hello lovely child: parenting

21 parental triumphs

7:49 PM

21 Parental Triumphs

Good Reasons to Let Us Eat Cake

by Michele Ranard, M.Ed.
620 words

It’s the little things, as they say. Assorted daily small victories—triumphs even—that only parents who aren’t perfect or posers can truly celebrate. This list of personal favorites is decidedly one-off and twisted…not unlike living with the children we cherish.

Can you claim any of the following parental victories? Well then, it is only fitting you get your just desserts.

1. Queen of Milk. Upon discovering you were all out, you dragged yourself to the market in the pouring rain to buy organic soy milk for the kids’ French toast rather than lazily substituting that frozen breast milk.

2. You’re All That. You managed to sail through an entire day without being barfed on or called “an inferior being who supplied these genes” once.

3. Responsible is Your Middle Name. Even though it was a temptation, you did NOT ask the UPS guy to “Please please please just keep an eye on Aidan in the ExcerSaucer for five minutes while I shower.”

4. It Really is the Little Things. You miraculously remembered to empty your teen’s pockets of his iPhone and driver’s permit before throwing in a load of laundry.

5. Patience is Yours. After helping your 5th grader prepare for the physical science exam, no one required traction or reconstructive surgery.

6. Your Awesome-ish is Legendary. Everyone under the roof has clean underwear to wear tomorrow.

7. Oh Yeahhhhhh, You’ve Still Got it. One of the kids commented “Your eyes aren’t as bloodshot and scary like yesterday, mommy.”

8. Cuz You’re Graceful. Last night when you tripped, you did not accidentally impale yourself on a Lego sculpture carelessly lying near that puddle of urine in which you slipped.

9. You’ve Always Been Well-groomed. Appearing relaxed and chic at the library’s story hour, no one complimented you on the "adorable grandchild."

10. When You’ve Got it, You’ve Got it. After 7th grader Ashley handed you her midterm grade report, you didn’t respond with “We are going to have to let you go.”

11. Social Networking Proves It. Your Facebook status reads more Mr. Rogers than Charlie Sheen.

12. It’s All in the Details. You prevented your child from being scarred for life and avoided a messy Family Services investigation by successfully packing your 9-year-old’s lunch without tossing in a can of Bud-Light (which looks eerily similar to blue cans of apple juice at 5:30 a.m.).

13. Move Over, Top Chef. Some version of “Best brownies in the galaxy!” was declared after dinner and not “Daaaaaad! Hand me a straw for Ma's meatloaf!”

14. Because You’re Amazing. When the 16 year-old sent the text about the $350 speeding ticket, you refrained from reacting with roundhouse kicks and binge drinking.

15. They Are all Just Teaching Moments. When your tween announced SOMEONE NEEDS TO PUT MORE TOILET PAPER ON THE ROLL, you calmly, without sarcasm suggested that “someone” might be “him.”

16. Hallelujah, You Rock. You managed the impossible: you took a nap today while your infant napped.

17. Advocacy is Your Strong Suit. Neither anxiety nor rage overtook you when your first-grader’s teacher announced your child’s impulsivity and failure to master phonics seem likely to lead to a life of crime.

18. Always the Bearer of Sweet News! The text sent to your spouse tonight read “Oops we r outta diapers” and not “Oops firstborn needs bail.”

19. Diva, Diva, Diva. If you’re a mom, you actually found adequate minutes to shave BOTH legs in the shower.

20. Handsome Devil. If you’re a dad, a portrait of you created by your preschooler is charming, without obvious horns or a pitchfork.

21. King of Orthodontia. You retrieved your 6^th grader’s expensive retainer accidentally thrown away in the trash bin three days ago.

