attachment – Lion's Whiskers

Raising a Leader – Conclusion

admin — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Readers who have been with us since the early days on this blog may recall I wrote about my decision to take an emotional courage challenge in the form of raising a guide dog puppy with my daughter, the Lovely K. Here is my report on raising a leader.

Our adorable pup, “F,” came to us in April of 2011 from Guiding Eyes for the Blind. She was a little black bundle of Labrador Retriever love, and we fell in love at first sight. Our family dog, Cider, was delighted to have a little sis to chase around the house, and the games began right away – although while she was small, F sometimes took refuge under a chair. However, it wasn’t long before she matched our dog in size, and then surpassed her. We had an independent spirit on our hands, and when we took little F to puppy play with the other pups on the regional GEB team, she was content to follow her nose through the grass while the other puppies tumbled and played. Her home playmate seemed to be enough for her.

The courage challenge for me, in the early months with this dog, was a real test of my patience and my composure. Raising a family dog is one thing; raising a guide dog is quite another. The protocols and training procedures are not complicated or even much different from basic obedience – but they are inexorable. There can be no exceptions to the rules, no ‘just once can’t she sleep on my bed?’ no, ‘I don’t mind if she jumps up on me at the door.’ The grass in my yard was steadily worn away by two energetic dogs playing chase, and my enthusiasm wore thin on occasions, too.

For my daughter – and her visiting friends – having a pup meant lots of adorable photos and hugs and kisses. As F grew bigger (and stronger) it became clear that walking her was going to fall mainly to me. Although the ideal we were working toward was a gentle dog that would not pull, the ideal wasn’t necessarily what we had in F at 8 months or 9 months! And yet she did steadily make progress, and when we put on the vest that identified her as a service dog in training and took her to the mall, the grocery store, the movie theater, the public library, she seemed to know her role. Twice-monthly training classes with the team exposed her to fire trucks and strange noises and people in funny hats and stairs and elevators and working with new handlers.

By the time she was 14 months old, we had a smart, confident young dog who clearly enjoyed using her considerable brain to solve puzzles and examine new things, but also loved lying at my feet at night in the t.v. room. And although we knew all along that she was not ours to keep, when we were informed of her “in for training” date – the date when she would return to Guiding Eyes for the Blind to begin her serious training in harness – it was a blow to our hearts. Two months away. Then one month. Then two weeks. Then it was tomorrow.

K. and I both sniffed back our tears and wiped our eyes when we dropped her off. Our ride home was silent, and we were brusque with each other for a while, arguing about something entirely different and both feeling an empty F-shaped hole in our hearts. “I miss her,” K. said that evening. “Me, too,” I agreed. She looked at me. “Were you crying?” she asked, as if not quite sure I was upset about the dog.

“It’s okay to cry if you’re sad,” I told her. “There’s no reason to hide it.”

I asked K. several days later how she felt about the experience. “Would you recommend other kids your age do a project like this?”

“Maybe” she said pensively. “Fifty-fifty.”

“How about when you think of how she’s going to change someone’s life?”

K. thought for a moment. “If it’s important to you, like if you care about helping people with disabilities.” She paused. “I tried not to get too attached. But a dog is a dog.”

A dog is a dog, and better writers than I have spoken eloquently about how much a dog can teach about love, attachment, and acceptance. And loss. And moving on. Emotional courage can help us with all of those and more.

Carnegie Heroes

admin — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you ever want to give your faith in humanity a boost, take a look at the hero profiles on the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission’s website. What is the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission you ask? From their website:

The two-fold mission of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission: To recognize persons who perform acts of heroism in civilian life in the United States and Canada, and to provide financial assistance for those disabled and the dependents of those killed helping others.

Reading these profiles is truly inspiring, and you may begin to notice some themes running through these stories of ordinary citizens who performed extraordinary acts of courage – usually on behalf of strangers. Many of these heroes credit their family relationships with giving them the core belief that every life is worth saving. The influence of parents is clear in profile after profile. The youngest medal recipients of 2011, three teenage Florida boys who saved a woman from drowning, explicitly credit their parents. “I grew up with my dad helping people,” one of the young heroes told reporters. This is the influence of family connection and strong attachment.

