stop micromanaging your child(ren)’s life/lives.  You are the mom or the dad.  That does not make you in charge of providing complete happiness and satisfaction on a path to ultimate success at all times.  It does not make you the one to take care of everything in your child’s life so he/she won’t be unhappy now or later.  It doesn’t make you homework monitor.  It doesn’t make you overseer of everything your child eats or drinks or wants.  It doesn’t make you the one to prevent all bad things from happening all the time.  That is NOT the role of a parent.  Micromanaging is bad for you.  It is more dangerous for your child because he/she isn’t learning how to manage his/her own life.

There are certainly many ways in which we are all more busy than we were five years ago or a decade ago.  I’m not sure we are busier than most people were a century ago (when there were many fewer conveniences in life or in homes).  I grant that our expectations of ourselves are more.  Our expectations of our kids are more.  They have more activities, more needs, more problems to be solved…or do they?  Must they?  Are they and you benefitting from the more?

Quite possibly you are thinking something like, “But of course they must go here and do that!”  Must they?  Then you think, “Well, if she isn’t at ballet, she’s on Instagram.”  H’mmm, now that is a problem.  Greater busy-ness may help, but doesn’t solve it.

But let’s be clear about the core of the problem.  Being busy isn’t a moral value.  It’s just busy.  Being connected to some number of people isn’t an ethical statement.  It’s just busy.

Where can you intervene?  Think about real needs and created needs.  Being in contact with others all day (and night) every day and night is not a need.  It is a created need.  Having everything managed in your child’s life is not a need. It is a created need.  The more needs you create or allow to be created around you, the more you are likely to fall into micromanaging.

How will your children manage if you don’t micromanage their lives?  Perhaps the more pertinent question is how will you manage if you don’t micromanage their lives?

Think about it.

Quandary

By: Carol Maxym, Ph.D.

This morning I heard the following story on NPR:  A mom had tweeted on Twitter or posted on Facebook (maybe both??) that when her son went to purchase his lunch at the high school cafeteria, he was told that he had overspent his meal allowance and wasn’t allowed food.  He offered to pay some of the bill with the $2 in his pocket ($3 short of the total), but was told that wouldn’t do.  His lunch was thrown into the trash.  The boy called his mother who came to his rescue, took him out for lunch, then went to the school, paid his bill (the e-mail about him being “overdrawn” on his lunch money account had only been sent out that morning), and paid an additional $60 to clear unpaid bills for other kids, so no one else would need to go through the humiliation and hunger her son had just faced.

So, the fact is, I probably would have done the same thing as this mother.  I would have been incensed as the stupidity of denying him lunch only to throw the food into the trash.  (Apparently it is mandated that the food be thrown into the trash…because of contamination???).  I would have put out $60 to make a statement that kids shouldn’t have to be put through such nonsense, be humiliated, and go hungry.  

But then I must think a bit more deeply.  In a different day and age, the young man would not have been able to appeal to his mom via telephone for immediate rescue.  He would have been obliged to figure it out on his own—one way or another.  Might he have had to go hungry?  Yes (but then there a lot of kids in this country who arrive to school hungry every single day), and that would be unpleasant but not really much worse.  Humiliated?  Well, and there isn’t much else to say on that.  And he would have had to deal with it all on his own.  Would he have learned from the experience, grown from it?

I think about a couple of other points:  I am saddened that the person who threw away the food couldn’t come up with a better solution to the problem, but then that person worked for the food service company contracted to prepare and serve the lunches at the school. so her/his responsibility was to do as trained.  Maybe there is a problem that the food service is outsourced and so there is a responsibility to “bottom line” that supersedes responsibility to be a bit generous to a kid who doesn’t quite have the sufficient funds for his lunch—this one time—and does offer to pay what he has.

And throwing the lunch in the trash.  I just have trouble figuring out how that made more sense than to let the kid each the lunch.  

There is also and very much the issue that if kids were responsible for their own lunch money instead of having an account that is kept filled by Mom and Dad, then if Johnny didn’t have the money to purchase lunch, it was completely on him.  Old fashioned, but a good way to make sure the responsibility stays as close to the right place as possible.

So, thinking about it, what this incident makes clear is that while there may be conveniences to have accounts for kids to purchase lunch with Mom and Dad being in charge of making sure there are funds there, and it may be more cost efficient (but then I wonder if it really is) to have a food service company preparing and serving lunches, perhaps the more “convenient “ way is not the best or even better way for kids to get lunch at high school.

