With the semester over and two teenagers in the house again (Andrew returned from his first year at college last week and Patrick is finishing up his freshman year in high school), it’s time to get back to the Joyful Parenting series. The teenage years are the other bookend of parenting, and it’s hard to say which is more challenging, the early or late years.

Two books that helped us the most during the middle and teenage years are Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose Child is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, and Energetic, by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka (William Morrow, rev. 2006) and Transforming the Difficult Child: The Nurtured Heart Approach, by Howard Glasser and Jennifer Easley (Nurtured Heart Publications, rev. 2008). The former was our bible during pre-school and elementary school. We didn’t learn about the latter until middle school when our son’s school adopted the Nurtured Heart Program, but it has done wonders for easing tensions during the teenage years.

Below are some quick tips from the trenches for surviving the teenage years, most of which are equally applicable to the middle years, especially if you have a child with a high need for freedom and independence (i.e., if it’s one of their top soulful values). If you’re not sure if your child has this need, then they probably don’t – both our boys were fiercely independent from the time of their toddler years – but you will probably need some help on this front during the teenage years anyway.

#1: It’s not about you. My husband Brian was raised in Texas, where the idea of respect for authority was ingrained at an early age, enforced by corporal punishment. So when my sons tested their freedom by ignoring what we had asked them to do, Brian took it personally, as a sign of disrespect. This made for some highly contentious battles over what the boys would or would not do, with both sides digging in their heels and sometimes literally yelling toe to toe and nose to nose, especially during the early teenage years. After working through this in family counseling, we’ve learned to take the boys’ rebellions as dispassionately as possible, delivering consequences when needed but trying to stay as calm as possible even in the face of high emotions. My favorite tip, and I can’t remember now where I heard it, is to pretend your child is your neighbor’s child. This takes practice and may require some development work for the parents, especially if the arguments trigger your childhood baggage.

#2: Set clear boundaries and consequences, and enforce them consistently. This is a classic parenting rule, but its importance is even greater during the teenage years. We find that life in our household is fairly peaceful as long as we all know what the rules are and enforce them consistently, but our boys go ballistic if we suddenly change the rules. This often happens when past precedence becomes an informal “rule” that we never intended. There is a large hole in Andrew’s wall from one of those occasions. We have at times kept a list of rules and responsibilities on the refrigerator and checked off when the boys have met them. This can be particularly helpful when transitioning to a new set of rules as your family’s needs change over time (see #4 below).

#3: Accept that sometimes your child will choose the consequences and hit the tree. Occasionally we wind up getting into a game of one-upsmanship, where we try to get our children to do what we want by continuing to raise the consequences in hopes that they will come around, and they dig in their heels and refuse to do what we want regardless of how we increase the consequences. This game can quickly reach the point of ridiculous, where we’ve taken away a month of privileges and have no more consequences to give for any future transgressions for a whole month. We’ve learned to gently stop each other during the one-upsmanship contest with a reminder that the consequences are already sufficient for the transgression and it’s time to back off. Sometimes we’ve had to renegotiate the consequences later because we’ve realized that we let them get to ridiculous levels before stopping. This doesn’t undermine your authority as long as you explain to your child that you are only willing to renegotiate because you made a mistake, and the renegotiated consequences are still sufficient to avert the behavior in the future.

Some time ago I heard a great metaphor about consequences and I can’t remember where I heard it to properly cite it. There will be times in your child’s life when you can see that they are driving straight towards a tree and they are oblivious. If you try to stop them by standing between them and the tree and waving your arms, they will simply accelerate and drive right over you to hit the tree anyway. So unless the tree is life threatening, it’s better to stand back and let them learn their own lessons and help them pick up the pieces afterwards (without saying “I told you so”!). I know from personal experience that this can be incredibly difficult when your child is making bad choices that will affect their future. Nonetheless, it is essential to giving them room to grow into independent adults, with you ultimately being a mentor rather than a director.

