Ron Huxley's Parenting Toolbox

“To err is human; to forgive, infrequent.”
- Franklin P. Adams

Maybe it was the relative who said something hurtful, the co-worker who stole credit for your idea, or the lover who cheated on you. Whatever happened, you were left feeling angry, hurt, and bitter, and you have held onto those emotions, in some cases for years.

But a grudge is no life preserver. It’s not a healthy thing to hang onto. In fact, holding grudges can harm you both physically and mentally.

When you hold a grudge, your body behaves as if it’s under stress, with the stress hormones kicking into high gear. This can raise your blood pressure, increase your heart rate, and lower your immune system. It can also steal your energy and set you up for depression and other mental health problems.

By contrast, when you release a grudge your blood pressure goes down, your heart rate drops, and you are less likely to have psychological symptoms.

Forgiveness is not always easy to achieve. It may take time and effort on your part, and you have to be ready to do the work. But if you succeed, it can have real benefits for your own well-being.

Understanding forgiveness
Forgiveness is letting go of anger and resentment about past events. It does not mean you forget what happened or that you approve of what was done. It means altering how you view the situation. You can’t change what happened, but you can change your attitude about it and reduce its power over you.

Forgiveness is not done for the person who harmed you but to help you. The goal is to free yourself of the negative consequences of carrying anger inside you.

If you are in an abusive relationship, though, your main focus should be on getting out of the situation for good. You can work on forgiveness later, when you are safe.

Letting go
Try these tips to help you let go of a grudge:

• Write down your thoughts and emotions. Think about what upset you and how it makes you feel. Writing can help you get perspective on the event.
• Try to understand what happened. Often people do and say hurtful things without thinking of the harm they can cause. They may later regret their actions. Chances are you’ve done this yourself. If you think of a time you hurt someone, it may help you understand what happened. Understanding does not mean you approve.
• Decide if you are ready to forgive. Sometimes it takes a long time to get to this point. Being ready is the biggest step to forgiveness.
• Don’t wait for an apology. Remember, this is an internal process, something you are doing for yourself. You do not need to have a relationship with the person to practice forgiveness.
• Work through the emotions. It may help to write about your feelings, pray, or meditate.
• Seek support if you need it. You may want to talk to someone you trust, such as a friend or a therapist. Someone who is neutral may help you gain new insight.

Ron Huxley Relates: It is amazing how many of our parenting problems have to do with things we don’t typically think of as “parenting”. Unforgiveness can be one of the biggest hindrances to relating to our children and partner.

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There are a lot of amazing new educational apps out there, whether you’re looking for native apps or Web apps, apps for your mobile phone, for your tablet, or for your laptop. There a number of app stores too where you can find and download them: Apple’s iTunes and its Mac App Store, the Amazon Appstore, Google’s Android Market, the Chrome Web Store, the Google Apps Marketplace, GetJar, and so on.

These app stores all offer products in a designated education category, ostensibly designed to make it easier to locate apps for learning and studying (as opposed to apps for productivity or for entertainment, although sometimes these categories do overlap). But having an education category doesn’t necessarily make it easier to locate quality apps, as any cursory search there will quickly show you. Apps for teaching pre-schoolers the alphabet are grouped alongside those for studying calculus or human anatomy. Spanish for Beginners flash cards are found next to GRE test preparation.

When you’re spending money on these apps, those $1.99 charges add up.

Take, for example, a look at the educational apps in iTunes. The category highlights the top paid and top free apps, that is, listing them in terms of download and sales numbers. It also features “New and Noteworthy” applications, as well as “Staff Favorites.” But these are a wide variety of apps: Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream for your iPhone and an interactive Winnie the Pooh e-book.

This problem with very broad categorization exists outside the education category, too. If you search, say, for “science,” you’ll get some science magazines, some reference apps, and some not-safe-for-work results too.

iTunes does offer a ratings system, as do all the major app stores, whereby users can give apps zero to five stars and can write detailed reviews of their experiences with the app. But this too is frequently an unreliable way to discover new and interesting applications. Oftentimes, like websites such as Yelp, those who leave these reviews have either had terrible experiences with the app (“It crashes every time I use it”) or rave about it uncritically (“This is my preschooler’s favorite app.”) Too often, there are so few reviews, it’s hard to know whether customers’ responses are typical or not.

