At a time when people seem to be obsessed with experts, how do you become your own?  It takes time and focus but it can be done.  Depending on how much effort you put into it, it can even be life changing.

First, you need to know yourself and be honest with yourself.  Have you ever followed someone else’s advice that didn’t feel right but you pushed through it anyway?  You need to really FEEL your truth not just talk yourself into someone else’s.  That is one of the most common ways that I have seen people do something that they really knew wasn’t best for them.  They ignored their inner truth and thought that having a positive outlook would make everything all better.  Don’t fake it!  If you have ideals and goals that are important to you, don’t let anyone talk you out of them.

You need to be patient with yourself and check in with yourself often.  If you can be in the habit of constantly checking in with yourself you can make course corrections as you go along.  Have you ever had an experience where you realized you made a big mistake, corrected it and then realized that you had little signs along the way but you ignored them?  Correcting the little mistakes along the way is a lot easier than trying to fix a big one at a much later time.  Unfortunately, a big fix often results in people making that big mistake all over again because they don’t go back and do the work on themselves regarding the whys and hows of the little things they kept ignoring.

You need to take responsibility for yourself and not do only what feels good to you in the moment.  For some, doing what feels good in the moment means ignoring or running away from the problem.  People turn to un-parenting, divorce, quitting their job, keeping unsupportive friends, etc. often when what they really need to do is find a way to work on what got them there in the first place.  The urge to fix something is only too easy to satisfy.  You have heard “Wherever you go, there you are.”  Running away or pretending it doesn’t exist by shutting down is not going to fix anything.

You need to be open to being wrong.  Now this doesn’t mean you need to be self-deprecating by sharing every mistake you make with the world.  It just means allowing yourself to be imperfect.  You are allowed to change your mind!  Sometimes you can’t see the big picture yet.  When you start seeing where things are going you can make adjustments along the way.  Sometimes you need to feel your way into a new point of view.  Don’t pressure yourself into finding the perfect solution now.  It will most likely evolve.

The one thing I ALWAYS go back to when I talk to anyone about this topic, is to keep focusing, and refocusing, on what you want.  Sometimes that’s a moving target.  You may realize that what you thought you wanted isn’t really what you truly want on the way there.  It’s ok to change your mind and retune it.  Don’t force yourself to get there but do at least one thing every day that will help you keep you moving in that direction.

Becoming your own expert doesn’t happen overnight.  You can’t take a course and become certified.  You have to make the commitment to yourself to do it.  You need to become extremely self-aware.  I also want you to understand that in the process you will be slowly redefining your relationships, but if done authentically and patiently there is no reason that the shifts that take place can’t be positive ones.

. . . . . . .

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was half asleep, nursing our one year old when the phone rang.  It was my mother in law calling us in Nashville to see if my husband was on a plane in the Northeast.  Since this was such a confusing question it took a minute to get past how frantic she was to find out why she was calling in such a state.  She had seen the news about the plane hitting the first tower.

After assuring her that there was no reason that my husband would have been on one of those flights and that he was home and totally fine, we turned on the news just in time to see the second plane hit the tower.  Little did we know that someone from the company my husband works for was on one of those planes.  Our first born, who was four at the time, must have heard our reactions because he came running into the room asking what was wrong. 

For a split second I was overcome with the urge to tell him what we just witnessed but I stopped myself.  I also realized that in that moment there must have been many other parents who felt that same urge, and without thinking, blurted out what they just saw.  Thankfully my husband and I were on the same page and we told him that there was something bad that we just saw on the news and that it would be ok.  It was just very sad.  There is nothing like the innocence of a child to remind you to be responsible.

In the years since then, we have only taught our kids about current events as long as they were pertinent to their lives.  Our oldest does know what happened on 911 but I waited to tell him until he had the emotional maturity to understand it.  I never wanted him or his siblings to live in fear due to what happened.

