Counselors
Cart
Parenting Press®Welcome to the April 2011
“News for Parents”
Dear Friends of Parenting Press:
Looking for project ideas? Books to read? Downloads for home, school, or youth group? At Parenting Press, we’re always generating material we hope you like and use.
“News for Parents” is available in two formats: by e-mail and, complete with color and photos, online. We appreciate your comments; use the “feedback” link after each article to reach us. Want to make sure you receive every issue? Subscribe now, and this newsletter will be in your e-mail box the beginning of every month.
To keep up with Parenting Press’s other news, e-mail marketing@ParentingPress.com and we’ll put you on our “all press releases” list. You’ll hear about authors coming to your area and new books—and we promise not to overwhelm you. You can also contact us via Facebook and get almost daily news from us via Twitter.com/parentingpress.
Got a story idea? Use any of the “feedback” links to contact us. Although “News for Parents” is created by the Parenting Press staff, your suggestions for topics are appreciated. Want to advertise in “News for Parents?” Sorry: this is an advertising-free zone!
If you teach parenting education, conduct home visits or counsel parents and caregivers, click on through to our Parent Educator Corner and register for a complimentary information sheet. There’s one every month! Popular topics include how to get kids into bed, how to keep them there, and how to get them to sleep.
If you write for a newspaper or school, extension, or child care newsletter, you’re welcome to excerpt or reprint our information, as long as you credit us and send us a copy. Advance copies of selected stories from the next issue (see “Coming Attractions”) are available the last week of this month for excerpts in print publications. E-mail our media contact.
Looking for a conference speaker? Check our list of authors available for speeches and interviews, and the online media kits. Books, info sheets, teaching plans, kids’ activities: we’re always in a whirl at Parenting Press with dozens of ideas that we hope you’ll enjoy and find helpful. Many are described in this issue; others will be published in later issues (see Coming Attractions).
IN THIS ISSUE
- WHAT’S NEW?
- FEATURES
- POTPOURRI
- COMING ATTRACTIONS
- Parenting after the Death of a Child
- Help! Babies Don’t Come with Instructions!
- Feast on Bugs and Dandelion Blossoms
I. WHAT’S NEW?
-
Start Small for Gardening Fun
A carton of eggs, a laundry detergent scoop and an old sieve are all your youngest gardeners need to start seeds for spring. Even if your “garden” will be no larger than a pot on the stoop, your family can use the seeds you start in potting soil that’s been sifted through the sieve. Spoon it into blown-out eggs or the dozen spaces in the egg carton and then carefully place a seed or two in each spot. If kids want to watch roots develop, fill transparent laundry scoops with soil, and place seeds near the scoop side.
A clear plastic take-out container or salad greens bin can be recycled into a mini-greenhouse, and if you don’t have a plant mister, wash out an empty hair spray bottle for gentle watering.
When your plants look as if they’re outgrowing these tiny homes, those plants in eggs or egg cartons can be moved directly into their outdoor pots or garden patch: the biodegradable containers will break apart from the pressure of roots.
-
Using the STAR Parenting Approach
Based on Elizabeth Crary’s decades of experience as a parent educator, the new STAR Parenting Tales and Tools: Respectful Guidance Strategies to Increase Parenting Effectiveness & Enjoyment spells out how parents and caregivers can prompt children to change behavior. The STAR Parenting model that the author developed and has used with parents for 10 years starts with three elements:
an attitude of respect and reflection that keeps the adult’s long-term goals for the goal in mind
a process for responding to unwanted actions
15 specific tools for responding to behavior.
Like other recent Parenting Press publications, this book emphasizes how a child’s temperament, developmental stage and life experience to date can affect behavior and how children from the same family often respond in different ways. Crary encourages adults to be realistic in their expectations and to also consider the values they want to impart to a child of any age.
What’s also common to Crary’s work is her focus on specifics. Gather data, she advises, so you know how often something occurs and how long a behavior lasts. Determine if it’s really a problem, and if it is, what you as the adult prefer to have happen. Set goals, brainstorm your options, choose an approach, and then implement your strategy. If you don’t see the desired behavior change after consistent implementation of the techniques, consider whether a different approach makes sense.
Full of examples from families that you and the families you serve can identify with, STAR Parenting is ideal for use with new and experienced parents of any age, with toddlers through tweens.
-
How You and Your Kids Can Protect Yourself from Manipulative People
At least occasionally, difficult people are part of all of our lives. Sometimes it’s at home, sometimes at work or school, sometimes in social groups, professional organizations or at volunteer projects. They make us feel bad and they can make it hard for us to get things accomplished. Worse yet, they can be abusers whose actions go unchecked because their tactics are so polished.