A second theme is the influence of rehearsal, either mental rehearsal or actual practice. Another teen medal recipient credited the self-discipline he learned in baseball practice with helping him rescue a drowning man. Other recipients cite safety drills in childhood, or hearing stories of courage and service to others with inspiring them and encouraging them to act. It is because of this rehearsal that heroes are able to act “without thinking.” The thinking happens ahead of time.

A third theme I observed in these profiles was gratitude – not the gratitude of the people whose lives were saved, although of course that’s there! – but the gratitude of each of these heroes to have been able to help! That is a truly beautiful thing, in my opinion.

So do yourself a favor and read a few of these profiles. Share them with your kids. Who knows? Maybe one day the Carnegie folks will be honoring you.

Courage to Survive

admin — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This video of concentration camp survivor, Alie Herz-Sommer, is a marvelous example of human courage! She is interviewed by Anthony Robbins on the eve of her 108th birthday.

We particularly noted:
1. the role that parent-child attachment played in her ability to withstand this ordeal,
2. her attitude of gratitude (“everything is a present”),
3. her life-saving optimism.

All things we can teach and model for our children, or that they teach us, that help develop our courage and resilience in life! Enjoy!

This Is Your Brain on Stories

admin — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve offered a lot of traditional stories on Lion’s Whiskers over the last several months. How many of you are telling them to your kids? Maybe not a lot of you, and that’s okay! But I hope you have gathered something from these stories. What I hope you have picked up on is this: around the world, in every culture, people have been telling stories not simply for entertainment, but for creating metaphors for understanding their world. I also hope I can persuade you that some form of storytelling – whether with traditional narratives or your own “When I was a kid” yarns – can be a powerful parenting tool, and may help your kids to develop the six types of courage.

I’ve shared a lot of my own anecdotal observations about the power of storytelling, and posted lots of inspiring quotations about the role of stories in our lives. What’s fascinating and exciting is that cutting-edge brain science is beginning to back up the wisdom of the ages. Researchers from many disciplines are using fMRI brain scanning to investigate what actually happens in our brains when we listen to stories. The fields of advertising and journalism have always known how to harness the power of stories; but that power is now part of medical education and law schools, in tax compliance and political discourse, as part of proposed Alzheimer’s treatments, and part of the on-going discussion concerning whether an understanding of narrative can help explain wartime behaviors. Even the defense department is studying whether narrative approaches can help create military leaders with more moral courage.

I want to very briefly (as a layperson, children’s author, and researcher on the importance of story-telling in our culture) summarize some of the findings.

Humans are hardwired for narrative. Evidence is mounting that we are natural storytellers, not by training or by culture, but by biology. The creation of metaphors for understanding our experience is automatic, which helps explain why being presented with facts is often insufficient for decision-making. When we create metaphors for information and experience, they fit more readily into a narrative frame and allow us to imagine how the story might end. Researchers such as Paul Bloom at Yale University’s Mind and Development Lab study babies to figure out how the imagination makes information processing possible, and use puppet plays (stories) to study babies’ moral judgement. “Story,” writes brain scientist Mark Turner, “is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories.”

. Oxytocin is released by stories. Oxytocin, the hormone associated with love and attachment, can be triggered by listening to stories. Oxytocin receptors are located in the pleasure centers of the brain; those stimuli that trigger the release of oxytocin (snuggling, for example) are the ones we seek rather than avoid. This tells us that listening to stories is an adaptation for survival. Oxytocin has also been linked to trust, empathy and moral behavior, and may thus be relevant for creating stable societies.

To an avid reader or storyteller, it’s stating the obvious to say that when we are immersed in a story, we feel excitement when the character feels excitement, grief when the character feels grief. We have all experienced the emotions of the characters we love, especially those with whom we empathize. But not only that, the areas of the brain that register motion are also stimulated when characters in story experience motion. When we say we are moved by a story, this is true in more ways than one. The brain lights up as if the listener (or reader) is actually in the story, fighting dragons and falling in love.