When I was in junior high, I remember a rash of kids in high school becoming depressed and feeling hopeless because they were shown The Day After, a movie about a small Kansas town after a nuclear holocaust.  This was a fictional movie created as a result of the tension that the Cold War had created and the emotional toll it took on these kids was one that no one would soon forget.  Clearly remembering how that affected so many teenagers has always dictated how we have relayed certain events to our kids. 

To this day, I fail to understand why there is a push for kids as young as kindergarten to learn about slavery never mind 9/11.  They don't have the emotional maturity to understand any of it.  Most adults don't even fully understand.  In fact, I wouldn't doubt that learning about violence in the adult world, now or in the past, affects some of children's attitudes and emotional development as they get older.  Although I don't watch the news anymore, I still continue to filter the things I do learn about to our children.  I am grateful that what they do learn about and how they learn it is totally in my control.

Photo credit - Sister72

Question submitted via email:

I am having trouble with the whole self-regulation thing?  My child will stay up all night, sleep all day, play video games for hours and forget to eat.  He just doesn't seem to get it!  As much as I love the philosophy of letting him learn how to self-regulate, it has gotten to the point where this just isn't healthy!  He is only 10 years old.  What do I do?


I understand what a tremendous amount of faith it takes in realizing that children can and do learn how to self regulate.  Very, very few of us were raised that way so it's hard for us to just let go and see how the process works because we have never experienced it.  We were raised with sets of arbitrary rules that often made no sense and didn't take anyone's needs or individuality into account.  Because we don't know how it works, we are unsure of the whole process.  We are left feeling like we are "supposed" to do things a certain way even if those ways don't work and cause nothing but struggle and frustration for everyone.

First of all, you have to realize that our kids are born already knowing how to do some very basic self-regulation.  Babies know when they are full.  They know when they need to sleep.  They know how to get our attention when they need it.  They are born innately knowing how to do all of this.  They un-learn how to do many of this through external circumstances. 

They unlearn this skill through rules that parents feel like they are supposed to enforce that in reality do not make sense for the child or for their family.  Parents make their kids eat things they hate.  They make their kids go to "sleep" when they aren't tired.  They get them out of bed when they really need more sleep.  They put them on an artificial schedule that doesn't fit with the child's individual needs, very often, from the time the child is born

They also unlearn self-regulation from seeing parents set bad examples.   They see their parents push themselves to eat more than they should or skip meals.  They see them work too hard or stay up too late. They see them spending way more time then they should in front of the computer.  Whether they mean to or not, sometimes parents are the ones that show them how to push things further than they should.

I also have to say that even with parents that do not force arbitrary rules and schedules and those have control of themselves, there are kids that get so into something that they overdo it all on their own. Normally I would I would suggest giving it a little time if what they are doing isn't harming anyone, including themselves.  To get back to your specific question, since you say it's at the point where it isn't healthy for him, don't be afraid to step in and give some guidance.  Ask him how he is feeling.  Pay close attention to any changes in behavior that indicate that maybe he should take a break because he isn't listening to how he his body is feeling.  Is he getting agitated?  Does he look happy?  Tired?  Bored? Tuned out? Overstimulated?  Is he eating?  Talking with him about how he's feeling as well as talking about what you are observing about him will help him to eventually pay closer attention to when he needs to take a break.

To use my own family as an example, two of my kids are polar opposites when it comes to this issue.  Recently one of them has really gotten into an online game that he will play with his friends.  He will get on Skype so he can talk to them while he plays and it's really easy for him to get sucked in for hours.  However, he stops when he's hungry or when he wants to go and do something else.  My other son however had a much harder time learning to stop when he needed to at the same age.  He wouldn't pay attention to the fact that his eyes would start to hurt after a while of playing and I would have to step in and tell him that his eyes looked tired.  He would forget to eat, which he has a tendency to do anyway and gaming would make this tendency worse.  I have learned to just work with each of my kids' personalities and individual needs and help them pay attention to certain things when they needed to.  They have learned to self regulate but not without gentle, respectful guidance.  They still need reminders sometimes. 

