My daughter Noff (the youngest girl in the photo) is a very inspiring kid, especially since growing up in a house with two very talented siblings is not easy.
This is the story of how Noff composed her first piece of music at the age of 8, with very little knowledge and a lot of ingenuity, and how she continually uses her older brother and sister not as competition but as inspiration to stretch herself and do the best she can in every area.
Read Inspiring Kids »
I like to walk around our beautiful neighborhood in the morning. It is one of the things that make me happy. I do it to warm up my body and mind, get my creative juices flowing (into the voice recorder on my mobile phone) and be ready for another great day.
About half way through my walk, when I was already going at a good pace and feeling pretty pumped, I saw a young Chinese woman leaving one of the houses and saying goodbye to a young man standing on the doorstep.
Suddenly, the young woman noticed a bus at a stop about 200 meters away. She became visibly uptight, her pitch rose and she looked like she was asking the young man what to do (as I do not speak Chinese, this is all my interpretation).
The man gestured towards the bus and looked like he was urging the woman to run for it and try to catch it. She kept pleading with him until he joined her and they started running toward the bus stop.
By the time they decided to run and crossed the street, I had been half way to the bus and it was still there. There were no passengers in sight, its doors were closed and it kept waiting.
Read Winners and Losers »
I always say life depends on what we focus on. Our expectations are a way of focusing on what we would like the future to hold for us, which means our life depends on them.
Expectations can motivate you or hurt you and only we can determine what they will do to us. Here is it how this works.
We all have expectations, because we rely on them to make life more predictable and therefore safer and less stressful. We learn from past experiences and predict how thing will turn out.
A person without expectations is like one with very short-term memory, because he or she cannot remember how things will turn out and must re-learn life’s lessons over and over again.
When I ask my daughter for her name, I expect her to tell me the name I gave her when she was born. Every day, I get up in the morning, I expect the sun to be there (sometimes it is hidden behind the clouds, but it is still there). I expect my sister to call me on my birthday and say “Happy birthday”.
Read Make a list: Expectations »
Last week, I wrote about writing your beliefs about kids. As I said, beliefs are a reflection of our parenting style. What we believe about kids becomes our reality. I realized this during my Special Education studies and I started making sure I always had the right beliefs, the most empowering beliefs that will make me the best mother in the world. And they have!
I examined all my beliefs and found out I had many I had received from my parents, my older sister, my teachers and other adults in my life that were very limiting, such as “Kids are cruel”, “Kids have no respect”, “Kids must be disciplined” and I will stop writing this list, because I would like to focus on beliefs that are better for parents to have.
So here I am opening my heart and telling you 100 of my beliefs about kids. I only write the beliefs that are empowering to me and that have made my parenting happier, healthier and more successful. I hope you will find inspiration in them and learn about the philosophy and vision I have for my parenting and for the Family Matters blog.
When I saw Nathan, I did not really understand who she was talking about. He stayed at our place many times, played well with my daughter and I really did not know what Leanne was talking about. The list of troubles she had with him seemed endless.
“When I talk to him, I need to say the same thing five times before he understands what I am saying”, she complained, “It is so hard to get him to sleep. Toilet training was so hard and dragged for such a long time. You should see him at the dinner table – he has no manners at all. Getting him dressed in the morning takes forever. He has no respect for my stuff and he can go to my cosmetics and use them for his art project. My car is such a mess because of him. I hate going to the supermarket with him, I go by myself on late-night shopping days. With him, every shopping is a nightmare”.
Every time she talked about Nathan, it was as if she was describing some psychopath and he was just a 5-year-old kid.
Read Bad Start for Parenting »
I thought that as parents, making a list of thoughts and beliefs about kids is highly appropriate, because reading such a list can be a wonderful reflection on our parenting and a chance to do things even better.
In my parenting workshops, where parents get the tools to raise happy kids, we take stock of our beliefs to find empowering or limiting beliefs. It is amazing for people to discover how closely their beliefs about parenting or about kids match the challenges and the happy experiences in their life. Although we believe in things due to our life experiences, once we have those beliefs, they start to drive our experiences instead.
Buddha has said this beautifully, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought”. So if you are a confident parent, it is a result of what you have in your mind and if you are not confident in your parenting, you can be, just change your thoughts.
Sometimes, the things we expect the least – both good and bad – can teach us the best lessons in life. Last month, I said to a group of 26 child leaders that in many things of our life, the important thing is not what others give us, but what we choose to take. When I said that, I did not consider the possibility of taking a lesson from others without any intention on their part.
Two weeks ago, we learned a very valuable lesson from a good friend of ours. Tom, our friend, had never planned on giving us this lesson. In fact, if it was up to him, I think he would gladly not teach us this lesson at all because of the heavy price he had to pay for it.
I hope that when you read this story, you will choose to take as much as possible from it. Remember, it is not about what I write, but what you choose to receive.
Read A Lesson in Proportion »
One of the participants of the Better Parenting Skills workshop was a principal of a primary school. When his turn came to share parenting ideas, he said that his wife, who is a teacher, had realized the kids in her class had been sick too often. Although being sick had given them some Mommy or Daddy time at home for a while, they had missed out on lots of Friends time, Learning time and Active Play time. Not wanting her own two kids to miss these things either, she came up with an expression she keeps saying to them whenever they feel sick:
Read Sick Kids »
Money is a big part of every success in life. Money is an enabler – the more money you have, the more successful you can be. For example, my son is very successful as a musician, no doubt due to his special talent, but without the money we spend to support his musical journey, he could have never reached this level of success.
“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us” – Jane Austen
Read I’m proud of me »
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