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Keep Your Cool says “ScreamFree Parenting”

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ScreamFree Parenting

ScreamFree Parenting

Recently, a friend of mine highly recommended the book, “ScreamFree Parenting”, by Hal Edward Runkel. The tagline is “Raising Your Kids by Keeping Your Cool”, which perfectly describes what you will learn from this very insightful book.

I made the assumption that this would be another book with more rehashed parenting ideas, but was pleasantly surprised to find out that it is full of fresh tips on keeping the calm between you and your kids.

Parents Need to Grow Up

Runkel focuses on the parent “growing up” and not being so reactive to their kid’s behavior.  One of my favorite examples in the book is about a Mom with her 12 year old daughter.  The daughter is being very dramatic and emotional about some of her Mother’s rules.

Instead of yelling at her daughter in reaction to her unpleasant behavior, she says that she remembers what it was like to be a 12 year old and that it was hard to not get worked up over simple situations.  Basically, the Mom was indicating that she understands what she’s going through, but she was not going to change her mind.  The Mom never raised her voice during the exchange.

As soon as you open your mouth with a calm tone and offer some understanding, while still remaining firm, your child will have more respect for you, and the situation will be under control much quicker.

The All Important Tone of your Voice

When I was working in Investment Management 10 years ago, I remember having the tone of your voice discussion with my co-workers and Director.  The truth of the matter is that 90% of your message comes from your tone, not the actual words that you use when your communicate.  With our clients, it was important to remain calm and steady when discussing their portfolios and answering questions.

I think this is so important to keep in mind with our kids as well.  If we are screaming at our kids and losing our cool several times a week with them, we have stooped to the maturity level of a kid.  There is no reason to lose our patience by yelling.

We will be much more effective if we stay calm and firm in our interactions.

Welcome Consequences into your Home

Another example I really enjoyed was with a teenage daughter and her Mom.  The Mom had been trying to get her daughter to walk to school for the whole year.  She would walk from time to time, but it was always a struggle to get her daughter to get ready in time and start her walk to school.  She would delay and delay until her Mom was leaving for work and could drive her door to door to school.

One morning, the Mom was failing again in her attempt to have her daughter walk to school, so she decided to introduce a time frame to this daily event.  She said that she was leaving for work in 10 minutes and if she wasn’t ready by then, she would have to walk to school and risk being late.

Ten minutes went by, and her daughter was still not ready for school, so the Mother left for work.  At lunchtime, the daughter called the Mom at work to ask her what they had for lunch at home.  The daughter had not gone into school at all that morning!  Instead of the Mom blowing up, she calmly told her daughter to get to school and accept an unexcused absence because she was not going to write a note for her.

It turns out that if you have an unexcused absence at her school, you are not allowed to attend school events for that week.  It just so happened that the Homecoming Dance was that week and the daughter had been looking forward to this event for months.  This was a huge consequence that the daughter and Mother would have to endure to drive a point home.

Do you think the daughter will ever risk being late to school again and being handed an unexcused absence?  I don’t think so.

I think this point of enforcing tough consequences is so difficult to implement.  There have been a number of times where Mountain Man and I have needed to take back privileges from our kids due to bad behavior, but I will give in because there’s a special event during the punishment time.

This book serves as a wonderful reminder that following through with a consequence serves both parties better in the long run.

We want to raise self directed adults

In the first half of the book, I became very teary eyed reading Runkel’s outline of the attributes of a self directed adult.  I became so emotional rather quickly because this list represents exactly what I hope for my kids as they grow into adults.

Runkel points out that one of the most important traits we can teach our kids is to take responsibility for their actions.  This responsibility is one of his main tenets for becoming a self directed adult and becoming an incredible example for those around them.

I love Runkel’s eight characteristics of a “self-directed” adult so much, I just have to share them with you below:

  • “He knows and pursues what he wants in life
  • She gladly seeks counsel from others, but ultimately makes up her own mind
  • He demonstrates integrity, a consistency of his beliefs, desires, words, and actions
  • She holds people accountable for their actions (including her parents), but does not blame others for her own problems
  • He does not let others blame him for their problems
  • She gladly and quickly takes responsibility for her decisions
  • He welcomes criticism as feedback, but does not automatically accept it as truth
  • She takes care of herself in order to be available to others without needing them to take care of her”

I could not have listed a better group of traits to represent what I want for my kid’s to embody.  Just imagine if the majority of the people in this world embodied these traits…it would be incredible.

