Definition: Wikipedia
“Evolution is speeding up, not time. Consciousness is evolving, becoming aware of itself as creation's mentor. Children are evolution's front edge. They push at boundaries... challenge the status quo...irritate convention. That is their job...to set free all that sullies the human heart and blinds the mind to the relationship between the Creator and the Created." ~ P.M.H. Atwater~
MY WORK ... MY PASSION
• Certified Transpersonal Hypnotherapist ; Past experiences: Dream Analysis /10 Years Experience •Psychotherapist / Use of Gestalt, Jungian, Zen, Reality and Energy Therapies /10 Years Experience •EMDR • Men and Their Journey: the neuroscience of the male brain, and the implications in sexuality, education and relationship • Women: Their Transformation and Empowerment • ATOD (Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs) / 21 years experience •Ordained Interfaith Minister & Official Celebrant • Social Justice Advocate • Child and Human Rights Advocate • Spiritual Guide and Intuitive • Certified Reiki Practitioner • Mediation / Conflict Resolution • “Intentional Love” Parenting Strategy Groups • Parenting Workshops • Coaching for parents of Indigo, Crystal, and Rainbow Children • International Training: Israel & England • Critical Incident Stress Debriefing • Post-911 and Post-Katrina volunteer
MSW - UNC Chapel Hill
BSW - UNC Greensboro
With immense love I wish Happy Birthday to my three grandchildren!
May 22: Brannock
May 30: Brinkley
June 12: Brogan
All three have birthdays in the same 22 days of the year ....what a busy time for the family!
"An Unending Love"
This blog and video is devoted and dedicated to my precious daughter Jennifer, my grand daughters Brogan and Brinkley, and my grand son Brannock. They are hearts of my heart. Our connection through many lives..... is utterly infinite.
The Definition of Genius
"THRIVE"
"ONLY LOVE PREVAILS" ...."I've loved you for a thousand years; I'll love you for a thousand more....."
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
We're threading hope like fire
Down through the desperate blood
Night falling on the city
Quite something to behold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
This disappearing world
I'll be by your side
Hit 'em 'tween the eyes
Through the smoke and rising water
Cross the great divide
Baby till it all feels right
This disappearing world
This disappearing world
"The degree of our enlightenment is the degree of passion that we will have for the whole world." ~The Greystone Mandala
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." ~ Winston Churchill
Kant: "We are not rich by what we possess, but what we can do without."
"A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires." ~ Paulo Coelho
“It is not the critic who counts,not the man who who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”Theodore Roosevelt
TECHNOLOGY..........
In “Conversations with God”, by Neale Donald Walsch, there is a warning I think of. I refer to it as the Atlantis passage, and I've quoted it a few times before." As I have said, this isn't the first time your civilization has been at this brink,"
God tells Walsch. "I want to repeat this, because it is vital that you hear this. Once before on your planet, the technology you developed was far greater than your ability to use it responsibly. You are approaching the same point in human history again. It is vitally important that you understand this. Your present technology is threatening to outstrip your ability to use it wisely. Your society is on the verge of becoming a product of your technology rather than your technology being a product of your society. When a society becomes a product of its own technology, it destroys itself."
Friday, June 11, 2010
Are You A Helicopter Parent or A Lawnmower Parent?
Definition: Wikipedia
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Obama Will Triumph...So Will America!
2008 election.
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(But that wasn't good enough for his critics)
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(But that wasn't good enough for his critics)
(But that wasn't good enough for his critics)
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Tips For Teaching Kids Compassion
"Be nice."
Parents send their youngsters off with those two words so casually they may barely think about what they mean. In fact, the words can be relegated to nothing more than a lightweight, feel-good idea about getting along with relative calm and creating no waves.
However, given the importance they deserve, the words can inspire children to a lifetime of caring enough to not only co-exist with others, but to actively help the less fortunate and improve their community. Of course there are no guarantees about what grown children will do given any particular parenting approach. But, if you make the effort, you can evoke compassion in your children and increase the likelihood they will be kind and contributing adults.
The times certainly help open the subject for families. Headlines draw stark attention to the awful reality of lives without compassion: Columbine; Sept. 11; sniper shootings in the nation's capital; terrorist bombings in Saudi Arabia.
Short of physical violence are the cruel names, the bullying and the one-upmanship some youth face. "We've gone from being a compassionate society to being a competitive society," says East Syracuse, N.Y., psychotherapist Jennifer Cornish Genovese, who hosts the radio programs "Parenting Matters" on WAER-FM 88 Saturday mornings and "Teen Talk" on WWHT-FM 107.9 and 106.9 Sunday mornings. "Competition often works against compassion."