So how is this related to courage development in our children? Dr. Lisa has discussed oxytocin’s role in promoting attachment which contributes significantly to courage development and resiliency in children. If storytelling, too, triggers oxytocin release, then we can speculate that storytelling also has a role in both deepening the connection in secure attachment relationships and inspiring courage and moral development in our children. On top of that, we have the connection between fear and uncertainty: because storytelling is a human adaptation for interpreting and making sense of experience, it may help reduce uncertainty, and by extension, reduce fear. Stories offer us the opportunity for mental, imaginative, neurobiological rehearsal of experiences we may encounter in the future. Just as champion athletes use visualization techniques to ready themselves for the contest to come (a form of storytelling), we can use stories to prepare ourselves and our children for the challenges of the future.

Whether you retell the traditional stories I’ve offered on this blog, pick a book from my bookshelf to read your child, or you like sharing family stories and taking turns narrating your day’s events at dinnertime, stories are powerful, free and abundant. They are what make us human and inspire us all to have courage in life. As the Native American saying goes, “Take courage from the story.”

Hard-wired to Care: You Matter in the Moral Life of your Child!

admin — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Current moral psychology research indicates that as parents we are our child’s first and most important teacher of the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. The good news is that from birth, humans (and other primates for that matter) are hard-wired to care. According to psychologist and primatologist Franz De Waal (2010), empathy, or being able to feel/care/think on another’s behalf, is an instinctual, adaptive capacity that helps us all survive.

Empathy is at the root of being a good person, or ape, whatever the case may be. Infants as young as six months old can differentiate kindness from meanness. By 12 months, infants begin to express care for others in distress. And by 14-18 months, these children show signs of altruistic (unrewarded) helping behaviors towards others (Decety, Michalska, and Kinzler, 2011). Moral reasoning develops as children learn to integrate their inborn empathy with more complex social-reasoning abilities. As parents, we have the responsibility to help our children learn how to connect and activate, through practice, that wiring through our care for them.

Developing a moral conscience is no longer understood to be a logical or even stage-by-stage process as proposed by the grandfather of moral development theory, Lawrence Kohlberg (1984). Social Intuitionist theorists like Jonathan Haidt (2001) conclude that human beings are much less logical and much more intuitive, emotional, and automatic in their moral decision-making and responsiveness. Moral psychologists like Darcia Narvaez, have developed several integrative theories, weaving together current neurobiology with more traditional cognitive and developmental psychology theories concerning the nature of moral development. Her research explores questions of moral cognition, moral development and moral character education. She is, in essence, trying to show that moral behavior in humans is driven by both bottom-up (reptilian brain instincts and limbic system responses) and top-down processes (higher brain metacognition and executive function linked with the development of our prefrontal cortex).

What does all this have to do with parenting and moral courage?

Narvaez’s Triune Ethics Theory (TET) (2007), concludes that a “fully functional moral brain” is an evolutionary adaptation dependent upon modern childrearing practices that support healthy attachment. Such secure parent/caregiver-child attachment leads to the kind of neurobiological development necessary for moral behavior. Which in normal speak means, with regards to the moral development of your child, YOU MATTER BIG TIME in helping to wire your child’s brain in ways that are both adaptive and moral! Read my post from last week, for an example of how much parents do matter!

Moral conscience, therefore, is now understood to be an instinctual and learned skill best passed on from parent to child through loving communication, care, and consistency. It all starts in the chemical soup called LOVE and with the way we hold our babes!

It is the heart with which you bring to parenting that will help define your child’s orientation towards prosocial behavior (which is loosely defined as: empathic caring about the welfare and rights of others and acting in ways that benefit humanity).

However, Narvaez and Vaydich (2008) caution that modern parenting practices, particularly in America, either do not afford or underestimate the importance of spending the kind of time ensuring secure parent-child attachment. They and others, like De Waal, voice concerns that we must not drop the ball on being the kind of attentive mentors our kids need to develop a healthy moral conscience. It can be hard these days with so many different technologies, extracurricular activities, and financial realities competing for our attention. Especially as our children enter adolescence, when their moral compass increasingly shifts towards the magnetic appeal of peer and mainstream media influence. It takes moral courage to be the parent who shuts down the party where alcohol is served to minors. To demand better workplace hours, benefits, or childcare policies so your children are made a priority. Or to advocate for your child in a school where bullying may be the elephant in the lunchroom cafeteria.

