Where there’s a will there’s a way. On the power of media…

Instilling values in our children is often a long process that often seems to go in fits and starts. Sometimes (ok, often), I wonder if these concepts are really sinking in. After all, my partner and I are just two people providing lessons to our children, and the world out there (friends, teachers, media, advertising, etc., etc) provides it’s own verification or contradiction to what they learn at home. It’s easy to fall into the trap of fear and worrying that the contradictory messages will over-ride the ones we are trying to teach.

Recently, however, I had a little help from an outside source in helping my oldest daughter (7 years old) integrate an important and difficult concept into her thinking. The help came from a movie, and an animated one at that! But before I get to that, let me explain what the concept was.

Teaching the concept of persistence towards a goal is one thing we try to instill. Persistence is one of the key traits that successful entrepreneurs and others posses, because you just can’t give up at the first brick wall (or the second one, or the third) if you really want something. Randy Pausch, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, says in his last lecture before dying of cancer, “the brick walls are there to show us how much we really want it”. (if you haven’t seen this excellent lecture, check out the 10 minute version from Oprah HERE , I highly recommend it, even for older kids).

Frustration often seems to set in in my children very quickly (yours too? imagine that…). Once I saw my 3-year old get frustrated trying to get her shoes on. After about 10 seconds of trying, she screamed, picked up the shoes and hurled them across the room. Probably normal for a 3-year old, but I’ve seen adults blow their top very quickly as well. The key is, what happens next? Do they continue on towards their goal? or do they get frustrated and give up.

So, I spend time encouraging persistence on challenging tasks (which could be putting on your shoes), talking to my older daughter about the concept, pointing out examples that I see and talking about my own struggles with this to provide an example. (hey, mom gets frustrated too, and sometimes handles it better than other times). With all the effort, sometimes I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. The fuse was still very short and level of abandonment of projects high.

Then one day, my 7-year old daughter starts saying that old saying “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way!” whenever she saw me getting frustrated with something, or if she really wanted something. Wow! Where did that come from because I’m not sure I’ve used that particular saying much.

Turns out, the saying came from a movie – Chicken Run! For those of you not familiar with the movie (obviously I wasn’t), it’s about a bunch of egg-laying chickens who are trying to escape from their fenced in yard. Their leader is Ginger, and she has a vision of green fields where all the chickens can relax and enjoy themselves (she refuses to leave anyone behind). She is so certain of this vision that she comes up with about a million ideas to try to escape, all of which are failures for which she ends up in the dumpster of solitary confinement. The thing I love about Ginger is that she never looses sight of her vision and she is determined to make it happen, even when some of the other chickens doubt the efforts and the vision, and even her. Like any great leader, she manages to inspire them and doesn’t give up even though everyone thinks she is crazy. She also doesn’t give up on the rest of the chickens, even though it would be easy for her to escape on her own and leave them behind.

I thought Ginger was pretty cool (although she did not have a very good sense of humor and could have stood to lighten up a bit!), and I guess my daughter did too. She absorbed the message of determination and grit right away. And I took a minute to describe in words some of Ginger’s positive attributes so she had some words to go with the character (“wow, Ginger was super determined! Even when things looked hopeless she didn’t give up.” and “Ginger was a great leader because she inspired the other chickens with her vision of what things could be like”.) I like to think that all those other things I did helped lay the groundwork for this concept to click, but the power of a story to really make it sink in was obvious!

It makes me think of the “zen master” image that is portrayed in movies. You know the old, wise master who always has a little story or parable or riddle in answer to any question (think Yoda or the Karate Kid). I wish I could be like that master, but somehow, my kids don’t view me as a master of wisdom so much as a master of the microwave ….hmmm…. Hollywood, however, takes these little stories and makes them clear as day with dramatic content and images. The stories stick. Good and Bad.

I personally love movies, and when I come across ones that have great entertaining stories with good messages, I’m really happy! They provide outside verification of the messages I am instilling in my children, and if they hear it from multiple sources, they’re more likely to pay attention. I also let my children watch inspiring lectures with me like the one I mentioned above (Randy Pausch) or TED talks that they might relate to that inspire and teach about the world. A lot of media is filled with negative and fear-based messages, and we can spend our time worrying about what those messages are. Or, we can spend our time searching out the positive messages that support what we want to teach. And by the way, if you don’t have time to “search out”, just keep your eyes open to what messages are around you, and point out the positive ones. You’ll find that doing this not only helps your kids, but helps your own psyche too!

Roll with it!
-Elise

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Doing vs. Being – the power of the present

Raising a child is both a marathon and gone in the blink of an eye. When the kids are young, our time together seems to stretch on past the horizon with plenty of time to figure things out. But then when the kids are older we look back and wonder what happened to the years?