How do you change that? Start by understanding that compassion is not just feeling sorry for someone or just refraining from hitting your playmate. "It's more than just a feeling," says the Rev. James Bresnahan, a Lutheran minister in Central New York. "Compassion involves the act." It entails both the heart that experiences it and the mind and body that bring it about.
Although you cannot "teach" compassion like a step-by-step math lesson, you can instill it in your children by making changes in your lifelong daily routine and by regularly stepping outside your ordinary schedule to make a difference for someone else.
DAILY ROUTINE: BOND AND MODEL
When it comes to modeling compassion for your children, start with your overall parenting style, and start at birth. Babies need a strong, loving bond with a caregiver, whether it is a mother, a father, a grandparent or another adult.
Without that attachment, babies will later have difficulty showing love and kindness, says Alice Sterling Honig, professor emerita of child development at Syracuse University. The early weeks and months of infancy are crucial. "It's the beginning," Honig says. "Whether it's about a skill in football, a skill in math or a skill in compassion, it's the beginning that really matters. "When you have a relationship that's loving and secure with an adult, then you are probably going to be able to give to others in life the way you were given unto," says Honig, who has written several child development books.
Respond quickly to your child's cries and learn to give him what he needs, whether it's a clean diaper, a hug, a drink or just reassurance. Babies won't remember the sweet words you whisper, Honig says, but they will remember "deep in their bones that they were given unto."
As infants become toddlers, however, it's important they observe parents modeling the kind of behavior they are to emulate. "Kids see our every move," Genovese says. "Are we modeling in the grocery store by pushing ahead in line, or are we letting the older person go ahead?"
Just like a 1-year-old will copy her parents by tapping away on a computer keyboard, children will copy social behaviors from their caregivers. "We model compassion by being nice to each other, my husband and I," says marriage and family therapist Linda Stone Fish of Central New York.
Analyze your own parenting style. It likely fits within one of three categories.
Permissive parents, for example, let the child do just about anything. They don't enforce rules and usually go along with whatever the child wants. They don't set high expectations for the child's behavior.
At the other end of the spectrum is the authoritarian model. Such parents won't let the child get away with anything. They are quick to crack down and often yell orders. Punishment is used to get immediate obedience.
Then there are authoritative parents, who are not too permissive and not too authoritarian. "You are for your kid 100 percent," Honig says. "You have clear rules, reasons for the rules, a genuine interest in your child's needs and high expectations."
Honig says the authoritative approach is the best for raising a compassionate child. "If you are very permissive, you get a spoiled brat. If you are authoritarian, you get a real sneak. He may be an altar boy and always says 'Yes, sir,' but he knows how to beat up kids and cheat on tests and hide it," Honig says.
If you are authoritative, you are kind but firm. You help children find alternative ways to deal with situations, encouraging their input. When they act inappropriately, you teach prosocial behaviors. Your goal is for children to do the right thing because of internal desire to do so, not because they fear punishment.
OLDER KIDS: TALK, TALK, TALK
As children get older, talking becomes even more important. They need to talk about their feelings, your feelings, and what other people may need or feel. They need to know it's not OK to make fun of others who are different; moreover, they need to imagine what others may be experiencing.
Bresnahan says teaching such sensitivity and awareness is an important component of instilling compassion. "Parents should expose their kids to people and circumstances beyond what they meet every day," he says. That can start with sharing the newspaper. "If there is an earthquake somewhere in the world, talk about what it must be like to have lost a home."
Parents should talk about how kids who are different from them feel. They can discuss kids who are overweight, boys who are thin and slight, children who are of a different race or social clique or any other "difference" kids see.
Parents should also encourage their children to talk about what they themselves may experience at school or in the community. Are they having problems with bullies? Help your child resolve these conflicts peacefully.
OUTSIDE THE ROUTINE: VOLUNTEER
Besides making changes in your day-to-day life, you can build on this groundwork by regularly involving your children in volunteerism.
"It's not just telling kids 'Go volunteer,'" Genovese says. It's doing it with them and showing them that helping others is important to you.
When Jim and Marcie Sonneborn's first son was 3, he helped them distribute toys at the United Way's Christmas Bureau. Seventeen years and two more sons later, the Central New York family still makes the Christmas Bureau an annual tradition.
"My kids have a lot of things," Jim Sonneborn explains. "They are very blessed. They are bright and have the opportunity to get a good education. They have two parents in the same household.
"Not everybody has all those advantages,” Sonneborn explains. “I want them to appreciate their getting a pile of things when other kids may only get one present. It transcends the specifics of the Christmas Bureau. It also teaches them it feels good to help other people.”
