A Servant Named Mom

A mom recently told me how frustrated she was to be continually doing most of the housework while her husband relaxed watching TV and her kids goofed around. They took it for granted that she would get things done and she was feeling resentful and unappreciated. Since her kids were 10 and 12-years-old, they were certainly capable of helping out but they rarely did.

What can you do if you find yourself being your family’s servant and want to change the situation? One approach is to call a family meeting to create a plan for dividing up the household chores.

Begin the meeting by writing down all the tasks that needed to be done in order to keep your home functioning. Try to include everything from bringing in the mail and buying groceries to paying bills.

Next estimate how often each task needed to be done. For example, how often does your family agree the bathroom should be cleaned? The bedding washed? The floors vacuumed?

Now create a list showing all the tasks that need to be done each week. For tasks that need to be done each day like preparing dinner, you may want to write down “Monday dinner”, “Tuesday dinner” and so on. This way different people can sign up for different days. Finally have everyone sign up for the tasks they will be doing.

You can plan to have another family meeting in a week to check with everyone on how things are going and if anyone wants to change chores. Posting the chore list in a central location can help everyone remember their commitments. It can also be helpful for children to have their own chore list so they can easily check it off.

Balancing the workload will help everyone feel like an important contributor to your family’s success!

What will your children's legacy be?

One of the gifts Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, left the world was the commencement speech he gave at the Stanford College graduation in 2005. This speech captured the wisdom he had learned from his experiences - wisdom that can help us as parents.

Dreams for Your Children

What dreams do you have for your children? Do you hope that they will one day go to college? Steve Jobs biological mom sure did. She was an unwed college graduate student and decided to have him adopted by college graduates. However, these college graduates wanted a girl not a boy so he ended up being adopted by a mom who had not graduated from college and a dad who had not graduated from high school.

His biological mom only agreed to sign the adoption papers after the couple agreed they would send Steve to college. Did they keep their promise? Yes. He attended Reed College for six months before deciding the cost of spending his parents' savings wasn't worth it.

Although he dropped out of college, he found a way to attend some of the classes that interested him the most. While he did not attend college in the way his biological mom hoped he would, he did learn what he needed to know to pursue his own dreams.

Your Children's Great Work

What type of work do you hope your children will someday have? Your children are deeply attuned to your desires for them.

(read the rest of the article at Priceless Parenting)

Ooshee, Whooshee, Gooshe Time!

Whenever she came home from work, the first thing Mary liked to do was change into more comfortable clothes. This simple task was made less pleasant by her young son, Ryan, since he always seemed to cause trouble during this time. Why couldn’t he just behave for a few minutes while she changed?!

One day it dawned on Mary that Ryan was desperate for some of her attention and preferred negative attention over no attention at all. She changed the dynamics by establishing what she called Ooshee, Whooshee, Gooshe Time.

Instead of immediately changing her clothes after work, the first thing she did was sit down with Ryan for their 5 to 10 minutes of Ooshee, Whooshee, Gooshe Time. He got her undivided attention for whatever he wanted to discuss or do. Having this special time together seemed to make the rest of the evening go so much better.

Suicide Without a Warning

I’ve recently spoken to two moms whose teens were suicidal. Neither thought their teen was thinking of killing themselves. They didn’t see any warning signs.

In one case, Diane had noticed her daughter, Chloe, had been overreacting to little things at home. Diane thought maybe it was from the pressure of the new school year or perhaps just hormones. However, when Chloe blew up at her brother for supposedly losing her hairbands (which in fact Chloe had accidentally tossed in with the dirty laundry), Diane decided to make an appointment for Chloe to see the school psychologist.

After seeing Chloe, the psychologist immediately called Diane. This was serious. Chloe had a plan for how she was going to kill herself. Diane was shocked; she had no idea that Chloe had even considered killing herself. Chloe entered an in-patient treatment program and got the help she needed.

The other mom, Susan, also did not see any suicide warning signs in her 16-year-old son Ryan. Susan and Ryan’s father had both volunteered for a few years on a suicide prevention hotline so they were well aware of the warning signs. Ryan planned out his suicide without either of his parents realizing what was going on. Tragically, he succeeded in killing himself last month.

Losing a child to suicide is a parent’s worst nightmare. What can we do to help prevent this type of tragedy with our own children? One thing we can do is discuss our concerns around suicide with our teens. We can ask them “Have you ever thought about killing yourself?” Asking the question won’t plant the idea in their heads, however, it will give them the opportunity to talk.

Do you really need to bring up such an unpleasant topic with your teens? Yes, you do. The 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Survey conducted by the Center for Disease Control and local schools found that one in 16 high school students had attempted suicide in the previous year.

If you'd like more information about youth suicide and talking to your teens, check out the Parent Resource Program by the Jason Foundation.

Fighting or Sticking Together?

I heard a story at church about a mom who one day sat down in her backyard with a book to enjoy a few moments of quiet pleasure. No sooner than she was settled into her comfortable chair when she heard her children and their friends begin fighting with each other. This was not the first time that she had been disturbed by their bickering.

She called them over. When they reluctantly made it to her, she asked them to each get two sticks. They set off to get their sticks and soon they were arguing over who had a certain stick first and whose sticks were better.

When they finally brought the sticks to her, she asked them to each give her one of their sticks. She tied these sticks up with a ribbon. She then asked the children to break their remaining stick. Each child was easily able to break their stick.

Next she handed the bundle of sticks tied with the ribbon to the youngest child to break. However, the child could not break the bundle of sticks. All the children were given a turn and none of them could break the bundle of sticks.

She explained to the children that they are each like one stick that can easily be broken. However when they stay together like the bundle of sticks, they are stronger. It was a wonderful demonstration of the power of sticking together instead of fighting!

Calming a Crying Baby

There's nothing like an inconsolable, crying baby to put a parent on edge. What would it be worth to know a routine that would reliably calm down an infant?

Dr. Harvey Karp, author of The Happiest Baby on the Block, proposes a combination of behaviors that will quickly soothe most babies. There are five activities used to calm the baby he refers to as the "5 S's":

• swaddle
• side/stomach position
• shushing
• swinging
• sucking

My daughter did a lot of crying the first few months. I wished I would have known about these ideas for calming her down.

This video shows a dad quickly calming his crying baby using this method:

Your Real Influence on Your Kids

What do economists have to tell us about parenting? A recent Freakonomics Radio podcast interviewed a number of economists trying to answer the question “how much do parents really matter, and in what dimensions?”

They discussed that research shows parents have little influence on the amount of education their children ultimately received or the amount of money their adult children eventually make. Parents have a far greater influence on their children’s relationship skills.

Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids had this to say:

There’s a great Swedish twins study, where the twins were in their fifties and sixties and seventies, and even when you’re in your seventies, whether or not your parents were kind to you stays with you, and you know, identical twins, fraternal twins have similar and quite high levels of agreement on these questions, which is the smoking gun for nurture really mattering. So the way that your kids feels about and remembers you. The quality of the relationship. This is where you really have an effect and where it is very long lasting, it really does last a lifetime.

Your children learn to how to love from you loving them. They learn how to treat others with empathy by experiencing you treating them with empathy. It is your relationship with them that has the biggest influence on them.