One type that’s particularly challenging to work with is the manipulator, what author George Simon Jr. calls a “character-disordered individual” or “disordered character.” In a recently revised book, In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People, he says it can be difficult to recognize that someone is deliberately trying to control you.
Simon’s advice: first, accept “how fundamental it is” for people to fight for the things they want, and become aware of what he calls the “subtle, underhanded ways” that manipulators can and do fight. He also recommends that we acknowledge that manipulative people are different:
- They have little or no conscience.
- They are unlikely to feel genuine guilt or shame. They may be embarrassed if their behavior is exposed, but they do not feel shameful about the behavior itself.
- They have inflated senses of self-esteem and think they are entitled to anything they want, that things are owed to them.
- They are undeterred by adverse consequences or society’s disapproval. They take what they want, regardless of societal norms.
- They may do mean things automatically, but these actions are still conscious and deliberate.
- They are aware of their attitudes and core beliefs and are not interested in changing them.
It’s also typical for manipulators to be:
- Self-centered. They think of themselves, not about others’ needs or how their own actions might impact others.
- Possessive. They see others as their possessions or as people whose role is to please them. A related issue: the manipulator sees others as objects, not as individuals with dignity, worth, rights and needs.
- Disdainful of effort. They want things the easy way.
It’s hard to accept that we must change our behavior to be able to handle a manipulator, Simon points out: we are more likely to want this difficult person to have to truly work and “pay” for the problems he or she has caused. However, you will maintain a position of greater strength in your relationships—with anyone—if you follow these guidelines, he says:
Accept no excuses. “If someone’s behavior is wrong or harmful, the rationale they offer is totally irrelevant. The ends never justify the means.” Simon continues, “From the very moment they start ‘explaining,’ they are resisting submission to the principle of civil conduct and trying to get you to cave in. . .”
Judge actions, not intentions. “If you base your opinions on your assumptions about intentions. . ., you’re going to be deceived about the character of the person with whom you’re dealing.”
Set personal limits. Decide what behavior you’ll tolerate before you either take counter-action or “disengage,” and determine what action you are both willing and able to take to protect yourself.
Make direct requests. Be specific about what you dislike, expect or want from the other person. Simon says this has two advantages: first, a manipulator cannot claim to have misunderstood you. Second, if you don’t receive a direct, reasonable response to your direct, reasonable request, you know the manipulator is not planning to cooperate.
Accept only direct responses. If you don’t get a direct, clear answer the first time, ask again. “Respectfully assert [that] the issue you raised is important and deserves to be forthrightly addressed.”
Stay focused in the ‘here and now.’ Avoid past issues or speculating about the future. Don’t let the manipulator divert your attention or evade your questions.
Keep the focus on the aggressive behavior. Continue asking what the manipulator will do to correct his or her behavior. Make sure the blame isn’t sidestepped or shifted back to you.
Avoid sarcasm and put-downs. “Aggressive personalities are always looking for an excuse to go to war,” Simon says, and any perceived hostility on your part can result in an offensive that distracts attention from the behavior.
Avoid threats. Making threats is an attempt to manipulate others.
Take action quickly. Confront manipulative behavior immediately to establish a more powerful position for yourself.
Impose consequences. These may appear subtle, such as disengaging when your direct requests are not honored. (With your family, you can brainstorm different ways of disengaging, especially what can be done in a classroom, on a playground or in a youth group setting if walking away is not an option.)
Prepare for consequences from the manipulator. Anticipate what the manipulator might do after being confronted, try to protect yourself, and find people to support you. Especially today, with so much bullying via social networking, anticipate what gossip, innuendo or outright lies may be spread about you.
Finally, says Simon, know what you want and need out of any situation. Ideally, you’ll be able to be specific about tasks that need to be accomplished, and keep the focus on those, rather than succumbing to your own desire for power, vindication or revenge.
-
Abracadabra, Bamboozle, Canoodle and Other Weird Words You’ll Love to Say
In Wordcatcher: An Odyssey Into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words, author Phil Cousineau says he wants to make us “keenly discerning, shrewdly knowledgeable” about words, and so for his 300 pages of “weird and wonderful words,” he sought out those that are:
- Derived from surprising sources
- Fun to say or hear
- Related to the same source
Keep this paperback in your kitchen and select a word a day to explore over dinner, spell it out in magnetic letters on the fridge and see how many words you can make out of each one, or use it with a teenager boning up on vocabulary before pre-college exams. (Or simply pull it out when you want a surprise or a chuckle!)
A few examples to get you started:
Aphilophrenia, which the author defines as “the haunting feeling, however fleeting, that one is unloved.”
Buccaneer, which started out as the name for ordinary islanders, “boucans,” who smoked meat on a wooden rack over an open fire. Later “boucanier” meant the outlaws who hid in remote woods of the West Indies and cooked their meat over open fires.