And when families volunteer together, the spirit is contagious. Sonneborn says his sons also volunteer as individuals with their own specific projects, such as playing piano at a nursing home.
Parents of school-age children will find that they often have an ally in their child’s teacher and school administrators. Many schools offer what is called “character education,” a subject required by many states who passed safe schools legislation after the Columbine tragedy. The laws cover everything from child abuse to codes of conduct to anti-harassment training. They also have prompted schools to expand value lessons like respect and caring.
Many schools offer opportunities for students to get involved in service projects like Habitat for Humanity, school ground cleanup days, clothing drives, and toy distributions.
You can also encourage children to find their own way to help. One 13-year-old
started volunteering at a jewish home when he was 8. He became particularly close to a resident who later died. The experience taught him "it makes me feel really good to help people," he says.
When Carol Leonard's children were young, they regularly helped make about 150 sandwiches to take to a homeless shelter. "I felt they should be doing something for the less fortunate and realize there were others who didn't have everything," she says.
The childhood experience took root. Now Leonard's daughter, 40, practices the compassion she first observed at her parents' knee. She volunteers regularly at charitable agency where she sorts clothing, performs office duties, and helps out with the after-school program.
She espouses the same ideals her parents discussed and demonstrated.
"I'm not a prejudiced person," Leonard's daughter says. "Whether you're a lawyer, a doctor or a janitor, wherever you live and however you get by, you're still a person. You have feelings and you have wants, needs and ambitions. We are all created equally."
You should take the time to instill compassion in your children because there's a good chance they will carry that belief into adulthood and become caring and contributing members of society.
FAMILY VOLUNTEERING TIPS
Here are age-appropriate ideas:
Ages 1-4: Accompany adult on visit to nursing home; go along on Meals-on-Wheels delivery.
Ages 5-7: Make sandwiches for the homeless; again, come along to nursing homes or home visits.
Ages 8 and up: Help set tables and serve food at soup kitchen;
collect clothing or supplies.
Teens: Volunteer at senior homes; help visually impaired go for walks; read to children in day care.
Whole family: Create holiday cards for hospitalized children or senior citizens; make favors for nursing homes or Meals-on-Wheels.
In addition, the United Way is a clearinghouse for volunteer opportunities. Call your local United Way for volunteer projects.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
23 Countries Ban Corporal Punishment of Kids in Homes
The science also shows that corporal punishment is like smoking: It's a rare human being who can refrain from stepping up from a mild, relatively harmless dose to an excessive and harmful one. Three cigarettes a month won't hurt you much, and a little smack on the behind once a month won't harm your child. But who smokes three cigarettes a month? To call corporal punishment addictive would be imprecise, but there's a strong natural tendency to escalate the frequency and severity of punishment. More than one-third of all parents who start out with relatively mild punishments end up crossing the line drawn by the state to define child abuse: hitting with an object, harsh and cruel hitting, and so on. Children, endowed with wonderful flexibility and ability to learn, typically adapt to punishment faster than parents can escalate it, which helps encourage a little hitting to lead to a lot of hitting. And, like frequent smoking, frequent corporal punishment has serious, well-proven bad effects.
The negative effects on children include increased aggression and noncompliance—the very misbehaviors that most often inspire parents to hit in the first place—as well as poor academic achievement, poor quality of parent-child relationships, and increased risk of a mental-health problem (depression or anxiety, for instance). High levels of corporal punishment are also associated with problems that crop up later in life, including diminished ability to control one's impulses and poor physical-health outcomes (cancer, heart disease, chronic respiratory disease). Plus, there's the effect of increasing parents' aggression, and don't forget the consistent finding that physical punishment is a weak strategy for permanently changing behavior.
But parents keep on hitting.
Why? The key is corporal punishment's temporary effectiveness in stopping a behavior. It does work—for a moment, anyway. The direct experience of that momentary pause in misbehavior has a powerful effect, conditioning the parent to hit again next time to achieve that jolt of fleeting success and blinding the parent to the long-term failure of hitting to improve behavior. The research consistently shows that the unwanted behavior will return at the same rate as before. But parents believe that corporal punishment works, and they are further encouraged in that belief by feeling that they have a right and even a duty to punish as harshly as necessary.
Part of the problem is that most of us pay, at best, selective attention to science—and scientists, for their part, have not done a good job of publicizing what they know about corporal punishment. Studies of parents have demonstrated that if they are predisposed not to see a problem in the way they rear their children, then they tend to dismiss any scientific finding suggesting that this presumed nonproblem is, in fact, a problem. In other words, if parents believe that hitting is an effective way to control children's behavior, and especially if that conviction is backed up by a strong moral, religious, or other cultural rationale for corporal punishment, they will confidently throw out any scientific findings that don't comport with their sense of their own experience.