Michele Ranard has three backup stashes of Peanut Butter M&Ms, a husband, two sons, and a master’s in counseling. She has a blog at http://hellolovelyinc.blogspot.com.

activities for children in car

getting there

7:31 AM

Holiday Road Trip Unplugged Wonder

8 Activities Prove Half the Fun is Getting There.
by Michele Ranard, M.Ed.
576 wds

Are you headed over the river and through the woods this year? Are you praying it will be a pleasant sleigh ride with minimal whining, bladder issues, and weary traveler meltdowns? I hear you.

Family road trips have undoubtedly changed since we were in the backseat...remember what a big deal it was when FM joined AM on the radio? (No? Never mind). High tech handhelds, electronic games, DVDs, and more should provide our kids with sufficient entertainment to stave off boredom and enjoy the ride, right? Except they may not be able to create opportunities for bonding and memory-making the way old school road trips rolled.

Electronic media can sometimes leave family members disconnected, and viewing “The Incredibles” more than 75 times honestly triggers hives in certain parents. So an unplugged adventure may be just be what everyone needs. After all, there are plenty of healthy creative unplugged activities for kids to keep them occupied on long drives.

Here are some suggestions to create lasting memories even before you arrive at your destination and to re-connect with the ones you love most.

1. Pipe Cleaner Paradise. A pack of inexpensive pipe cleaners and a nail clipper will keep fidgety kids happy for long stretches of travel time. They can bend the fuzzy sticks or wrap them around pencils to form cheerful colorful creatures. The best part? When they’re satisfied with their creation, they can play imaginative games with them for more stimulating fun. They can share them with you and make up a story about the creature’s adventure to a faraway planet.

2. Cootie Catcher. Remember these things? You pick a color, then a number, and then you get to read your fortune. You need only show your kids how this works once before they’ll be able to come up with variations and stay busy for hours!

3. Figures & Games With String. Supplies required? Wait for it…string. They can make “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Kitty Whiskers,” “Cup and Saucer,” or play “Cat’s Cradle.” AND IT”S QUIET!!!

4. Go Nuts With Foil. Remember when shiny, reflective aluminum foil was as magical to you as fairy dust? Remove the foil from the box with the razor sharp edge, and provide your artful imaginative kids with a cheap roll to go to town! Perhaps, they will transform themselves into superheroes, making masks and “power bracelets.” Perhaps, they will enjoy constructing tiaras, jewelry, and headbands. In any case, they will discover the fun of sculpting foil into cool animals and more—with no cleanup!

5. Old School Card Games. Card games are smart for traveling because a deck is so easy to transport, and there are so many variations of games to play. Crazy Eights and Old Maid are two possible kid pleasers.

6. License Plate Game. Before you depart for your trip, print out a map of the U.S. so children can color in the states as they see license plates. They can even record the time and date they saw it.

7. Virtual Hide and Seek. This guessing game is a hoot! Pick a place inside your house to hide—and here’s the fun part—it can be any size at all! A sock drawer, the dishwasher, the medicine cabinet…everybody asks questions until they narrow it down and find you.

8. Make a Wacky Roadside Stop. Go to the website www.roadsideamerica.com to find quirky, eccentric, touristy places to visit. The kids will remember these nutty detours with you forever.

Michele Ranard has a master’s in counseling and a passion for helping families and children.

humor

parlez vous teen?

2:16 PM

Parlez Vous Teen?

Decoding Millennial Slang
by Michele Ranard, M.Ed.
615 words

I live with teenagers. The other morning at breakfast, my 15-year old son mentioned sorrowfully he may have “tossed a fork.” I grimaced. Because I have grown so accustomed to feeling clueless for what my kids and their friends are talking about (“Dude, that song is way sick widdit stupid hotness yo!”), I assumed “tossed a fork” was new lingo for “blew chunks.”

In reality, my son literally threw a piece of cutlery in the trash. Clearly I over-analyze, but it feels like every day new jargon from their ever-evolving vocabularies is introduced. Here are a few terms with definitions learned from my teen sons, my experience as the parent of millenials, and the world wide web:

Going Screensaver: When you notice a coworker spacing out or dozing off in a meeting.

“Check it out, look at Joe. He’s going screensaver.”