Although sites like the Google Apps Marketplace do try to help the review process by highlighting those tools that have been reviewed by a “Verified User” (in other words, by a real customer rather than a fictitious account created just for the purposes of boosting ratings), these ratings aren’t weighted more heavily or any differently than anonymous reviews. An app can have 20 anonymous five-star reviews, and without a closer look, it’s easy to mistake that as something better than an app that’s got only five reviews, but all from verified accounts.

The alternative, of course, to searching through App Stores and taking your best guess based on the review information there is to rely on the recommendation of people you know. Indeed, word-of-mouth remains one of the most important ways that developers can sell and buyers can find quality applications. Several educational blogs write detailed reviews of new educational apps, and sites like Moms With Apps try to showcase “family-friendly” developers’ work. And while “caveat emptor” holds true in app purchases as with anything you buy, one has to wonder if there aren’t better ways to help showcase quality apps.

It’s one thing, of course, when the applications are free. If you download a new educational game and you find that it’s not fun and not smart, it’s easy to simply delete it. But the stakes are higher once you’re looking at spending money on these apps (those $1.99 charges add up), particularly since the return policy for app marketplaces is limited: Android apps can be returned within 15 minutes, but iOS apps are non-refundable.

Readers, how do you find quality educational apps? What changes would you make to the app stores to give consumers better information, particularly when it comes to educational apps?

Ron Huxley Learns: How many parents have a smartphone or tabet that a child doesn’t want to play with? If there are going to use your digital device it is a good idea to have child safe apps for them to play and learn!

Children say the funniest things, yet all too often, I seem to forget them after a day or two.  I’ll start telling my husband.. “C said the funniest thing…” and then I can’t quite remember. Or I get it a little mixed up and it’s not nearly as funny as I remember.

So I started writing down the funnier moments of the day. I keep a jar on my desk, and when the kids say something particularly worthy of recording, I grab a scrap of paper (phone bill, envelope, chopstick holder.. whatever is lying around) and I quickly jot it down. I read about Joan Didion doing something similar when her daughter was a young girl in The Year of Magical Thinking.

Ron Huxley Reply: Children life in the the magical world of imagination and mystery. Use this to your advantage as a parent and start to collect little memories of times together. Leave messages for your child at night when they go to sleep and let them reply. Keep the conversations for the tougher days ahead.

As a parent, sometimes it seems like your day is filled with an endless stream of backtalk from your kids—you hear it when you ask them to do chores, when you tell them it’s time to stop watching TV, and when you lay down rules they don’t like. It’s one of the most frustrating and exhausting things that we deal with when we raise our kids.

“Your job as a parent is not to get your child to accept the rationality of your decisions. You just need them to follow the rules.”

 

Backtalk comes from a sense of powerlessness and frustration. People don’t like to feel powerless, and that includes children. So when kids are told “no” they feel like something’s been taken from them. They often feel compelled to fill that empty space with backtalk. I want to make the distinction here between backtalk and verbal abuse, because many times people confuse these two very different things. If your child has started saying hurtful or harmful things, the line between backtalk and verbal abuse has been crossed. For instance, if a child is cursing you, calling you names or threatening you, that’s verbal abuse. If your child is saying, “This isn’t fair, you don’t understand, you don’t love me,” that’s backtalk.

Verbal abuse is a very negative behavior and has to be dealt with aggressively and up front. It’s not that backtalk is harmless, but it’s certainly not as hurtful and hostile and attacking as verbal abuse is. For parents who are dealing with verbal abuse in their home right now, rest assured that we’ll be addressing this topic in an upcoming article.

Backtalk itself can take several forms. One is the kid who can’t keep quiet, no matter what you say: he or she has got to have the last word. And then there’s the child who wants you to understand their point after you’ve already said “no.” It’s easy for kids to get into the mindset of, “If I could just explain it better, you’d understand my situation.” So you’ll get kids who present their problem or request repeatedly in the hopes that their parents will give in and respond to it. If their parents don’t give them the answer they want, those kids will then try to re-explain, as if the parent doesn’t understand. Often, as they launch into their explanation for the third or fourth time, the child and the parent will both get more frustrated until it ends up in an argument or a shouting match.