When we are engaged in consistent, loving parenting—which is at the basis of secure parent-child bonds—everyday teachable moments with our children abound. Teachable moments that can facilitate the transmission of moral values through moral instruction, modeling, supervision, and even the kind of story-telling associated with helping children to become good people.

Narvaez and Vaydich (2008) urge educators, too, to become the kind of safe, caring mentors children need. They believe school teachers are placed with an increasingly heavy burden of responsibility in helping to shape the future leaders of our world, in lieu of parental involvement and supervision. In fact, these researchers encourage teachers to establish the same kind of secure attachments with their students, through attention and emotional awareness, in order to help ensure children will learn and follow the moral guidelines with which classrooms best function. Moral guidelines like: be kind, wait your turn, share, pick up your garbage, tell the truth, and don’t poke your classmate!

For a list of ways to help support your child’s moral development, be sure to read my post next Sunday!

Courage is Not the Absence of Fear

admin — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. ~ Ambrose Redmoon

As parents, we are often faced with the decision to put the welfare of our children above that of our own. Being a courageous parent can range from rescuing your child from near death or other peril, to fighting for your child’s right to feel safe at school and not bullied, to telling the truth about your decision to separate, to holding your child’s hand at their hospital bedside, to canceling that belated wedding anniversary vacation (the first one in 10 years) due to your child’s unexpected flu bug, to waking each morning early to ensure that you keep your job and your child has shelter, food, and the many other necessities modern life now seems to require. Any number of opportunities present themselves everyday to us as parents to muster and model the six types of courage. Sometimes we even fail to recognize what courage it takes to be a parent. It takes courage to walk through the fears about our own eclipsed needs after deciding to have a child. To accept the risks associated with loving another human being so fully and completely that they one day walk out our front door with the keys to their own castle in hand (God willing). Courage is telling the truth about who we are, apologizing when we mess up, and loving ourselves and our child in the process.

As a child and family therapist, I frequently witness the courage and compassion parents have in advocating for their mentally ill child, their child who struggles in school because of a learning disorder, their obese child facing long-term health issues if they don’t lose some weight, or their child banished to the outskirts of social acceptance due to the arbitrary judgment of an individual or group with more social cache. I see the heartbreak on these parents’ faces when their child is called fat, gay, stupid, or weird. Then, I witness the tears brushed away and the smile return to greet their child’s gaze with unconditional love. The child, in turn, is looking for that acceptance as fuel for their own courage to face the battles they must. Sometimes as parents we feel powerless about what to do to help our child through a tough time. But it is the decision to keep moving forward, digging together for solutions in the dark, that inspires our children to have faith in the kindness of others, hope for their future, and to develop the necessary courage associated with resilience.

We don’t have to have all the answers. No one does. We just need to keep moving through fear towards hope. When I work with children who are anxious and afraid of the dark, I learned from a fellow therapist to bring in flashlights, nightlights, candles, and those sweet little Guatemalan worry dolls (they disappear worries while tucked under pillows at night) to help make friends with the dark. As parents, sometimes we need to call in reinforcements, ask for help ourselves, and make friends with our own fears so we can be present, brave, and our child’s own personal hero or heroine. As parents, we are the light that can shine when our child’s world seems dark, when the monsters under the bed give fright, and no one at school seems friendly.

I remind myself each day that having courage does not necessarily end worry or disappear fear. Courage is the catalyst by which we move beyond fear and into faith. We may not know exactly the right words to say when our child is sad or anxious or unhappy. But, we can decide to push aside our petty worries and pernicious fears. We can tell stories from our own life to offer comfort and perhaps even some inspiration. We can hold their hand and just breathe together through the pain and confusion. We can place our trust in the fact that as in nature, after darkness comes light.

Part of the purpose of this blog is to collect stories from parents like you, about how you nurture courage in your children. I am curious what has required you to have courage as a parent? What have you found powerful and helpful in teaching your own child about courage? How has your child inspired courage in you? If you’d like to be interviewed, too, please send me an email: [email protected]

We’d love to hear from you!

