Each moment feels like a question.

Each is a chance to practice – to try, to fail, to assess, and in time, to try again.

I fail often.

Our ‘failures’ are sources of information, not judgments, helping us clarify which boundaries are in cement, and which in sand, which to hold, and which to flex.  In time, we get clearer about the boundaries to nonchalantly set and hold in cement. The rest becomes negotiable. Some even gets discarded completely.

My practice is that each time I fail,

I zoom out and look from various angles

to clarify what boundary I needed but ignored,

or what boundary I held that needed flexibility.

I spend 30 seconds on feeling the boundary, or feeling the flexibility so that next time,

I can better notice, honor, and follow-through on holding to it, whichever kind of boundary it is, cement or sand.

The post A surprising everyday mother’s day wish for you appeared first on Stoller Parent Coaching.

We can better set rules, boundaries, that our children comply with when we are clean and clear about the boundaries we place around ourselves. What are we going to follow-through with when they do something? What are we going to collaborate about with them? 

This perspective of young Trevor’s is widespread among gifted children. They have highly sensitive radars for picking up hypocrisy and the source of the rule. They know when the rule is focused on meeting the parent’s need and perspective without consideration of the child’s need and perspective.  These children trust themselves before they trust the parents. They won’t be disregarded. They go into survival mode for their identity as a sovereign being. No consequence is going to change that for some of them. For others, it will break them. 

Collaboration on rules that are negotiable builds self-efficacy and connected relationships.

The post “I’d find my way around it.” appeared first on Stoller Parent Coaching.

Some of us and of our children have systems that do this consciously and get a squirt of the pleasure hormone dopamine when there is a reaction to one of our conscious experiments. These children need our adult help in figuring out other sources of such dopamine pleasure for this child, approaches that meet enough of their needs to replace the disruptive behavior.

The way this played out in my house with one of our children when young – “Do you stir things up for entertainment?” “Of course!” was the answer. I had had a clean clear moment when I responded, “I know you’re creative and will come up with a different way to entertain yourself that doesn’t make anyone miserable.”

The post “I wasn’t breaking overhead projectors. . .” appeared first on Stoller Parent Coaching.

The post “I never wanted to destroy. I wanted to create.” appeared first on Stoller Parent Coaching.

Trevor came to realize something jarring the first time he witnessed white people playing fetch with their dogs – his mother had for years been running him like a dog to wear him out.  

In the cognitive, critical thinking arena, he came to surpass her wit at about age seven or eight, at which point she would only participate in discussions with him that were carried out on paper – letters back and forth to each other. She found a great work around to his creative sly independent thinking that both honed his skills and gave her time to think through her answers.

The post I wasn’t ADD. I wasn’t a sociopath. . . appeared first on Stoller Parent Coaching.

A child knows when our mind is somewhere else. They know mom or dad is not really here. There is a sense of being abandoned, which turns on their survival mode. Adults feel it with other adults when someone’s mind and attention is elsewhere. When we parents are not being fully present to a situation with our children, we are sending a message that signals “danger” to our child’s system, which responds, appropriately, by turning on their survival-mode’s reactions. When we are not fully present, we, for all intents and purposes, are asking them to fight with us or flee from us. When we do do the work of being clean and fully present with them, their emotions can be no more and no less than they need to be.

The post Being present turns off survival mode appeared first on Stoller Parent Coaching.

The best we can do to help create the trust with our child is to be authentic – of course, in appropriate ways. Our energy needs to match our words. When we are angry, name it. And allow a modicum of the corresponding energy. A child knows when something we’re saying is not matching our underlying emotions through our energy. Their system – whether consciously or not – has to decide whether to trust itself and not the adult; or to not trust itself in order to be safe with the adult. Their outward behaviors may be reflecting their confusion and disconnect about the mismatches they are witnessing.  

The post When your energy and words match appeared first on Stoller Parent Coaching.

There are many people throughout time who have said in many ways that children are here to help us evolve and grow up. Dr. Shefali and Dr. Dan Siegel have done so very powerfully, for example. Here, I am simply sharing these teachings.  Each one of us can use the situations with our children to see ourselves and grow.

Noticing our reactions to their behaviors, we are confronted by parts of ourselves we don’t necessarily like. We get very familiar with what triggers us to be angry or sad – as well as happy and joyful. Most powerfully, our children allow us to see patterns that have subconsciously been running our lives. They, our children, need for us to grow out of repeating those patterns so that they are not also limited by them.

We get to grow as a result of parenting them – for us to heal and thrive, as well as for them to do their own growing. Our children require that we notice how intense we are. Why am I angry at this child for not following my script and needs? Which part of me isn’t getting some very basic needs met? What makes me think my child’s job is to meet my needs? Because the child in me is still demanding, whining, crying “What about me?”

When we see our part in this, it is easier to accept and understand that each one of our children is his/her/their own sovereign being.

A couple of months into the process of working with one particular couple, I asked what was a current dilemma they were facing.  The answer was leaving the park. Exploring different scenarios, it turns out that when their daughter was with her grandmother, this child would leave easily. Why? Turns out Grandma lets her stay as long as she wants, and the younger brother is happy to stay as well. This young girl resists leaving the park because she knows her system still needs to run, to move, to play.

With that understanding, the parents got that their daughter is actually doing her job – listening to and trying to get her needs met. Her body still needs to move and to enjoy moving. We brainstormed ideas about how to use this information to ease the transitions. Their active participation with her – heavy energy expenditure of gross motor fun – starting ten minutes before the parent wanted to leave, and continued while leaving the park, was the solution.

What ideas does this spark for you?  What does it tell you about your frustration when your child does not transition on your time-agenda? What belief does it reveal? Maybe – “I think children should ___.”  Or “The world isn’t friendly to me.” Our answers to these questions will help us break the pattern that we think children are for us to control, or teach a lesson.

It helps us see and be able to be what they actually need: the calm anchor and safe-harbor their system can orient towards. Seeing our patterns and their sources, and also knowing that our children are sovereign beings, we are more able to believe that’s it’s not our fault. Children come into the world with circumstances inside of themselves that set up them up to have dilemmas – some small, some large.  Whatever those are, they will help us heal, evolve, and grow, if we let them.

The post Children are here to help us evolve appeared first on Stoller Parent Coaching.

Sometimes we can outsource the forms of play that we really don’t enjoy. Others forms of play, we can help ourselves find a way to get into it. And then there are the ones we do enjoy. Whatever the arena in which you find your child engaging with life – a ball, imagination, talking, watching – think about the life-skill you want them to learn, and creatively think about and research games that reinforce those skills. Puppets and role plays were key arenas for one of our children; throwing and bouncing balls, and all sorts of gross motor games were the arenas for another; and talking, role-play acting on a makeshift stage, and reading mythology, and watching and discussing movies, were the arenas for another.  What ideas does this spark for you for your children?

The post Learning Life Skills Through Play appeared first on Stoller Parent Coaching.

You may not think that small sensory experiences are you taking care of you, but they are! What are the ways you already give yourself small sensory experiences? Do you run your fingers through your hair? Put a hand on your neck? Bounce your leg? They are ways your system is subtly taking care of you. Your system is giving you experiences that require you to experience your body, here, now. It’s already helping you stay grounded, centered, and present. Integrated. By being conscious of those moments, you vastly increase the power of having taken care of yourself.  When we are able to build up the reservoir of that message and believe it – that I’m here for me and I’m taken care of – we don’t have to use the moments with our children to take care of ourselves. We can cleanly determine what they need from us to take care of them.

The post What is your system already doing to take care of you? appeared first on Stoller Parent Coaching.