Own Your Focus

It's awful when our kid's come to us feeling down on themselves because of a peer. We see our kids and value them more than anything, and when THEY don't see that, it really hurts. So today, I want to build on a concept I shared a few weeks ago: we can use our feelings of envy to investigate and discover what matters to us. Guess what? We can teach our kids to do the same thing.

For example, your child comes in from school and is clearly downcast. Shoulders slumped, depressed. You learn someone in their class got asked to play guitar for a new band. Your child plays guitar, and it was a gut-punch they didn't get asked. They express feelings of not being good enough, and are exhibiting other negative ideas about them as a person vs their skill level.

Here's what you can do:

1. Empathize - "it's so hard when we don't get picked. We all hate that feeling. I'm here with you." 

2. Ask questions, starting with guitar. Do you love playing it? What about a band is appealing to you?...

It's no secret that Brené Brown is one of my heroes. When I first came upon her research, it put words to what I was seeing in my pediatric practice: kids were sickest when the parents were stressed and living in constant overwhelm. I've re-read Daring Greatly about 1000 times, and today I'm sharing one of my favorite quotes. This stopped me in my tracks about parenting:

"Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting".

-Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

I could shout this from the rooftops. I saw this everyday with children's physical health, and having research to back up what I was seeing validated my 20 years of experience as a pediatrician. As parents, we need to deal with our stress, our anxiety, our coping mechanisms - our very way of life - if we want our kids to thrive later in life. It's the reason I created a program to help parents get their lives on track. Parents,...