Chicanery, defined as “tricky talk, clever deceptions, unfair artifice,” comes from an old French verb, chicaner, which meant to deceive or wrangle.
Red-handed originated as a 15th century Scottish legal term for a criminal caught with blood on his hands.
Thole, immortalized in “Beowulf,” means to endure, or “bear the evil consequences.” A companion word: intolerable.
Zephyr comes from the name of one of eight gods of the wind and today, says Cousineau, it means “a soft breeze. . .a refreshing breeze from the West.” He found the word in an 8th century book on tea, in Emily Dickinson’s poems. . .and in an athletic gear catalog, where it refers to a garment worn by rowing crews.
-
Puppet Play by Repurposing
Just in time for the National Day of Puppetry on April 23 comes twenty ways to turn throwaways into hand puppets and marionettes! Click through to the Puppeteers of America’s web site for a little history on handheld friends and then use the ideas in Puppet Play by Diana Schoenbrun for your own puppets.
"Bean-Bot" is a marionette made from cans, notebook spirals, keys, fish line and old wood rulers.Well illustrated with photographs of finished puppets and sketches of construction details, this new book walks you through twenty projects that are designed for mittens and socks that have lost their mates, old towels, felt, cans and other odds and ends. The author rates each project for difficulty as 1, 2 or 3, but she doesn’t spell out what that means. She does emphasize that adults should be involved in any project requiring a hot glue gun, nails or sewing machine, at least to supervise.
Kids are encouraged to start each puppet project with a treasure hunt throughout the house, gathering both puppet materials such as socks and gloves and possible embellishments: buttons, metal washers, pom poms, fake flowers, vegetable bag netting, old keys, clothes hangers, bottle caps, old shoelaces and sponges.
Four pages entitled “Sewing and Gluing” provide some of the construction instructions, including five stitches for hand-sewing, some tips on glue—and important advice on keeping finished puppets away from pets, who may want to show their enthusiasm by chewing on these new toys!
II. FEATURES
-
Tips for the month
Each Saturday, Parenting Press posts a new parenting tip and the previous week’s tip is moved to the archive.
Power! The kids want it, and so do you! This time of year, as kids sometimes struggle to settle back into the classroom after spring break, and they’re anxious for summer vacation, your family may experience more power struggles. Here are five of our popular tips to provide some help with this issue.
April 2 — Other Power Struggles Parents Can't Win
April 9 — Reduce Power Struggles with Your Children
April 16 — Ways to Avoid Struggles & Hassles with your Kids
April 23 — When Compromise is a Good Thing
April 30 — Battles Over Clothing
-
Family Fun Ideas — Rhythm and Rhyme
April is National Poetry Month, and what better way to celebrate than with rhymes you and your children make up? Depending on kids’ ages, you may do just a couple of lines, and finding rhymes may be more important at this stage than making sense: “The sky is blue, and I’ve got the flu,” or “Apples in the bag, salute the flag.”
One of our favorite books introduces Whitman, Lear, Milne and many others, new and classic, in A Foot in the Mouth: Poems to Speak, Sing and Shout, illustrated with vivid and witty artwork by Chris Raschka. You all might want to create a pamphlet with poems you’ve written and the collages you’ve created to accompany them!
-
Community Service — Celebrate Your Library
This month also brings us National Library Week, starting April 10. To model the concept of sharing and giving back to your community, you can help your children come up with ideas for celebrating all that libraries have to offer, and thanking your local library staff for what it provides. Big kids might help a library with its used book sale, or offer to help librarians with a children’s program; younger children can create thank-you and “in appreciation” notes for the local staff and deliver them with flowers or a dessert (perhaps a sheet cake decorated to look like the pages of a book).
III. POTPOURRI
-
Special of the month — Mudras for All of Us!
This special has expired.
-
Subscriptions to this newsletter
If you received this newsletter as a forward from a friend or colleague, you can have it delivered by signing up for an e-mail subscription (there’s no cost). If you received the e-mail edition from Parenting Press, you are already subscribed.
Like to tell friends, students or colleagues about “News for Parents?” Simply email them a link to this page.
Thank you!
-
Reprinting e-zine articles in your newsletter.
If you publish a school, preschool, day care or parenting newsletter, you are welcome to reprint articles from this e-zine. Include our copyright notice with a phrase such as
Reprinted with permission from Parenting Press News for Parents, copyright © 2011. For a complimentary subscription, see www.ParentingPress.com/signup.html.And please mail or email a copy of your newsletter to Publicity Department, P.O. Box 75267, Seattle WA 98175-0267.
Home · Special Services · Parenting Resources · Professional Resources · Subscribe to Newsletter · Contact Us