It’s perfectly fine to tell your child that, based on your past experiences, you believe the path they’ve chosen will lead to some unpleasant outcomes. You can then ask if they are interested in hearing about some alternatives to consider. Just don’t be surprised if they don’t want to hear about them or choose to ignore them. Over time, though, they will eventually come to value your advice if it’s offered in a way that allows them to maintain ownership over their choices (see #7).

#4: Renegotiate boundaries periodically, especially when tensions become high. As your child grows, his or her needs will change and he or she will be able to handle more responsibility on their own. It’s important to recognize when the boundaries need changing and be willing to have a family meeting to brainstorm new approaches and get everyone’s input on them. We use the level of tension in the household as a guide for where we need to focus attention and make changes. Often there are certain “sticky” times when frustrations, and voices, habitually get raised. With our sons, getting out of bed and to school in the morning has been a long-time sticky point with sleepy-headed teenagers. We’ve had to experiment with many strategies over the years to find ones that work, and try again when conditions change and previous strategies stop working.

This renegotiation is also important for allowing your child to take on more responsibilities as they get older and are preparing to leave home. As a professor, you’ve probably seen the students who go wild when they reach college because they never had any freedom at home, and you wouldn’t want your child to become one of those statistics. With both our children, we reached a point where they were expending more effort in fighting us about doing their homework than in actually getting the homework done. That’s when we knew it was time to give them responsibility for when and how their homework gets done. We still ask them if they need help and set up meetings with their teachers to help negotiate when things aren’t going well, but the final result is up to them. Sometimes this has involved hitting the tree (see #3), but in the long run they need to take ownership for charting their own academic path.

#5: Work to create more positive interactions than negative. This is a key point in the Nurtured Heart Program and it helped our family relationships immensely. It’s easy to fall into the trap of only focusing on your child’s negative behaviors, which can inadvertently train them to behave negatively just to get your attention. A rule of thumb I heard somewhere (perhaps in the Nurtured Heart book) is that you should try to find 2 positive things to say for every negative thing, building up a bank of positive interactions to offset the inevitable negative interactions and maintain (or rebuild) a positive relationship with your child.

Positive interactions can be as simple as thanking your child for making it downstairs in the morning, remembering their lunch, or following any rule successfully, no matter how minor. We also schedule sacred family times when we bank larger stores of positive interactions. Teenagers may protest spending time with you, but if you establish such times as routine and scheduled, with consequences if they don’t participate, and select activities they enjoy (or at least tolerate), you’ll find that you all enjoy these times in the end. Below are our sacred family times, but you’ll need to find what works for you.

• Dinnertime: We all eat together at dinner whenever schedules allow (usually 5-6 days a week), and each person answers one of four questions: (1) What did you learn today? (2) What mistake did you make and what did you learn from it? (3) What did you try hard at? and (4) What did you have fun doing today? The first three questions help instill a growth mindset towards life’s challenges (see Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck for more on the importance of this), while the last one is to remind us to make time for fun.
• Pizza and a movie night: Once a week, usually Friday nights, we have pizza and watch a movie or a couple shows, taking turns choosing what we watch. This gives us a history of pop culture jokes and stories to share in the future.
• Weekly family time: Each weekend, we spend some time together doing an activity, rotating who gets to choose the activity. These days, we usually wind up playing board games together for an hour or two. We’ve learned that there’s nothing worse for quality interaction than having one person disgruntled because they hate the activity, so we try to choose something that everyone enjoys (or at least tolerates).
• Vacation family time: At holidays and during the summer, we make time for sightseeing trips and visiting extended family. Again, try to choose something that everyone enjoys, or can at least tolerate without getting too grumpy. Long summer vacations can get more challenging in the later teenage years when kids have jobs or other activities, but even a day or weekend trip can make a major difference in banking positive interactions.

#6: Give unconditional love and respect. Especially in the teenage years, children can be disrespectful and sometimes downright hateful to their parents. We enforce consequences for their speech and actions, but remind them that they are lovable regardless of their behaviors by giving plenty of loving, patient, and respectful treatment back to them. Keeping a sense of humor about their shoddy behavior also helps immensely – we have a running joke about thanking the aliens for periodically kidnapping our teenagers and leaving pod children when they have an unusually well-behaved day. Of course we’re human and sometimes get caught up in the emotions of the moment and lash back, but we always apologize and make amends when we do. Teaching your child to forgive themselves when they’re not perfect is also an essential point to model.