For more inspiration, read some of my previous profiles of parental courage:

This is What’s True: Anya’s Story

Never Quit: Susan’s Story

Losing it All and Gaining Everything That’s Truly Important: Robert and Emma’s Story

A Spectrum of Attachment: Beth’s Story

Playing the Lion Game

admin — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Around the time of my son E.’s first birthday he took charge of managing his separation anxiety, conquering fear, and developing a capacity for courage. How exactly did he do that, you ask? Well, we’d been reading lots of books together about animals, and making the requisite oink-oink here, baa-baa there, and moo-moo everywhere to help him learn to communicate in sounds and words. I noticed that he jumped every time I made the rather dramatic ROAR! for the lion. He loved my lion, and he feared my lion at the same time.

Coinciding with my efforts to help him develop the capacity for language, we’d played plenty of “Peek-a-Boo” and his brain had developed, like most other infants around eight months, the capacity for object permanence. E. could retain and utilize visual images enough to understand that I could go away, out of sight/sound/touch, but still exist in memory. As he developed language over the next year, around eighteen months he began begging me, “Be lion, Mommy.” When I turned to him and roared in his face, he looked at me without recognition at first, startled, eyes wide, and then he’d place his sweet hands on my face and say, “Be Mommy!”

Eventually, this game evolved over the coming months whereby he would ask me to approach him, then chase him, with “Come Lion.” As soon as I would reach him, after roaring whilst I covered the distance between us, he would say “Go Away Lion!” Then, urge me in the sincerest, anxious, heart-breaking voice, to “Be Mommy ‘gain.” It probably seems a masochist game to play, but trust me he was mastering fear. He was rehearsing the limbic pathways to both experience and calm fear synapses provoking sympathetic nervous responsiveness. He could turn on the fear “Be the lion”, and turn it off “Be my mommy again.” Abracadabra, I’m in control of my fear and my fate.

E. was also learning to handle the short periods of separation distress evident in secure attachments between parent and child. According to adult attachment researcher and associate profession in the University of Illinois Department of Psychology, Chris Fraley (2010):

Bowlby observed that separated infants would go to extraordinary lengths (e.g., crying, clinging, frantically searching) to prevent separation from their parents or to reestablish proximity to a missing parent. At the time of Bowlby’s initial writings, psychoanalytic writers held that these expressions were manifestations of immature defense mechanisms that were operating to repress emotional pain, but Bowlby noted that such expressions are common to a wide variety of mammalian species, and speculated that these behaviors may serve an evolutionary function.

Bowlby argued that, over the course of evolutionary history, infants who were able to maintain proximity to an attachment figure via attachment behaviors would be more likely to survive to a reproductive age. According to Bowlby, a motivational system, what he called the attachment behavioral system, was gradually “designed” by natural selection to regulate proximity to an attachment figure.

(Source: http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm, ¶2-3)

My son, E., was trying to learn to survive in the wilds of our living room. I was the lion stalker, he was my prey. Then, he turned the tables on me and became my tamer, his little hands on my face taming me instantly. He also appeared to tame his own fear.

We were enacting the age-old drama associated with natural selection which requires that we learn to survive danger, seeking comfort in the arms of key attachment figures or at least camouflage in community. E. developed a game that helped him trigger not only the hormonal cascade of fight-or-flight chemical messengers, but also activated the attachment feedback loop that Bowlby, Ainsworth, and others today still observe that helps to regulate and restore limbic homeostasis:

Source: http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm

Hold Out Your Hand and Close Your Eyes!

admin — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Firstly, “Happy Father’s Day!” to all our readers who are dads. Here’s a great quote to start your day:

“My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me.” ~ Jim Valvano
Now for today’s post:

Further to the research in previous posts that I’ve shared about the importance of baby bonding, creating healthy attachment between parent and child, separation anxiety, and the development of object permanence—these games help build trust and playfulness into your everyday life with young children.

Dr. Lisa’s Parenting Tip:

Play Peek-a-Boo and other Trust-Building Games!

The goal: Reassuring your child that you are reliable, consistent, and that you always come back.

Peek-a-Boo: You can play this game with infants to toddlers, and watch in amazement as their cognitive capacity for object permanence develops. You can start with an object, a teddy, a ball, or something else familiar. At around six months of age, begin to hide your own face, and quickly reappear after asking “Where’s Mommy?/Where’s Daddy?” Then say, “Here’s Mommy./Here’s Daddy!” As your child approaches eight months, start using the moniker “Peek-a-Boo” as you reappear, “I see you!” and/or “I love you!” to reconnect. Separation distress is normal for securely attached infants, your goal is to allow time-limited experience of separation anxiety, followed by the comfort and nervous system soothing provided by the return of a loving primary attachment figure—YOU!