I absolutely adore “ScreamFree Parenting”, by Hal Edward Runkel, and think you will too.

 

Tools of the Mind Curriculum

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Tools of the Mind Curiculum

Tools of the Mind Curriculum

As I mentioned before in a previous post, the book NurtureShock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, brings up some excellent, well-researched points about how we should be raising our kids.

There is one more study I would like to discuss that is outlined towards the end of the book, called the “Tools of the Mind” curriculum designed for Kindergartners and First Graders.

Tools of the Mind Curriculum

The curriculum implements a few minor changes to the traditional ways of teaching this age briefly outlined below.

1. The wall calendar is a straight line of days along a narrow sheet of paper rather than a typical month by month set up.

2. The alphabet on the wall separates the consonants and the vowels into two different sets, rather than simply going from A to Z.  Consonants with similar sounds are clustered together (ie: C,K,Q).  Also, next to each letter is a sound map, meaning a picture of a “monkey” is next to the letter M, for example.

3. Learning through play.  The example given in the book is about playing fire station.  The kids learned all about firemen the previous week, and are now going to pretend they are firemen and write out their roles.  They get to choose between being a pump driver, 911 operator, fireman or a family that needs to be rescued.  The kids tell their teacher the role they would like and write out a play plan.  They also draw themselves in their chosen role.

The kids then proceed to play for 45 minutes in their role.  If they fuss, then the teacher asks if that was in their play plan.  They need to become self – motivated to stay in their role for so long.   At the end, the teacher plays a clean up song CD which signals that play time is over and they pick up.

4. Reading Time Structure – the children are paired up during reading time with one child holding a drawing of lips and the other a drawing of ears.  The lips drawing holder.  After the first reading, they switch roles.

5. Games – this curriculum utilizes games that require restraint, like Simon says or a game where the teacher plays music and the kids have to draw a certain shape until the music stops.

After Kindergarten, the tools curriculum continues into first grade with a make believe premise based on a book that they are currently reading in class.

Stunning Test Results of Tools of the Mind Students

The Tools techniques were developed by Drs. Elena Bodrova and Deborah Leong in the nineties.  In 1997, they decided to do a test with 10 kindergarten classes in the Denver public schools where half of the teachers would teach the normal district curriculum and the other half would implement the tools curriculum.

One third to one half of the students in these classes were Hispanic and had very limited English proficiency.  At the beginning of kindergarten, they were about a grade level behind due to this obstacle.

In spring, the kids from the tools classes “were now almost a full grade-level ahead of the national standard.”  Bronson points out that in this district, “only half the kindergartners score as proficient at their grade-level.  Of the Tools children, 97% scored as proficient.”

Why Does Tools of the Mind Work so Well

By staging a play area like the fireman example where there is a firehouse, the 911 operator, the family who is in the fire, the trucks, the firefighters etc…, and having each child commit to one role, the level of play becomes more mature, sustained and multidimensional.  Bronson says, “This notion of being able to sustain one’s interest is considered a core building block in Tools.”

Teaching children early on to remain focused and committed to the task at hand is an invaluable asset that will serve them well for the rest of their life.

Playdates are Great for Tools type play

Ms. Imagineer, who is in second grade, is always setting up play scenarios with her friends during playdates.

She will set up an optometrist office, a school, a restaurant, a house with a neighbor or a veterinary office to name a few.  She and her friends assign roles, and usually give Mr. Bam-Bam a small part in the play scenario too ( 🙂 ).  They can play for hours.

It really is quite amazing how engaging play can be when the area is set up efficiently to portray the playtime scene and when all characters commit to a role.

Have any of you had any experience with this curriculum in your school district?

 

NurtureShock is an Eye Opener

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NurtureShock

NurtureShock

NutureShock, a book by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, published in 2009, is definitely an eye opener for parents in the throws of raising their young children.  The subtitle of the book is “New Thinking about Children”.

I would definitely agree with this subtitle as it brings up some very persuasive research for different subjects that will really cause many parents to do a 180 degree turn in the way they handle different areas of parenting.

A friend of mine from my swim team was raving about this book, and I just assumed it would be another parenting book rehashing what I have already read or experienced.  I was wrong.  This is different.  Let me put it to you this way.  I started implementing changes immediately as I gained a new tidbit of knowledge with each chapter I completed.

In this post, I want to share two pieces of research presented in this book that I found particularly interesting.