Rosetta-stoned: One who gets so high, he or she begins to speak in a foreign language.

Phone-yawn: The act of taking out a cell phone from one's pocket or purse, resulting in other people in the vicinity taking out and checking their phones as well.

Ballin: The term has been thrown around our house (pun intended) for years so I am sort of a ‘ballin’ connoisseur. It means to be living the high life, to be well respected, to be wealthy or to be a basketball player. “That dude is ballin.”

Tranq: 1. A sedative, or the act of sedating.

2. Any chemical substance used for calming a human or animal through injection or ingestion.

n. "The TRANQs are kept in the emergency medical locker by the gauze."

v. "The bear was TRANQed so that officials could safely transport it back into the wild."
v. "You need to TRANQ out, man, it isn't the end of the world."

Totes: Short for totally.

Facebook Ammo: A humiliating or incriminating photo saved on a friend’s camera to be potentially posted on Facebook for blackmail purposes.

Generation TMI (Too Much Information): While not slang, it is a concept parents of teens likely understand but may need a term for. Urbandictionary.com defines it roughly as kids overloaded with too much information because of the rapid growth of technology and the incessant need people have to share information online.

Text Anxiety: The worry after texting someone when they don’t text right back. Are they alive? Mad? What could possibly be taking so long?

Text Away Your Dignity: Familiar with drunk dialing? It’s the equivalent with texting.

Throw Down: (NOTE: Pay close attention to this one—throw down or throwdown means a million different things depending on context!)

#1: To contribute money to pay for something.

Colton: “Dude, I’m gonna make a McDonald’s run, want some?”
Jake: “Sure, dude, I’ll throw down.”

#2: To mosh or slam dance.

“He totally threw down in the pit.”

#3: To street fight, like “throwing down the gauntlet.”

#4: To throw a large party. (WARNING: it may not be ‘dancing’ they’re planning to do this weekend if you hear your kid mention throwdown on the phone.)

#5: To drink excessively; see warning in #4.

Tiger’s Wife Mad: Or TW Mad. So angry that you find the item which the object of your anger cherishes the most and proceed to beat him/her with it.

“Did you see that dude ask for the manager at Taco Bell? He was Tiger’s wife mad with the burrito!”

By the way, do not under any circumstances try out these expressions on your teens! Trust. They could easily become TW mad and reach for…whatever. Use this knowledge solely to decode, sympathize, and delude yourself into feeling cool. (If you parent a teen, you already know a delusion is the closest you’ll come.)

Because Michele Ranard is paranoid, she still worries ‘tossed a fork’ is secret code. She is an epic sick blogger at http://hellolovelyinc.blogspot.com and http://hellolovelychild.blogspot.com.

Sources: The Urban Dictionary (www.urbandictionary.com) and sons

parenting

Stress and Preschoolers

4:25 PM

STRESS and PRESCHOOLERS

Clearer Understanding & How to Help

by Michele Ranard, M.Ed.

800 wds

As adults with plenty of experience managing stress, we cope with it by learning to calm ourselves. Sometimes we forget that children lack our years of experience and maturity. Anyone who has ever visited a preschool classroom can attest that plenty of three to six-year-olds have yet to learn or practice such coping skills. Understanding some of the underlying structures of stress may help us better guide them.

Measuring Stress

Stress and cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone produced by the outer portion of the adrenal gland in response to stress. It aids in digestion, the immune system, and energy usage. When we face challenges, cortisol levels spike and provide us with energy. Since it can suppress immunity when stress is chronic, stable levels are associated with good health. In fact, recent research suggests a relationship between cortisol levels and suicide risk (Nauwert 2010).

Child health and development expert Sarah Watamura of the University of Denver looked at cortisol and stress in toddlers and preschoolers. She found that young kids were aware of stress within the family EVEN IF THE PARENTS TRIED TO HIDE IT.