Hide-and-Seek: Once your child is mobile and more confident to be left alone for a moment, introduce “Let’s play Hide and Seek.” Hide yourself in an easily accessible place and call your child to come find you, delight in their ability to find you and the pleasure that comes from being reunited. Then, teach your child to find a safe place to hide nearby and allowing for a few moments of suspense by counting to 10, go find them in their hiding place. Again, celebrating their cleverness to hide, to disappear for a short time, to be found again, and delight in your reunion. We have played a myriad array of hide-and-seek games in our family over the years including flashlights, secret nooks and crannies in the house, hidden-from-view places in tall grasses or high in the trees, favorite books to while away the waiting in secret hiding places for Mommy or Daddy to find them. They loved watching me look for them, bewildered, lost, calling out for hints about whether I was “hot” or “cold”—closer or father—from finding them. They were reassured to see me on a loving quest to reunite myself with them.

The Tickle Game: It’s impossible not to tickle a two year-old. They are so full of wonderful reactions, giggles, and sensory pleasure. As important as loving touch, teaching our children to say “No” or “Stop” and how to establish their own healthy boundaries is vital. I started the tickle game based on the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” song, where the spider eventually lands as a tickly five-finger spider climbing down my child’s arm as the water spout. They also got to be the spider starting on my head, working its way down to my most tickly bits of all, my toes. You can have a great deal of fun playing with the physical sensations of tickling. But, make sure that your child learns to both say and honor the word “No”, “Stop”, or “Enough” when the tickle game is done. Over time, as kids grow up, teaching them that their bodies are their own and that no one is allowed to tickle them without their and/or a parent’s permission is essential for their safety and security. Eventually, our tickle game resulted in years of my super-mobile spidery fingers chasing my kids around the house, them screaming in both delight and fear at being chased, and all of us tumbling into a tickle pile when I managed to catch them. My 10 year-old daughter surprised me during a sleep over with all her pals recently, to do the same with all of them! Once again, as soon as anyone says “Stop”, the game was over, often to start again with kids’ pleas to “Chase us again!”

I’ll Catch You When You Fall: Once the tumbling and living room gymnastics stage starts, variations of this trust game can be lots of fun with the proper pillows in place. Obviously, falling and hoping your child will catch you is not how this game is played. But siblings can join in together, if they are equally matched and capable. Start with your child on his/her knees with a pillow behind. Have your arms cradled under their arm pits and ask them to trust their body in your arms as they lean back to lie on the pillow with your arms as support. Then, as they develop confidence and agility, eventually they can stand “as tall as a tree”, and you can give a gentle chop to their side, ask them to count to three, “1, 2, 3”, and call out “Timber” which is, obviously, your cue to show your amazing lumberjack skills and catch your falling child, a.k.a. “Little Tree”.

See Jennifer’s post about going on trust walks in “Blindfold“.

Please post other games that you’ve found that build connection in your family. Games which are safe, fun, easy to learn, and facilitate trust between parent and child.

Are You an Inny or an Outy?

admin — Sun, 22 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Do you believe that you control your fate or that outside circumstances beyond your control do? In 1966, psychologist Julian Rotter was busy trying to answer this question and bridge traditional psychoanalytic thought and behaviorism (the zeitgeist at the time) into what is now termed social learning theory. One aspect of Rotter’s social learning theory, that is particularly relevant to the way we can parent a child to develop courage, is called Locus of Control of Reinforcement. Locus of control is related to individual difference in the way we generalize our expectancies (i.e. what we think will happen to us in the future). If you want to help your child develop courage, teaching him/her to develop an internal locus of control is important.

