Here’s a story of a mother and her daughter at the beginning of their long summer break. She’s trying to get through the holidays by doing Special Time early in the day with her 8 year old daughter, to get things set the right way at the beginning of the day.
Starting school – for the first time, or at a new school, or even after the long summer break, can be a challenge for both our children and ourselves. We carefully pack their school bag with the things that will help them through their day – a nutritious lunch, a spare pair of pants and pencils. But it’s easy to forget our children carry an emotional backpack as well. Our special role, as parents and carers, is to help them pack and unpack that bag. It’s at least as important as a healthy lunch or a good night’s sleep. Continue reading
My friend and I were doing Special Time together with her 4-year-old son, Cameron, at the local park. There were a lot of bull-ants (a large and very aggressive kind of ant) on the ground.
Cameron told us that ants were very dangerous, and scary, and that we should get out of their way. Continue reading
When our kids first start school, it can be so infuriating that they often aren’t interested in telling us much about their day. (And as the parent of a teen, I can tell you that it is often the same when they get older!)
Patty Wipfler, founder of Hand in Hand Parenting, explains why you don’t get much of an answer when you ask the question “How was school today?”. She explains how to use Special Time to reconnect – with young children, and those heading into adolescence. Continue reading
It’s easy to put off Special Time. After all, family life is busy, and in some ways gets oddly busier when we have older children. But Special Time it brings rich benefits when we do it. Most importantly it builds emotional safety.
Even when it is “pretty basic”, as this mother puts it, Special Time refreshes and renews our children’s sense of our confidence in and for them, and reassures them of our love for them. This is what our children need in order to begin offloading the emotional backpacks they are carrying around. As they get older, those backpacks are more tightly buckled down that they used to be. Our children learn to “suck it up” and hold it in for fear of social death if they let their feelings show.
So after Special Time, this mother finds her 11 year old daughter’s grumpy mood dissolves, and out rolls a big upset. It can be hard to know whether to go or stay when our children tell us to go away. At least sometimes, however, it’s worth staying, and listening it out… Continue reading
We parents want to stay close to our young people!We parents want to stay close to our young people as they get older. And they want us to stay close to them too, even though it doesn’t always feel like they do! But how do we do that? Continue reading
Recently, we visited a local mosque, and put scarves on in solidarity. My daughter told the reporter “We are here to be together as one big family group.”
As parents, how do we respond to shocking and violent events – whether they are terrorism, wars, awful mass shootings, or natural disasters?
We can get Listening Time for ourselves, we can listen to our children and answer their questions with pictures of what humans can do together for good, and offer them the huge resassurance of regular Special Time.
Plus some free resources as you move towards the start of school, and courses starting in the New Year.
Here’s our November 2015 Newsletter. Enjoy!
More on the topic of Pre-Teens. If you have Pre-Teen children, you will know that things start to change. Special Time can be a great tool for parents and children to stay connected through times of change, including times when we don’t feel we really understand each other.
Special Time – a dedicated period of time where we put aside our pre-occupations and concerns, pay full attention to our child, and delight in them – begins to change as your children’s interests change. But the magic that it works still applies: it builds emotional safety into our relationship with our children at a particularly important time.
And when we do this, children will start to show us their upsets. By the time they are 8, 9 10, some of those upsets will be about us, and much will be about what it has been like being a young person for 10 years or so, in a world that does not treat young people with much respect.
We need to listen warmly at these times, giving our children all the attention we can muster. Inevitably, the upsets will tend to be scrappier and less direct than using the process with younger children. When they were little we could being them onto our lap and hold them as they sobbed out their sorrows, but now they are more “defended” and their sorrows have hardened into anger, and we are working hard just to keep our foot in the door, before it slams (literally and metaphorically!).
But every bit of warm, non-judgemental hanging-in-there with our Pre-Teens makes a difference. They notice EVERYTHING we do, and it all still matters to them.
Here’s a great article by Hand in Hand Founder, Patty Wipfler, on just what is going on for our Pre-Teen children, and for us:
http://www.handinhandparenting.org/article/helping-angry-preteens/
What Next? by Madeleine S Winter, CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 INT
You probably have a list of things that you make sure you put into your child’s backpack every morning before school. Their lunch, a hat, sunscreen, their homework or “show and tell”. Those things are all important, and whatever happens – don’t forget them, or it might mean you have to go all the way back home again to get them!
There’s something else that children really need in their backpack, also. And now I am talking about their emotional backpack. They carry this to and from school, too. We don’t always see this backpack, but we often feel it – when it is too full of hard feelings, accumulated through the day, or not full enough of the important feelings – a sense of being loved and connected and cared about. When this happens, this backpack gets really heavy, starts bumping into things, won’t fit in the back of the car. Continue reading