1. Research shows a better way to praise our kids’ efforts

Throughout my 10 years of parenting, I have tried to focus on my number one goal of creating an environment that will contribute to each of my kids developing a high self esteem.  I have noticed through the years that if a child is not confident and secure with theirselves, then all sorts of problems can arise.  Peer pressure, bad decision making, etc…

Because this is my goal, I praise my kids often.  I still think it is important to praise our kids with positive feedback, but this book suggests doing it in a different way than most of us are doing.

One research example led by Dr. Carol Dweck at Columbia university gave a series of experiments to 400 fifth graders.  Before this study, it was generally accepted that if we praise our kids by telling them they are smart, they will be confident and fearless when tackling a new academic challenge.  It was Dweck’s hypothesis that this method of praising would not work when the children experienced failure or difficulty.

This study with the 400 students was research to see if Dweck was correct in her theory.  There were four research assistants that ran this test.  They were told to administer a nonverbal IQ test that was easy enough that most of the kids would do fairly well.

After the test, the kids were randomly praised either for their intelligence or efforts:

“You must be smart at this” OR “You must have worked really hard”

Then the research assistants gave the kids two choices for their second round of testing:

-they could choose a more difficult test, but were assured that they would learn a lot from attempting the puzzles

OR

-they could choose a similar test to the first one that was fairly easy with no reward of challenging themselves

Results of the Praise Research

The results were stunning to me:  90% of the kids praised for their effort chose the harder test and the majority of the the kids praised for their intelligence chose the easier test.

Dweck’s conclusion was that “When we praise chldren for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: look smart, dont risk making mistakes.”  This is exactly what the fifth graders did – they chose the safe route to not risk being embarrassed.

Talk about eye opening!!  I changed my method of praise the day I read this, because it just makes so much sense.  It was like being hit over the head and having some sense knocked into me.

I have been telling my kids that they are smart when they bring home a great score on a test.  I can now see how this is not going to help long term with their desire to take on new challenges.  It is really more about the effort anyway.  Even if a child is naturally intelligent, they have to apply themselves to reap the benefits.  I just cannot believe I didn’t figure this out earlier!  Glad I’m equipped now.

2. Sleep is so important for our teenager’s developing brains

Mary Carskadon from Brown University performed research outlining the differences in the teenager’s developing brain and why sleep is so important.  She shows that during puberty, the biological clock (circadian system) does a “phase shift”.  When the sky becomes dark outside, in kids and adults, the brain produces melatonin and it is this chemical that makes us sleepy.

For some reason, teenager’s brains do not start producing the melatonin until 90 minutes later than kids and adult’s brains.  Therefore, typically, they will stay awake later.  Since many high schools across the country start very early (7:30am), teens are awoken by alarm clocks while their brains are still producing the melatonin.

This causing their bodies to still require sleep to finish the production of the melatonin.  This accounts for moodiness, falling asleep in first period, and tragically for more than half of the 100,000 “fall asleep” crashes that occur every year.  Really, really sad, to say the least.

There were some school districts who took notice of this study and changed their time to start at 8:30 am instead of 7:30 am.  One school mentioned in the book, is located in Edina, Minnesota.  They started school an hour later to 8:30am after reading this study.

Real World Results from changing high school start time to One Hour Later

Because of this change, the verbal SAT scores of their top 10% went up by 156 points and the Math scores up 56 points!!  I want to write my high school right now and see if this can be changed before my fourth grade enters.

There was another school district in Kentucky that pushed their start time an hour later and they found that the teenage car accidents in their area went down by 25% compared to the rest of the state still on the earlier schedule.  Crazy!!

This just sounds like such a no brainer.  But, it is not that easy.  The early start time is for the convenience of the teachers and administrators to avoid traffic and to get out of school earlier at the end of the day.  It is a huge shift to change the time by one hour.

The book also talks about a Mom with a son whose mood completely changed when their school implemented the later start time.  This particular boy was very happy before high school, then became moody and disengaged.  With the new start time, his test scores went up and he bounced down the stairs every morning ready for school, rather than being moody and non-communicative.

WOW.  I cannot believe I was not aware of this and am so thankful I am informed now.  The book points out that the typical traits of teenagers, “moodiness, impulsiveness, and disengagement” are all a result of chronic sleep deprivation!

The idea that we are actually creating teenage problems is very troubling.

Conclusion

This book is so chock full of great research based parenting advice and guidance, it should be a required reading (if that could somehow be possible 🙂  ).  The book covers many issues including why kids lie, how siblings affect each other, and whether it is possible to teach your kids self control.

I highly recommend this book, in case you were still wondering if I liked it.  🙂

 

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