#7: Remember that it will get better. Everyone who has survived the teenage years tells me that their children eventually become loving and productive human beings again, and they will probably do so more quickly if you can follow the suggestions above. We’ve seen a huge change in Andrew just during his first year away from home. We’ve worked hard to listen to his ideas and challenges in a supportive way and ask him how he plans to address the challenges rather than telling him what to do. This often requires a good measure of self restraint to avoid giving our opinions, but it’s paying off as he’s now more willing to talk with us and consider our ideas than he ever was before.

Please share your favorite parenting tips from the middle and teenage years in the comments.

Barbara Minsker

June 1, 2013

Last year I wrote a couple of posts (January 7, 2012 and January 12, 2012) about the challenges of maintaining equanimity on Indian roadways, where cars, trucks, motorcycles, rickshaws, carts, cows, dogs, and people careen from all directions in a madness that shows none of the orderliness of U.S. traffic. So when I prepared to take 13 students back to India this January to work on sustainability projects, I dreaded facing the same stress again. To my surprise, though, I had few problems dealing with the chaos this year. While some of that came from being prepared this time, I believe much of it came from the development work I’ve done this year.

It all started last spring when the perfect storm of personal and professional stresses conspired to keep me awake when I woke up during the night. I thought I had done well in finding joy and equanimity in my life, but as day after day dragged on in a constant state of sleep deprivation, I realized it was time to seek help. I mentioned this to our family therapist, Ron, and he recommended that I try some new stress-reduction methods. After a couple of discussions, I realized that, despite all the years of development work, loving family and friends, and a successful career, deep down a part of me still thought I was a failure. Ron asked me to make a list of all the things that happened in my life that led me to that conclusion, and I wrote down everything that had ever gone wrong in my life. Apparently some part of my psyche thought I was responsible for making sure everything went well and, of course, when that wasn’t possible all the time, I was therefore a failure. Not a good state of affairs.

Ron recommended that we try focusing on the most traumatic of the events, which was when my brother Steve fell down a waterfall at the age of 11, when I was six. During the treatment, I held a small paddle in each hand that gave off a mild electrical pulse, alternating between hands. Apparently experiencing alternating pulses while talking through a traumatic event re-unites the right and left sides of the brain, which separate during trauma, enabling one to re-experience the event with a more informed viewpoint, not to mention a trained counselor to help with interpretation. We talked through the events when my parents woke me up, told me that my brother had fallen down a cliff and might not survive, and left my other brother and me with the neighbors while they went to help Steve through a long hospital stay. It was as if I were six years old again, and details and thoughts I had at the time re-emerged that I hadn’t even remembered. In the process, I discovered that I blamed myself for my brother’s accident.

Why? Well, like most big brothers, Steve sometimes teased me and even stole my dolls (the ultimate betrayal!). I would get mad at him and apparently wished that he would die and leave me alone. So when Steve fell down the waterfall, I thought God had heard my request and made it happen. It didn’t help that the nuns had told me that only bad people have bad thoughts, which of course meant I must be a bad person for wishing ill of my brother.

Ron told me that it’s quite common for children to have this type of reaction to trauma, believing they are responsible for events entirely out of their control. For me, the discovery was mind blowing, to realize that the anxieties I’d suffered all these years were based on a few stupid childhood ideas that I had completely forgotten but nonetheless managed to quietly undermine all my best efforts to let go of the illusion of control and find peace and equanimity.

Ron lent me a book called Healing Your Aloneness: Finding Love and Wholeness Through Your Inner Child, which teaches you how to dialogue with your inner child and help them work through these types of misunderstandings, patiently and with compassion. It seemed pretty crazy, but I had conversations between little Barbie and grown-up Barbara about all the things that were bothering Barbie and how we could address them. Over the course of a few months, I completely stopped having the last of my chronic anxiety symptoms, tightness in the chest, and the sleep problems disappeared.