Don’t Respond to Backtalk: You’ve already set the limit
Why do parents react to backtalk after they’ve already won the argument? I think parents often see it as their job to respond to their children: to teach, train and set limits on them. And backtalk is an invitation to do just that. Just as the child re-explains things to the parent if they’re told “no,” the parent “talks back” and re-explains things to their child. So the parent’s mindset seems to be, “If you really understood what I was saying, you wouldn’t talk back to me—you’d accept my answer.” Let me be clear here: That’s not a rational mindset. It leads parents into attending and prolonging arguments in which they don’t need to engage. Parents sometimes see backtalk as a challenge to their authority, but as long as you accomplish your objective, the fact is that your authority is fully intact.

Here’s an example:

Your child: “Can I stay out until 10 tonight?”
You: “No, because you have to get up early tomorrow for soccer practice.”
Your child: “Who cares? I don’t need that much sleep.”

You should stop right there. Any conversation you engage in after that is meant to convince your child that you have sound judgment. Know this: that’s the wrong objective because it addresses a completely different issue—whether or not you made a good decision. So once you give a reasonable explanation for the rule you’ve stated, your job is done. You can repeat it again if need be. You’ve already won the fight. But when you try to convince your child that you’re right and they continue to challenge you through backtalk, you’re just going to get more frustrated. Your job as a parent is not to get your child to accept the reasonableness and rationality of your decisions. You just need them to follow the rules. Look at it this way: when a cop stops you for speeding, he doesn’t care if you think that 35 miles an hour is too slow. He just tells you what the law is. If you argue with him, he repeats what the law is. If you don’t accept it, he hands you your ticket and walks away. If you become verbally abusive, he arrests you. Try to think of yourself as the cop here—you’re the parent making the rules, and your child needs to accept them or pay the consequences.

Shutting Down Backtalk: The Plan
In order to put a stop to backtalk, there are several things you have to do. First of all, when things are good, sit down with your child and lay down some ground rules. Discussions about these rules are critical to good communication and to cooperation down the road. I guarantee that you’ll feel better as a parent if you set up rules and follow them with your children. Your goal then becomes following the ground rules instead of trying to achieve your child’s acceptance. The first rule is, “I’ll explain something once and I’m not going to talk more after that. If you try to argue or debate, I’m going to walk away. If you follow me or if you continue there will be consequences.” You set limits on backtalk and you don’t give it power.

Another option is to set up a certain time of day in which your kid can talk back to you. You can say to them, “From 7-7:10 p.m., you can ask me to re-explain all my decisions. Save it for then. If you need to, write it down in a journal. Then at 7 o’clock, we’ll sit down and I’ll explain to you why you can’t date a 22 year old or how come you got grounded for smoking. But at 7:15, our discussion is done. If you try to keep it going there will be consequences.” That way, if you feel like you want to give your child an outlet to air his or her grievances, there’s a way to do it without getting bogged down in constant arguing.

Remember, there are two kinds of days that a kid has: there are good days and then there are days when things don’t go their way. Don’t try to fight the tide of disappointment that kids experience. They will use backtalk to get their way, but as a parent, you have to accept the fact that they will not always be happy with your decisions. Your job is to set the rules and enforce them because those roles are for your kid’s development and safety. Whether they like those rules or not, they have to learn to live with them.

Ron Huxley Respects: I have a lot of respect for James Lehman’s Total Transformation Program. Give him a look see and join our Parents “Inner Circle” for even more parenting help.

The definition is now being reassessed by an expert panel appointed by the American Psychiatric Association, which is completing work on the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the first major revision in 17 years. The D.S.M., as the manual is known, is the standard reference for mental disorders, driving research, treatment and insurance decisions. Most experts expect that the new manual will narrow the criteria for autism; the question is how sharply.

The results of the new analysis are preliminary, but they offer the most drastic estimate of how tightening the criteria for autism could affect the rate of diagnosis. For years, many experts have privately contended that the vagueness of the current criteria for autism and related disorders like Asperger syndrome was contributing to the increase in the rate of diagnoses — which has ballooned to one child in 100, according to some estimates.

The psychiatrists’ association is wrestling with one of the most agonizing questions in mental health — where to draw the line between unusual and abnormal — and its decisions are sure to be wrenching for some families. At a time when school budgets for special education are stretched, the new diagnosis could herald more pitched battles. Tens of thousands of people receive state-backed services to help offset the disorders’ disabling effects, which include sometimes severe learning and social problems, and the diagnosis is in many ways central to their lives. Close networks of parents have bonded over common experiences with children; and the children, too, may grow to find a sense of their own identity in their struggle with the disorder.