Similar to many aspects of parenting, shaping locus of control is not an exact science. Here are a few ways to help your child develop an internal locus of control:

Offer your child opportunities for mastery and success. Look through school extracurricular courses to see what is of interest, pick one per term to try and complete. Take the time to teach the kinds of skills you hope they will develop before leaving home, e.g. washing their own laundry, loading/unloading the dishwasher, or any of the 5-Minute Courage Workouts and Challenges that we offer.
Ask your child to become responsible for developmentally-appropriate chores and daily tasks. The rule of thumb here is: show your child how to do the task, ask them if they have any questions, remind them they can ask for help if they need it, and then back away and trust in their abilities to complete the chore/task all on their own. Notice when they do it without reminding and appreciate they job they’ve done!
Encourage your child to become increasingly independent. Plant the seeds for specific target dates or future milestones of independence by saying things like “Imagine how proud you will feel when you are in Grade 5 and can walk to school on your own!” “Imagine what you will feel, the personal satisfaction,when you first put on your black belt after completing all your training next year!”
Show and trust them to do the right thing. Mentoring with respect for your child will help nurture the same respect for you from your child. It is hard to expect them to do a task without support the first time. Talk about hard choices you’ve had to make in your life and how you worked through the pros and cons, risks and benefits. Highlight people, stories, moments that you believe required moral courage. Modeling this kind of creative problem-solving will help them develop their own inner compass when it comes time to making their own tough decisions.
Help them identify the intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards in all they do. Instead of slathering them with empty praise, bribes, or otherwise external rewards, be specific by asking “What did you learn about yourself when you did that?” “What do you think about your report card? What are you most proud of? How do you think you accomplished that? What would you like to improve on for next quarter?” “How does it feel now that you made the team after so much practicing?” Let the natural fruits of their efforts be enough sometimes. Then, find special ways to celebrate and honor your own and your child’s accomplishments. It could be a chore-free night, a special dinner or movie night together, calling a relative to tell them the good news, or buying something special to mark the occasion. By periodically mixing up the reward system, kids are more likely to keep looking inside instead of outside for affirmation and/or approval.
Model for them self-discipline, self-motivation, and how to take responsibility for their own fate. When we share stories from our lives with our children, with ourselves as the hero/heroine instead of the victim, our children learn from us to expect that they, too, are responsible for the outcome of their lives.

On the other hand, when we continually rescue our children from completing age-appropriate tasks they are fully capable of doing, limit their opportunities to prove their worth and capability, push too hard in areas they are ill-equipped or disinterested in succeeding, or pull them back from accomplishing something due to our own fear, bias, or agenda—our children develop an external locus of control. They learn to expect others to save them from the burden of responsibility for their life.

Internals (or as I call them, “innies”) learn to see a causal relationship between their behavior and rewards, whereas externals (or “outies”) miss the point altogether and attribute both their successes and failures to forces outside themselves.

Let’s review:

At the internal locus of control end of the continuum, you have individuals who believe they can control the events of their lives through their decisions and efforts. The more the internal locus of control, higher the degree of internal self-control, self-motivation, perceived influence on others and our environment, and the more intellectually curious and active we are in our own learning. Prematurely developing an internal locus of control though, without first having opportunities to be dependent, to develop secure attachment relationships, and be actively supported in to become independent, can burden a young child and lead to egocentrism, alienation, or extreme competitiveness.

The more we believe that outside forces like God, the environment, powerful others, or chance rule our lives, the more externally we place our locus of control. Extreme external locus of control appears to be correlated with decreased levels of academic, social, and occupational success and increased levels of mood disorders, drug/alcohol use, and voter apathy (Twenge, Zhang, & Im, 2004). That said, if the culture you live in embraces an external locus of control, it may be an adaptive response to develop this lens on the world. The concern is if through this lens you or your child sees a world where your actions make no difference, where you feel alienated or powerless, and/or you want to look away instead of forward with hope for the future.

Rotter cautioned broad applications of this particular construct in personality theory. He understood that the interaction between the human being and his/her environment is complex and his/her responses fall on a continuum instead of one particular discrete style. It may be, for example, a healthy response to fear and life challenge to rely on the spiritual courage associated with having a faith-based practice or belief system. On the other hand, believing in yourself, using powerful visualization techniques and positive affirmations and having the physical courage to dig deep and finish that fitness training program, may be exactly kind of internal locus of control that is needed.

To find out if you are an ‘inny’ or an ‘outy’, you can take an abbreviated version of Rotter’s 23-item internal vs. external locus of control assessment by clicking here.