Things can change too!  One of them may be going through a growth spurt and they need more hours of sleep than they did previously.  There may be some scheduling changes where they have to be certain places at certain times that they weren't used to and they will need reminders of that.  The key is to keep working with your child.

Wanting your child to learn self-regulation does not mean that you just sit back and not be a parent to them.  It is knowing your child so well that you are able to guide them to do what is right for themselves.

I have received more questions on the topic and will continue to stay on the topic as long as I need to in order to answer them all.  If you have more questions, don't hesitate to submit them as well!

Photo credit - fd's photostream

Recently our 10 year-old son, Colin, discovered we had the original Halo for our old Xbox.  He saw it in storage and asked me if he could play it.  After checking the rating on it, and seeing that it was rated M, I told him that I didn’t think it was appropriate for his age due to violence, language or intensity but I wasn't sure so I’d ask dad about it.  Since I don’t have very much time, or desire for that matter, to play video games anymore I rely on published reviews and friends’ opinions on the appropriateness of certain games.  This was one game that I heard mentioned within some gaming circles as not necessarily deserving of the “Mature” rating.

We ultimately decided to let him play it.  I figured I could watch the kids play it as well as ask them if there was anything that bothered them about it.  After my husband also played it with our son, we decided that our 8 year old, Ethan, was mature enough to play it as well.  I’ll admit that I still had my reservations but I was taking a watch and see sort of approach with it.

About two weeks after the kids started playing it, we had an incident that made me realize that my kids were way more in tune with reality no matter what studies try to show about kids and video games.  It was right after dinner and the six of us were running around the house chasing each other.  Everyone was laughing and having a great time.  We were all at the point where we were out of breath so I decided to run upstairs to check the afternoon’s emails before it got too late.

It was about two minutes later that I hear our four year-old daughter, Keira, crying, and about sixty seconds after that Colin and Ethan came running upstairs with tears in their eyes saying “Dad needs you.”  You can imagine what I started to feel at that instant but I managed to take a deep breath and quickly go downstairs instead of panicking.

As soon as I walked in the kitchen, I was thankful that the first thing I saw was the quarter inch long, tiny cut above Keira’s eye.  If I had seen all of the blood first, I probably would have been as upset as the boys.  She was covered in blood from the top of one side of her head, down her arm and elbow, and down the side of her leg.  My husband was holding her and trying to calm her down so he hadn’t been able to determine where the blood had come from yet.  All I can figure is that since she had just been running around, her blood was really pumping and then when she hit her head of the side of the table, the first thing she most likely did was rub where she hurt herself, spreading the blood everywhere.

I got her cleaned up and put some medicine on her cut which had stopped bleeding just as quickly as it had started.  Then my ten year old looks up at me and says:

“Halo is nowhere near as scary as THAT was!”

My eight year-old, who was standing next to him with big tears in his eyes says, “Yeah!  I thought Keira was going to die.”

I will never, ever wonder if my kids truly understand the difference between video game violence and reality ever again!

(Thankfully, Keira didn’t need any stitches and it looked like a tiny scratch above her eye by the next day.)

I read something this morning that I feel compelled to share with you.  The link below is to a very long blog, but please set aside the time to read through the entire thing.  This is a well thought out opinion about the sexualization of women from a blogger that I have been following for a while.  You will probably start reading it and react to this or that along the way, but stick it out to the end because he does address probably every thing you may have had a reaction to.

As a side note, he has recently questioned his own words regarding the ladies covering up more part, so understand that this is a writer that took the time to get past the BS and write something as honestly as he could, even if he later was questioning some of what he wrote.  The integrity is there and that's what really counts, in my opinion.

I hope that you can take at least a few of things from the perspective he shares and apply them in your own way.  You all know how strongly I feel about setting the best example for our children that we can.  Our children learn from what we DO even more strongly than from what we SAY.  It's about time we take our power back and stop buying into what is sold to us and acting mindlessly, as Dan puts it, like Pavlov's Dogs.

I hope you enjoy this fresh perspective as much as I did!

single dad laughing - Worthless women and the men who make them

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