Pronoun Disorder

By: Carol Maxym, Ph.D.

I’m sure you have heard all about disorders.  Your child has probably been “diagnosed” with at least one of them.  I’m not a great fan of the DSM “disorders” because they don’t tell you anything you didn’t know before and contrary to popular belief they do NOT prescribe treatment.  (That’s a big difference between a medical diagnosis and a psychological or psychiatric diagnosis. A medical diagnosis is prescriptive; a psychological/psychiatric diagnosis is descriptive, NOT prescriptive.)

However, there is a newish disorder that I have personally discovered, and it is not mentioned in DSM 5.  It’s one that has pervasive negative effects.  It is easily avoidable.  There is no medication for it.  I suspect, will there ever be, for one isn’t  required.  No. 

Pronoun Disorder  can be self-corrected, and you can get rid of it yourself.  Pronoun disorder is when you use an incorrect pronoun (I, you, he, she, we, they).  

Pronoun Disorder is fostered by schools, therapists, advice-givers, advertising,  even by colleges and universities.  Pronoun Disorder is simply when, as a parent, you use the pronoun “we” instead of  “he” or “she” or “you” or you say “I” when, in fact, you are not the one who is doing the doing…whatever it is.

Here are some examples:  “I am moving my daughter into college next week.”  “We are taking the SATs again next month.”  “We have a term paper due before Christmas.”  “We need to take our medicine.”

Schools are very much at fault for creating some of the first stages of the disorder.  It happens when schools involve parents in their children’s homework.  This is certainly the case when kindergartners are given homework.  I mean, really, how are five-year-olds ever going to be able to manage doing homework on their own (that’s why kindergartners shouldn’t be given homework!)?  So when little kids are given tasks that they cannot accomplish, Mom and/or Dad are brought in and, in fact, the assignment is completed by us instead of by him or her.

Thinking About Psychobabble

By: Carol Maxym, Ph.D.

Well, perhaps we should put this post in the pet-peeves folder because the concept of overachieving is one of my pettest of pet peeves.  May I list a couple of pesky overachievers?  Leonardo da Vinci.  Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Marie Curie. Oh, right.  Another overachiever:  Steve Jobs.  Lots of people we venerate are overachievers.  So why is it a bad thing if your child is an overachiever?  (It isn’t.)

Psychology has presented us—and especially parents—with a large number of useless or even harmful concepts.  Overachieving is one of them. In a society that measures goodness and worthiness by busy-ness, achievement, and reward, the idea of stigmatizing those who achieve greatly is hypocritical, annoying, and downright stupid. 

So, when the psychobabblers start talking about overachieving, what is it they are really saying?  Well, firstly, I can’t help but wonder about just a soupcon of jealousy or envy:  Let’s put down the really successful people.  Somehow they must be psychologically compromised or emotionally stunted.  But even more than that, what the concept is really about is that some people are super intelligent, talented, socially savvy, business savvy, artistic…and so it just messes up the norms of the bell curves upon which so much of the psychobabble world is built.  And there is more to it. 

I think there can be little question that some kids are over-scheduled, at least partially because their parents are hoping they will be “over-achievers.”  Some are over-scheduled because that’s what a lot of parents do and there is the competition (overt or covert) as to who will really have the Ivy-League, NFL/NBA billionaire kid.  Lots of scheduled activities, however, beats sitting with a smart phone and being on social media or lost in imaginary world of war and destruction. Still, none of that quite taps into the real issue I have with the very silly concept.

My real issue is that it is just one of the terms that gets used without much thought.  It seems to have some sort of root in the idea (mainly false) that kids are being asked to work so hard at school that any anxiety or depression that might be noticed/diagnosed has to do with the academic rigors of school.  Kids who work very hard and feel the stress of hard work get put into the anxious/depressed over achiever category because there doesn’t seem to be a category for them. Maybe the category, if there need be one is, hard-working kids who feel the effects of hard work. Maybe they don’t need a category?

I have no problem with hard workers and high achievers.  Do you?  Really?   Hard workers who achieve greatly is a concept that makes sense.  Over achiever?  No.  So the moral of the post?  Think long and hard about the psychobabble concepts that professional advice-givers provide.  If you can’t really make sense of the concept (or the diagnosis), it is possible that it doesn’t really make sense.