I remember looking at my child one day when she was 1 or 2, and suddenly realizing she was no baby anymore, but had turned into a little person with a mind all of her own (perhaps this happened to you too?). And when my twins were small, life rushed by at such a pace that I can barely remember anything when they were 1-2 years old. I was working 6 days a week at a new business, taking care of 3 children in the evenings, and dealing with dinners, house cleaning (our cleaning help actually quit because I couldn’t keep the house picked up!), coordinating babysitters, and about 8 million other things. It’s no wonder I don’t remember anything. When I look back at that time I think, “what was I thinking? Now the twins are older and we’re never going back there again. Wish I’d paid more attention at the time…”

Of course, I wasn’t thinking. Instead I was rushing around, packing my schedule, and trying to do too much – are of which all part of the popular culture paradigm these days. We spend all our time DOING this, Doing that, always striving for productivity, multi-tasking, action, and getting things done. When the kids get older it’s not just our own busy schedules that get in the way of paying attention, it’s the kid’s schedules too. How many people do you know whose kids are shuttled around from one activity to the next with nary a free moment to catch their breath. This spring, my older daughter wanted to have a play-date with a new friend from school, but turns out the new friend has after school activities scheduled 5 days a week. It made it a real challenge to find any time to get together, and thus to form a friendship.

The problem is, all this DOING moves life along, but it’s not really helping us to connect with our children, to see them for who they are, and to just BE with them. Sometimes, even when we are doing things together with our children, we are not really being with them. Instead, our minds are racing off towards all the things still on our schedule for the day, planning for the future, or worrying about the past. We are not paying attention. That moment, like all the others, will be gone and we won’t remember it because we were never really there.

I think most of us realize the insanity of our self-imposed schedules, but it’s hard to break out of it and slow down. I myself have had difficulty reducing my obligations because of pressures from outside and inside not to be unproductive. If I have 20 minutes to rest, do I take it, or do I throw in another load of laundry? If my child wants to play “imaginary house” with me, do I indulge her or continue to make dinner that everyone is waiting for? When do I slow down and make sure we smell the roses instead of rushing from one thing to the next?

My best solution of late is to build a little Slow Time into the day, and then try my best to honor it. During this time, I try to forget about all those 8 million pressures and just BE. After all, everything I have to do will still be there when I get back. For my twins, it is getting them to daycare. Their daycare is only about 3 blocks from our house, so we usually walk there and back. It’s easy to get in a rush (Argh, I’m late again!), but one of the benefits of small children is that they are naturally in the moment. So all I have to do is take a deep breath, follow their lead and remember to be grateful for these few minutes to spend with my children.

When I do that, every day becomes a little adventure of discovery. In our daily walks we’ve noticed and discussed all kinds of things that probably would never enter my consciousness otherwise. For example, the neighbor’s solar walkway lights were a topic of discussion because they just don’t look like lights (are they really lights? what happens if you touch them? can you stand on them? why aren’t they on now?). And every house has a metal water meter cover in front of it – some on the sidewalk and some in the lawn (we located every last one one day, and some were hard to find!). There are also ever-changing aspects of the walk, like the person who planted a wildflower mix between the fence and the edge of the sidewalk. We’ve been watching as the different flowers grow up and bloom – the sunflowers are just starting today. One house we go past is home to a woman who smokes outside while she puts her small white dog on leash to go to the bathroom. We wave as we go by and the dog barks at us. This morning there was a crew setting up to trim some trees with all kinds of fancy equipment, and a guy shoveling asphalt to fill some potholes. This prompted the question of whether only men drove big work trucks, because we’ve never seen a woman (apparently). The girls love to run and tag the mailboxes on the walk, they balance on the low wall like a balance beam, and talk about the spiders they suspect live in the prickly juniper bushes. When we get home, they run to the mailbox to see if there’s anything in it.

This little walk takes just 10 minutes out of my day twice a day, but it’s an opportunity to slow down and view the world from 3-year old level. That is, the level of BEING, not DOING. This level is sorely missing in most of our daily lives, and it just doesn’t happen unless you make a point of making it happen. But the importance of it cannot be understated. It is these moments of being where we connect with our children and it is these moments we will remember when we look back and wonder where the time went.

To make it happen in your life, first you have to decide to do it. Second you have to pick a time. And third, when you get to that time, you have to make the mental shift away from the pressures of the future or the past, and just take the time NOW to connect, to BE. Sometimes making the shift is the hardest part, but like anything it gets easier with practice. (that’s what we tell our children, right? do we take it to heart ourselves?).

Think about your day that you have planned tomorrow. Is there a time in the day when you’ll be with your child that you can just designate as Slow Time? Maybe it’s on the way to or from somewhere (in the car you can turn off the radio and DVD player, cell phone, etc and just talk). Maybe it’s right before bed. Maybe it’s a planned activity. Maybe it’s a meal together. Maybe you take a few minutes to play a game.

Pick your time for tomorrow and decide to spend it really being. Then when you get to that time, see if you can turn off all the mental noise and just be. Then post below how it went!

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