The proposed changes would probably exclude people with a diagnosis who were higher functioning. “I’m very concerned about the change in diagnosis, because I wonder if my daughter would even qualify,” said Mary Meyer of Ramsey, N.J. A diagnosis of Asperger syndrome was crucial to helping her daughter, who is 37, gain access to services that have helped tremendously. “She’s on disability, which is partly based on the Asperger’s; and I’m hoping to get her into supportive housing, which also depends on her diagnosis.”

The new analysis, presented Thursday at a meeting of the Icelandic Medical Association, opens a debate about just how many people the proposed diagnosis would affect.

The changes would narrow the diagnosis so much that it could effectively end the autism surge, said Dr. Fred R. Volkmar, director of the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine and an author of the new analysis of the proposal. “We would nip it in the bud.”

Experts working for the Psychiatric Association on the manual’s new definition — a group from which Dr. Volkmar resigned early on — strongly disagree about the proposed changes’ impact. “I don’t know how they’re getting those numbers,” Catherine Lord, a member of the task force working on the diagnosis, said about Dr. Volkmar’s report.

Previous projections have concluded that far fewer people would be excluded under the change, said Dr. Lord, director of the Institute for Brain Development, a joint project of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center and the New York Center for Autism.

Disagreement about the effect of the new definition will almost certainly increase scrutiny of the finer points of the psychiatric association’s changes to the manual. The revisions are about 90 percent complete and will be final by December, according to Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force making the revisions.

At least a million children and adults have a diagnosis of autism or a related disorder, like Asperger syndrome or “pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified,” also known as P.D.D.-N.O.S. People with Asperger’s or P.D.D.-N.O.S. endure some of the same social struggles as those with autism but do not meet the definition for the full-blown version. The proposed change would consolidate all three diagnoses under one category, autism spectrum disorder, eliminating Asperger syndrome and P.D.D.-N.O.S. from the manual. Under the current criteria, a person can qualify for the diagnosis by exhibiting 6 or more of 12 behaviors; under the proposed definition, the person would have to exhibit 3 deficits in social interaction and communication and at least 2 repetitive behaviors, a much narrower menu.

Dr. Kupfer said the changes were an attempt to clarify these variations and put them under one name. Some advocates have been concerned about the proposed changes.

“Our fear is that we are going to take a big step backward,” said Lori Shery, president of the Asperger Syndrome Education Network. “If clinicians say, ‘These kids don’t fit the criteria for an autism spectrum diagnosis,’ they are not going to get the supports and services they need, and they’re going to experience failure.”

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Amy Harmon contributed reporting.

Ron Huxley’s Reply: The DSM 5 (Diagnostic Statistical Manual) is one of those necessary evils. We need it for mental health professionals to communicate with one another and for qualifications for reimbursement through insurance companies or treatment services. We hate it because it labels people and can stigmatize them for life. How have you loved or hate your child’s diagnosis? Share with us by clicking the reply link.

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Ron Huxley Responds: This repost from Brain Blogger outlines how children who are chronically aggressive at children has increased risks of health issues later in life. The most obvious reason for this is that angry children turn out to be angry adults, which has serious social and health costs. The 15-year longitudinal study revealed that aggressive lifestyles led to increase drug use, alcohol dependency, injuries and overall poor health. Anger takes a toll on our lives!

The blog states: “Young children can be physically aggressive, owing to a combination of instinct, temperament, cultural and social influences, and (sometimes) not getting what they want. But, by the time most kids reach preschool age, they have learned to control their aggression with coping skills and relational techniques. However, children who do not learn to regulate aggressive behavior are at risk for physical and mental health issues, as well as serious patterns of aggression and violence, as adults.”

Children have to learn social skills. They will hit, bite, or knock other children down as a very primal solution to who “gets to play the toy” or any other challenging social situation. Parents have the responsibility to model appropriate social behavior and teach children common social skills.

Homes with lots of stress and conflict can make teaching children how to get along with others as they look for a release valve for their anxiety. This can turn inward or outward depending on the temperament of the child. The solution to this, while not always simple, is to have healthier marriages and improve family communication.

How have you managed anger in children? What tips can you share on teaching social skills?

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Ron Huxley Reacts: This little girl has some very big thoughts that parents need to hear…