The researchers suggest that paying attention to a preschooler’s stress signals (crying after separation, exhaustion after day care, trouble sleeping, or frequent illness) and reacting with support helps.

Stressors for Pres-choolers What is stressing them? Interaction, for one thing. Watamura discovered that even more than separation anxiety, interaction with peers contributed to stress. Levels of cortisol often increased as they attempted to play with lots of other kids.

“At home, preschool-age children typically show a decreasing pattern of cortisol production across the day,” Watamura says. “At child care, many children show a rising pattern,” probably since they are more challenged there.

Family members also affect stress levels. A 2009 study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry reported almost 15 percent of preschoolers have atypically high levels of depression and anxiety. This five-year exploration of Sylvana M. Cote and international researchers in Canada and France found that children with atypical levels were more likely to have mothers with a history of depression.

“We found that lifetime maternal depression was the second most important predictor of atypically high depressive and anxiety problems during preschool years,” says Dr. Cote. The researchers stress preventive interventions are needed to see a long-term impact on the well-being of kids at risk.

Combatting Stress With Nurturance

Nurturance matters. The amount of nurturing rat pups receive from their mothers (licking and grooming in infancy) has lasting effects on the stress response over the life cycle. Laurie Miller Brotman and researchers at the NYU School of Medicine found in studies of parenting and children’s stress response that in fact, there is a cause-effect relationship (2007).

They aimed to measure whether intervention for preschoolers at risk for antisocial behavior could alter the kids’ biological response to a stressful social situation (playing with a group of unfamiliar peers). After the intervention, cortisol levels of preschoolers who were taught coping skills were found to be lower than for those without instruction.

Brotman says results “provide further evidence that early intervention can have a profound effect on children.”

Nurturance may change the brain’s anatomy. Recent research, by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is the first to show that changes in the hippocampal region (a brain region strongly associated with memory and linked to the capacity to manage stress) of children’s brain anatomy are linked to a mother’s nurturing.

The researchers discovered that preschoolers whose mothers actively supported them during a stressful incident showed greater volume in the hippocampus! This finding supports a growing body of research suggesting what we suspected: nurturing kids early in live is critical to healthy development.
Tips to Help Stressed Out Preschoolers

*Provide assurance. If the stressor for your child is at home, Watamura says talk to your child about how you will be able to figure it out and that there’s no need for worry.

*Assess the connection. If your stressed child goes to day care or preschool, investigate to make sure your child’s teacher is bonding with her. Science shows that cortisol levels are more stable when there is a secure attachment.

*Ask around. Watamura suggests asking your care provider: “Does my child play well when she wants to play? How does she do when I leave? When are the roughest times of day?”

*Choices. Give your child appropriate ones. For example, let her pick a friend for a playdate.

*Offer a heads up. To prevent a meltdown, make sure she knows what to expect—she’ll be better able to adjust to circumstances which could trigger stress.

*Remember all families struggle with stress. Watamura reminds that “Like adults, kids don’t always have to be happy” so you shouldn’t automatically try to “fix” things.

Michele Ranard has two children, a husband, and a master’s in counseling.

Resources:

Brotman, Laurie Miller, Ph.D. Effects of a Psychosocial Family-Based Preventive Intervention on Cortisol Response to a Social Challenge in Preschoolers at High Risk for Antisocial Behavior. Archives of General Psychiatry. Oct 2007.

Cote, Sylvana M. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Feb 2009.

Luby JL, Barch DM, Belden A, Gaffrey MS, Tillman R, Babb C, Nishino T, Suzuki H, Botteron KN. Maternal support in early childhood predicts larger hippocampal volumes at school age. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition, Jan. 30, 2012. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118003109

Nauwert, Rick. Brain Inflammation Linked to Suicidal Tendencies. Psychcentral. http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/12/01/brain-inflammation-linked-to-suicidal-tendencies/21371.html. Dec 2010.

Watamura, Sarah, Ph.D. University of Denver. http://www.du.edu/psychology/child_health_and_development/