Between this work and my ongoing meditation practice (see this posting), I can feel my grip on the steering wheel of life loosening more and more. Things that used to bother me don’t any more, and my reactions are becoming less intense. When irritations come up, I’m able to apply the skills I’ve learned from my meditation teacher, Sandra, to create a peaceful space in my mind large enough to hold it all, from which I can be with the emotions and thoughts without getting swept up in them. This works any time, any place, even in Indian traffic. So when the traffic careened around our mini-bus, and even ran into us once, when our plans were constantly changing (not always for the better), and when the heat, humidity, noise, and lack of sanitation pressed on our patience, I was able to handle it all with relative ease.

While I’m far from perfect, and never will be, it’s a relief to finally, deep down, be at peace with imperfection. And for that I am deeply grateful to my teachers on this path, Ron and Sandra, and before them Jan at the Center for Authentic Leadership, who helped me to start the process of lightening my baggage and finding joy.

Barbara Minsker

March 16, 2013

Recently I ran into a colleague, father of twin babies and an older child in the parking garage on our way to work. He was carrying a huge thermos of coffee along with another giant coffee mug, his supply of caffeine for the morning. When I asked him if things were tough on the sleep front, he replied that one of the kids always seemed to be awake at any given time. While I’ve fortunately never experienced such a triple threat, every parent of young children struggles with the challenges of parenting. Here’s a few tips, hopefully not too rusty (my kids are 14 and 18 years old now):

1. Give unconditional love. Yes, children are wonderful bundles of joy, but they can also be irrational and self-centered creatures that can drive you to madness. No matter what they do, they need to know that they are still loved, as that is the best platform to developing a healthy (and not overly needy) ego. In the earliest years, that means being sure that they are held and cared for, and given the space to explore and still come back to a loving home base (a lap or arms) when they need to. That home base doesn’t always have to be yours (see #4 below), but it needs to be reliably available.
2. Follow your heart. You can ask for advice and read lots of helpful parenting tips, but in the end trust your heart and do what feels right for your child and you. Andrew was a terrible sleeper as a baby and toddler, fighting sleep at all costs and waking up numerous times in the night. Desperate for sleep, we finally caved and tried others’ advice to let him “cry it out.” Supposedly it works beautifully for other people’s children, who settle in after a little while and then go to sleep on their own thereafter. Our little fighter, however, was hysterical for over an hour before he finally threw up all over himself. In the end he didn’t sleep through the night until he was three years old, but he did eventually learn to do so when the time was right for him, much to our relief. I just wish we had trusted our hearts more and not put us all through that trauma.
3. Take care of yourself. The early years are exhausting and young children can demand constant attention. However you won’t be able to give them the patience and wisdom they need if you don’t take the time to care for yourself, so don’t feel guilty about it. This is the most important time to figure out exactly what your needs are so you can be efficient. Of course your needs include the basics like sleeping (take naps when your baby does, or at work, to get you through the day on a short night), eating healthy foods (buy pre-made if you can), and exercising (put the baby in a stroller or backpack and get moving). Taking care of yourself also includes forgiving yourself for the mistakes you make, which are an inevitable part of parenting. Fortunately children are highly resilient and you usually get another chance to try again. When they’re old enough to understand, be sure to apologize for the mistakes you make, as it’s important for children to understand that we’re all human and we need to give each other the chance to forgive and try anew. And don’t forget to feed your soulful values (see my book for more on these), the things that bring you the greatest joy and satisfaction. Get creative and find ways to meet them while also meeting the needs of your family and career. When Andrew was very young, he loved to explore the world and I would take him to new places that fed my need for learning and adventure while also delighting him.
4. Ask for help. If you’re a two-career family or single parent, hire help so you can find enough time to take care of yourself and spend quality time with your family. If you’re a one-career family, be sure the stay-at-home parent has enough relief time to keep their sanity and feed their own soulful values. At work, take as much leave as you can and ask for a reduction in teaching and service load during the first year. My one regret was not pushing harder for no service during the year after my son was born. When you’re sick or overwhelmed, don’t be afraid to ask family or friends for help. People do enjoy helping others and grandparents can treasure time alone with their grandchildren to build their own special relationships.
5. Carve out family time. If you have a partner, schedule regular time alone, even if it’s just curling up with a video on the couch after the kids are asleep. Try to get out for a date night at least once a month to keep your romantic spark alive during this challenging time. As your kids get older, establish sacred family times when everyone comes together, such as dinners, weekend outings, and trips. Those are the times your kids will remember most, creating the bonds to help you through the tough times. When my kids were young, we also scheduled times when one of us would take one child out alone for a special outing. This particularly helped my older son to feel special despite his younger brother’s intrusion in his life.
6. Accept speed bumps in your career. While it may seem like an eternity at times, the year or two that it takes to get your children through the intensive care period will be pretty short compared to the rest of your career. Cutting back on travel and some grant writing or publishing during this time is not going to kill your career, especially if you take a rollback on the tenure clock. And don’t listen to rumors that rollbacks will hurt you later – I have yet to see it happen.
7. Cherish this time. The biggest surprise for me in becoming a parent was how many joys and fun times there were. Somehow I’d gotten the idea that parenting was just a lot of work and hassles. Stay mindful in the moment and enjoy these precious times (see my previous posting on mindfulness if you want tips for how to do this). Before you know it, you’ll be sending your child off to college like me!