The catch is that we frequently misperceive our own experience. Studies of parents' perceptions of child rearing, in particular, show that memory is an extremely unreliable guide in judging the efficacy of punishment. Those who believe in corporal punishment tend to remember that hitting a child worked: She talked back to me, I slapped her face, she shut her mouth. But they tend to forget that, after the brief pause brought on by having her face slapped, the child talked back again, and the talking back grew nastier and more frequent over time as the slaps grew harder.
So what's the case for not hitting? It can be argued from the science: Physical discipline doesn't work over the long run, it has bad side effects, and mild punishment often becomes more severe over time. Opponents of corporal punishment also advance moral and legal arguments. If you hit another adult you can be arrested and sued, after all, so shouldn't our smallest, weakest citizens have a right to equal or even more-than-equal protection under the law? In this country, if you do the same thing to your dog that you do to your child, you're more likely to get in trouble for mistreating the dog.
The combination of scientific and moral/legal arguments has been effective in debates about discipline in public schools. Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have banned corporal punishment in the schools. But so far, we have shown ourselves unwilling to extend that debate beyond the schools and into the ideologically sacred circle of the family. Where the argument against corporal punishment in the schools has prevailed, in fact, it has often cited parents' individual right to punish their own children as they, and not educators acting for the state, see fit. The situation is different in other countries. You may not be surprised to hear that 91 countries have banned corporal punishment in the schools, but you may be surprised to hear that 23 countries have banned corporal punishment everywhere within their borders, including in the home.
I know what you're thinking: Are there really 23 Scandinavian countries? Sweden was, indeed, the first to pass a comprehensive ban, but the list also includes Hungary, Bulgaria, Spain, Israel, Portugal, Greece, Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela, and New Zealand. According to advocates of the ban, another 20 or so countries are committed to full prohibition and/or are debating prohibitionist bills in parliament. The Council of Europe was the first intergovernmental body to launch a campaign for universal prohibition across its 47 member countries.
Practically nobody in America knows or cares that the United Nations has set a target date of 2009 for a universal prohibition of violence against children that would include a ban on corporal punishment in the home. Americans no doubt have many reasons—some of them quite good—to ignore or laugh off instructions from the United Nations on how to raise their kids. And it's naive to think that comprehensive bans are comprehensively effective. Kids still get hit in every country on earth. But especially because such bans are usually promoted with large public campaigns of education and opinion-shaping (similar to successful efforts in this country to change attitudes toward littering and smoking), they do have measurable good effects. So far, the results suggest that after the ban is passed, parents hit less and are less favorably inclined toward physical discipline, and the country is not overwhelmed by a wave of brattiness and delinquency. The opposite, in fact. If anything, the results tell us that there's less deviant child behavior.
There could conceivably be good reasons for Americans to decide, after careful consideration, that our commitment to the privacy and individual rights of parents is too strong to allow for an enforceable comprehensive ban on corporal punishment. But we don't seem to be ready to join much of the rest of the world in even having a serious discussion about such a ban. In the overheated climate of nondebate encouraged by those who would have us believe that we are embroiled in an ongoing high-stakes culture war, we mostly just declaim our fixed opinions at one another.
One result of this standoff is that the United States, despite being one of the primary authors of the U.N.'s Convention on the Rights of Children, which specifies that governments must take appropriate measures to protect children from "all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation," is one of only two nations that have not ratified it. The other is Somalia; 192 nations have ratified it. According to my colleague Liz Gershoff of the University of Michigan, a leading expert on corporal punishment of children, the main arguments that have so far prevented us from ratifying it include the ones you would expect—it would undermine American parents' authority as well as U.S. sovereignty—plus a couple of others that you might not have expected: It would not allow 17-year-olds to enlist in the armed forces, and (although the Supreme Court's decision in Roper v. Simmons has made this one moot, at least for now) it would not allow executions of people who committed capital crimes when they were under 18.
We have so far limited our national debate on corporal punishment by focusing it on the schools and conducting it at the local and state level. We have shied away from even theoretically questioning the primacy of rights that parents exercise in the home, where most of the hitting takes place. Whatever one's position on corporal punishment, we ought to be able to at least discuss it with each other like grownups.
Alan E. Kazdin, who was president of the American Psychological Association in 2008, is John M. Musser professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale University and director of Yale's Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic.