Harley Rotbart, M.D.

Dec

18

No Regrets Parenting Tips for Holiday Time with Your Kids

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Tis’ the season for holiday tips. Everyone has tips for you: eating healthy over the holidays; gift-giving for the holidays; gift-wrapping tips; coping with the crowds; tips for last-minute shopping; tips for baking edible fruit cake; tips for surviving TV gift commercials; frugal vacation ideas; decorating tips;  tax-saving end-of-year giving tips.

The tips for a No Regrets Parent, though, are a little different. Just as the No Regrets Parenting book is not like other parenting books because it focuses on only one parenting priority (TIME WITH YOUR KIDS), my holiday tips are also all about one thing – TIME WITH YOUR KIDS OVER THE HOLIDAYS. How to find enough of it and how to make the most of it.

So, here are 10 Holiday Tips for No Regrets Parents:

  1. At big family gatherings, carve out time for just you and your kids. Sneak away for a quiet walk, build a snowman while the extended family is watching football on TV, find a quiet corner to read a special story to your kids.
  2. Rent a classic movie to watch with your kids (“White Christmas,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Eight Crazy Nights,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” “Babes in Toyland,” “An American Tail”).
  3. Make special holiday foods together. Baked treats are my personal favorite. With colorful sprinkles.
  4. Take your kids along if you have to work on weekends or evenings during their winter vacation. Have them bring a book to read or a game they can play while you’re busy, and then stop for a snack on the way home. Depending on their ages, maybe start with one child at a time. Make sure their pictures are on  your desk – kids love knowing you’re thinking about them when you’re at work.
  5. Pick bedtime stories that are special for the holidays. Don’t limit yourself to books – tell your kids funny holiday stories from your childhood, do puppet shows, use picture albums from holidays past.
  6. Include your kids in decorating your home for the holidays. Each child can be in charge of decorating his or her room.
  7. Establish new holiday traditions unique to your family. Make your own holiday cards, have a family talent show, have a gift-wrapping contest, write new lyrics to classic holiday songs. And then perform them karaoke style.
  8. Volunteer together at a food bank, homeless shelter, or hospice. Do a family run for charity. Donate new toys to a local children’s hospital.
  9. Clean all the closets in your house and make a family donation to Goodwill.
  10. Make gifts for each other from scratch.

Use the comments section to send me your tips for holiday time with your kids – finding more of it, and making the most of it. (If the comments box is missing, click on the title of this post and it will magically appear!)

Dec

07

The Other End of the Parenting Spectrum – Book Review of “Parents to the End”

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This past summer, after the unthinkable tragedy of the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shootings, I wrote a piece for Parents Magazine titled, “Is Bad Parenting to Blame for the Aurora Shootings?” Were the actions of the accused shooter, James Holmes, the result of mistakes in parenting him, either when he was a young child or after he became an adult? I’ll let you read the article yourself to see what I concluded, but, the acts of a deranged adult child are, thankfully, rare. What is not rare, however, are less serious, yet still upsetting and unsettling actions of adult children in their interactions with their parents. These are difficult and often painful issues, and not often written about. How should parents deal with adult children who are spoiled, disrespectful, and demanding? What about those who are substance abusers or physically abusive? And, also on the spectrum of parent-child troubles with adult children, how should parents deal with their kids’ disturbing refusal or inability to develop independence and self-sufficiency? What about an adult child whose spouse isn’t what parents had hoped for?

Linda M. Herman’s book, “Parents to the End – How Baby Boomers Can Parent for Peace of Mind, Foster Responsibility in their Adult Children, and Keep their Hard-Earned Money,” tackles those issues and many of the other most perplexing relationship crises between parents and their adult children. This book is tough love – Ms. Herman rejects the notion that everything will be okay if parents just try harder, give more generously, indulge for the sake of peace, or love more. This is truly an advocacy book for Baby Boomer generation parents whose kids have been given more opportunity and more advantages than any previous generation in history. The result, as Ms. Herman documents from her own longstanding psychotherapy practice, is a generation of entitled adult children with expectations of their parents that previous generations would never have entertained. Irresponsible adult children, alienated from their parents and alienating of their parents – the dark side of parenting. The case histories presented in Parents to the End provide a front-row seat to real people in real crises.

I fear, as Ms. Herman suggests, that the number of families in these situations is far greater than we in the “parenting advice business” want to confront. Yet confrontation is exactly what many parents who find themselves in these circumstances must endure and even elicit. The only way out of some of these most difficult interpersonal conflicts between parents and their adult children may be for parents to deal with those children in a way they dread. Or, as Ms. Herman puts it for parents, “saving yourself.”

This book is a must for parents struggling to maintain their relationships with defiant, disrespectful, or simply unmotivated adult children. The book’s section on “creating drive” is insightful and practical, drawing on the research and writings of giants in the field of psychology, business, and education.  Ms. Herman addresses the heartbreaking challenge of an adult child who is addicted to drugs, the unique challenges of “blended families, and even gives advice for parents learning their child is gay.

Ms. Herman guides parents in forgiveness, and in letting go. Her “Bill of Rights” and “12 Truths” lists are concise and important collections of parenting wisdom for those in this challenging demographic.

While reading this book may make the parents of young children cringe, I recommend that parents of adolescents who sense potential problems like those noted above read this book even though they are not yet in the thick of battle with adult children – I believe Parents to the End can help prevent some of the crises from developing in the first place.

Congratulations to Ms. Herman for writing this important and courageous look into a side of parenting we all hope we’ll never have to see for ourselves.

Dec

04

The Holiday Gift that’s Still Giving

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My December post for Parents Magazine’s GoodyBlog tells the story of the garage sale discovery that became the hit gift of the decade for our kids – and for us!!

http://www.parents.com/blogs/goodyblog/2012/12/give-kids-holiday-gifts-that-will-bring-joy-to-parents/

Nov

29

How to Convince Your Spouse/Partner to be a No Regrets Parent

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As part of my ongoing national seminar series based on the No Regrets Parenting book, I spoke on behalf of Children’s Hospital Colorado to a community parents’ group program this week. As usual, the questions at the end of the program were insightful, intelligent, and provocative. One mom, Lisse (not her real name) asked this heartfelt question:

“Everything you said tonight struck at my core, and I am trying to be that No Regrets Parent. But how can I get my husband to do the same. He doesn’t seem to enjoy his time with our kids. After work, he’ll sit and read the newspaper while the kids are playing in the same room and, when I ask him to spend the time with the kids, he says, ‘I am with the kids. We’re all here together.’ When he takes our daughter to swim meets, he spends the whole time on his iPad and doesn’t even watch her. I want him to be as excited about being a parent as I am. What should I do?”

There are no easy answers to these questions. Here’s what I suggested:

Find ways to help your husband “double-dip,” one of the “staying sane strategies” in No Regrets Parenting. I define double-dipping as doing activities that a parent and a child would both enjoy doing separately, and instead doing them together.  Movie makers, for example, have figured this out and found it to be very profitable; today’s slick animated films are targeted to both adult and kid sensibilities.  Some of the jokes are way above a child’s head, and the story lines may be as well, but there are also enough cute characters, goofy gags, and slapstick to tickle a wide range of childhood maturity levels. Two hours in the theater with your kids, everyone laughing (albeit, often at different times), everyone sharing popcorn, and everyone talking about the movie in the car on the way home. A great double-dip.

A few more examples:

Biking—Put the littlest ones in a trailer, the somewhat older ones on a trailer cycle that hooks onto your bike and lets your child pedal; once kids are old enough to bike next to you, they get their own wheels. You get outdoor exercise, your kids get fresh air, and you get each other.

Charity—Do a charity walk together; get sponsors and spend a weekend day in healthy outdoor activity for a good cause. Or have a spring-cleaning day where everyone collects clothes and toys from the closets and under the beds to donate. Then go to the collection center together and show your kids the act of giving.

Jogging—Strollers made for keeping your kids close while you’re pounding the pavement are perfect for together times that relieve, rather than create, stress.

Language lessons—Learn a second language together, listening to tapes on long car rides or in the dentist’s waiting room.

Swimming—The pool feels great on a hot day whether you’re an adult or a kid. When the kids are old enough to play in the pool unsupervised, you can swim laps while they splash their friends.

Reading—Books are one of the best ways to reconcile different attention levels and interests. Quiet time with everyone reading his or her own latest page-turner.

Snow-shoveling and leaf raking—Depending on the age of your kids, you may be doing most of the shoveling while you help them build a snowman, make snow angels, or have a snowball fight. The idea is that you’re all at the same place at the same time, sharing the experience. And the snow gets shoveled. Same idea with raking the leaves: you rake, and the kids play in the piles and help you fill the bags. As the kids get older, of course, feel free to assign them the harder parts of this partnership.

I suggested to Lisse (the mom at the seminar who asked the question) that she start slowly with No Regrets Parenting training for her husband. Have him announce “Time for READING CLUB” to the kids when he’s ready to sit with his newspaper, and gather the kids in the same room to read their books or magazines. Every 10 minutes or so, have him pause and ask the kids what they’re reading, and share what he’s reading (age-appropriate news only, of course). That’s double-dipping reading time. Lisse had another great suggestion based on one of the other strategies I presented in the seminar – she’ll ask her husband to video her daughter’s swim meets so they can watch together at night. Lisse can’t get to the meets because she works at those times, so now she’ll get to share the excitement and her husband will be pulled off his iPad.

Share your own suggestions for helping your spouse or partner get in the No Regrets Parenting spirit. Click on the title of this post, and a comments box will magically appear.

www.noregretsparenting.com

 

 

 

Nov

21

Parenting Our Kids, Parenting Our Parents

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Thanksgiving is for families, and multi-generational gatherings are blessings. My post today in the New York Times celebrates the opportunity to parent our kids and, when necessary, parent our parents.

http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/21/patience-consciousness-and-white-lies/

Best to all for a meaningful and memorable Thanksgiving

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