Please share your favorite parenting tips from the early years in the comments.

Barbara Minsker

October 5, 2012

In my last posting, I talked about the difference between “having it all” and having a successful career and healthy family life. A colleague (thanks Jeanne!) followed up with a related news piece from The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” by Anne-Marie Slaughter. Slaughter just gave up a dream job at the State Department after two years of commuting between Washington, DC, and her home and family in Princeton, NJ, to return to her faculty position at Princeton University and spend more time with her family.

It was interesting to learn that a career in academia is so much friendlier for spending time with family than a high-level government job. As Slaughter says, “Before my service in government, I’d spent my career in academia: as a law professor and then as the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Both were demanding jobs, but I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done. I had to travel frequently, but I found I could make up for that with an extended period at home or a family vacation.”

Indeed, flexibility is one of the greatest assets of the faculty life, one that many faculty often don’t take full advantage of. When my kids were young, I worked at home as much as I could, walked my kids to school most days, attended school events during the day, and made sure I left the office by 5 PM so we could have family time before they went to bed. Then I went back online and worked some more in the evening. I am blessed to have a stay-at-home husband so that I could focus solely on quality time with the kids when they were awake, while he took care of most of the household chores. For two-career families, hiring help so that you can get good family quality time is essential to sanity. We’ve also gone on long family vacations (including a 7-week odyssey across the country one year) where I work while we’re driving and play while we’re visiting.

As my kids got older, I set aside Fridays for working at home and getting papers and other time-intensive tasks done, and continued keeping a flexible schedule around family needs. Now that my kids are independent teenagers with their own activities, I find working at home even more important so that I can be around for the few times when my kids still need me, as well as to help out with ferrying to activities. This summer I am working at home 1-2 days a week and another 1-2 mornings a week, which has brought family connection and high productivity, a win-win arrangement. And nothing beats having lunch on the back deck and an afternoon nap before returning to productive time in the afternoon and after dinner. (For those who might be skeptical of the idea of napping in a busy life, trust me, it makes the rest of the day so much more productive that it’s well worth the time investment, not to mention how blissful it is!)

In fact, studies have shown that job flexibility is one of the best indicators of productivity and health, even in high-stress jobs (see, e.g., this story). So go ahead, find a schedule and environment that integrates your personal and family needs with those of your job, and don’t feel guilty about not being at the office so much. Thank goodness for the internet: we can be present anywhere, anytime. Just don’t let that 24-7 availability pressure you into working too much.