Source:

Rotter, J.B. (1966). Generalized expectancies of internal versus external control of reinforcements.
Psychological Monographs, 80, (whole no. 609).

Twenge, J., Zhang, L., & Im, C. (2004). Itʼs beyond my control: a cross-temporal meta-analysis of
increasing externality in locus of control, 1960-2002. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8,
(3), 308-319. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15454351

Peek-a-Boo!

admin — Sun, 15 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Little did I know that all the hours of playing Peek-a-Boo with my children actually produced necessary neuronal growth in their brains so they can feel secure in this world! Peek-a-Boo teaches our child that we are a secure object. I thought we were just having fun!? That’s the cool thing about putting psychology research into practice, it can be fun. Research now shows that many time-honored traditions in parenting help create the trust and courage in kids necessary to conquer many of life’s challenges.

Around eight months of age, children develop the cognitive capability called object permanence. Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget coined the term object permanence, that refers to the cognitive understanding that even when a secure object is out of sight, it doesn’t cease to exist. Even if we can’t see, hear, or touch someone or something, we can access the memory of its existence in our mind. Imagine how much psychological comfort this cognitive capacity we all develop brings, given healthy and normal development. Have you ever felt lonely and imagined calling someone you love and what they might say to comfort you? Have you ever run a race and imagined the people who support you waiting with smiling faces at the finish line—especially when you feel like stopping? Has it ever brought comfort and solace to remember the funny and loving memories of a relative who has died? Object permanence can be protective and inspire courage in moments when we feel alone, distressed, or stressed.

It is so fun to hide yourself from your child, just long enough to create some suspense, and then pop back into view. Careful, though, around eight months your child will begin to show the normal signs of secure attachment, called separation anxiety, and cry for your prompt return—especially if you take too long to peek back out! The game is not meant to be a psychological torture test, just helpful practice for building separation anxiety tolerance. Remember, before your child develops object permanence, you literally cease to exist. Who says parents aren’t master magicians?

The goal is to teach your child to self-soothe, be reassured that you are a permanent object in his/her life, and how to reach out and find you or someone they love for comfort.

Our family game was actually called, “Peek-a-Boo, I Love You.” As soon as I would reappear, I would reassure my child that I really was back with a big smile, open arms, eye-to-eye contact, say “I see you” and, what would eventually become one of their first phrases, “I love you!” I made sure to give the same verbal and non-verbal cues every time I would go away and come back once I started having other caregivers help in caring for my children. Consistency being an important key to unlocking the treasure trove of trust between parents and children!

Schore’s (2001) research stresses the importance of this parent/caregiver-child game in that a child gets to experience glimpses of loss, and practice emotional regulation to handle any stress associated with object loss until the attachment object returns. In other words, Peek-a-Boo helps us to teach our children the foundations of interpersonal trust. We are playing a game, but practicing and building the mental, physical, and emotional muscle to handle bigger separations, and other courage challenges, to come.

I also didn’t know that my own learning and memory were improved through motherhood—that was a shocker given how hormonally zoned-out and tired I have felt at times. According to Kinsley et al. (1999), increased neuronal connections occur in late pregnancy and in the early postpartum period reshaping the brain to handle the increasing demands of motherhood—now that I get! The benefits, it turns out, of attachment between mother and infant are not unidirectional; our infants ensure their own and their mother’s development and survival through a rich set of sensory, and primarily non-verbal, cues related to what I’ve written about previously on attunement (see my post about one of the first of life’s courage challenges). Playing Peek-a-Boo can help you not only wire your child’s brain, but any infant-caregiver game that evokes love, trust, playfulness helps us improve our own dendritic brain connections and calms our limbic system, too!

Upcoming posts will include more trust-building games to play with your kids!

Sources:

Kinsley, C., Madonia, L., Gifford, G., Tureski, K., Griffin, G., Lowry, C., Williams, J.,

Collins, J., McLearie, H., & Lambert, K.G. (1999). Motherhood improves

learning and memory. Nature, 402, 137.

Schore, A. (2001). Effects of a secure attachment relationship on right brain

development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22, (1-2), 7-66. http://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreIMHJAttachment.pdf