As Slaughter points out, “The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today…Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s.”

When I first started as an assistant professor 16 years ago, I was told that publishing 2-3 journal papers per year was reasonable, and when I published 5 papers one year I was told that I was a “star.” Old timers shook their heads and said that the performance standards were much higher than when they were assistant professors. Recently my department head told me that the average rate in my department is now 6 papers per year and that I should aim for 10 papers per year as a top faculty member. What is driving these inflationary numbers? Is it a drive for ratings game? Has anyone noticed that the ratings are based 50% on reputation, which has little to do with volume? I worry about what these pressures are doing to our young faculty, and I believe it’s up to the senior faculty to speak up for the value of a more sane life.

Bravo to Slaughter, who says “When I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I decided that one of the advantages of being a woman in power was that I could help change the norms by deliberately talking about my children and my desire to have a balanced life. Thus, I would end faculty meetings at 6 p.m. by saying that I had to go home for dinner; I would also make clear to all student organizations that I would not come to dinner with them, because I needed to be home from six to eight, but that I would often be willing to come back after eight for a meeting. I also once told the Dean’s Advisory Committee that the associate dean would chair the next session so I could go to a parent-teacher conference.”

I’ve taken a similar strategy for some years with my students, explaining to them why I need to reschedule a meeting to make a parent-teacher conference, doctor’s appointment, sporting event, or class party. It’s important for them to understand that personal lives are important and they don’t have to be left at the door when you take a faculty position. But in order for that to happen, we need to “just say no” to inflationary pressures to generate more and more publications and graduate students. Because quality isn’t about the numbers, it’s about creativity and innovation. And those require adequate time and the clarity that comes from taking care of personal needs as well as professional. So it’s time to sign off and go have my afternoon nap and enjoy a family dinner and fireworks tonight. Happy 4^th of July!

Barbara Minsker

July 4, 2012

Recently I was interviewed by my alma mater (Cornell University) for an article entitled “Women in CEE: Four Decades of Success,” which was the cover feature in the Spring 2012 CEE Update. During the interview, I was told that I would only have 500 words in the feature and asked what message I would like to give. I thought a moment and then said that I would like young women to know that it is entirely possible to have a successful faculty career and a healthy family life. When I started as a faculty member, I had a two-year-old and knew I wanted another child, but I wasn’t sure if the faculty life was going to work with my family commitments. During graduate school, I had seen plenty of separated and divorced faculty and one faculty member stated emphatically that I would have to choose between work and family, and in fact she had turned down a marriage proposal because she didn’t think both could be done.

Andrew and his proud parents

Last week my oldest son, Andrew (my grad school baby), graduated from high school and my youngest son, Patrick (my tenure-track baby), was promoted from middle school to high school. Having now launched one child almost out of the nest and another well on his way, while still maintaining thriving career and personal lives, it’s time for an emphatic rebuttal of that long-ago poor advice. Yes, both work and family can be done well, if you are very careful about how you spend your time and work hard at both.

Somehow, though, that message got translated into a headline reading “Savvy Women Can Have It All.” What?! Anyone who has read the Joyful Professor book or taken one of our workshops knows that no one can have it all. The whole point of the program is to help people identify their most important values and needs, both personally and professionally, and eliminate all the other distractions, at least to the extent possible. So no, you can’t have it all, but you can have what’s most important to you. The tricky part is figuring out what’s most important to your career and personal life and finding the discipline and courage to effectively integrate them into a joyful life without feeling guilty about all the things you’re not doing. (Note that I did not use the word balance here. Far better to integrate your needs and responsibilities into a full life rather than trying to walk some tight rope of balance.)

Patrick and his proud parents

And so, in honor of my boys moving into a new chapter in their lives, this posting begins a series on Joyful Parenting in the next few postings. I’ll start with surviving the teenage years, which is of course freshest on my mind, and then move to the baby and toddler years. Those two bookends of parenting are the most challenging periods, and if you find the skills and wisdom to survive them, you’ll do fine during the intervening years.

Barbara Minsker

June 2, 2012