Lion’s Whiskers asks: Which fairy tales inspired you as a child? What did they inspire you to create in your life, do you think? (i.e. taking a scuba diving course with hope of glimpsing a mermaid below the ocean’s surface)
Which fairy tale is your child’s favorite…what particular intellectual, moral, emotional, social, physical, or spiritual possibilities do you think that this tale opens up in your child’s imagination? (i.e. designing a house made entirely made of candy, and settling for a smaller scale model made of gingerbread)
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
“When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.”
~Albert Einstein~
Intellectual courage is a problematic type of courage to discuss. Most people can pretty easily understand what we mean by emotional or moral courage, and certainly physical courage is pretty self-evident. But what is intellectual courage? Why do you need courage to think?
You can imagine my delight at finding the words above by Einstein, widely considered one of the greatest intellectuals in human history. Evidently, he felt that creativity and flexibility of thought and ideas made all the difference. The willingness to propose an unconventional idea to others may take social courage, but the ability to form that unconventional idea takes intellectual courage, in my opinion. It requires a mind that does not shy away from dragons and dark forests, a mind accustomed to thinking that impossible things are possible, given enough time to find the right solution. Climbing a mountain of glass can happen in fairy tales. It does happen in fairy tales. Sorting out all the lentils from an ash heap in an hour can and does happen. Spinning straw into gold can and does happen.
Of course the right solution is part of this, and part of intellectual courage is the ability to try many many solutions. Thomas Edison famously tried hundreds of different materials for filaments in his quest to perfect the incandescent light bulb. If he had given up after twenty tries, or even fifty, the world might look quite different right now. Taking failure as a signal to keep trying, rather than a sign to give up: that’s courage.
Babies don’t give up trying to walk just because they fall down a lot when they’re learning. To a baby, the whole world seems as impossible to climb as a glass mountain, yet babies don’t give up. Somehow all healthy babies have the will to keep going at it; if they didn’t, the world would be full of people crawling along the sidewalks. But the world isn’t full of crawling people, the world is full of walking people. Our job as parents is to help bolster that same will in our children’s intellectual life.
Folk tales and myths are full of helpers and guides. As parents, we play that role to our children, handing out magical feathers or cryptic rhymes when they reach a fork in the path. It’s not answers we need to give them, it’s the tools and talismans for finding the answers on their own. I believe fairy tales can be one of those tools. That’s my theory of special relativity.
Whether or not your first days as a parent were spent breastfeeding on the couch watching Oprah, like me or not, psychologists now understand that the bonding between a parent and child (or caregiver and child) occurs in a myriad of ways. The important thing is that bonding happens! Without developing the ability to care about ourselves and each other…we rarely possess the kind of heroic heart we need to thrive in life.
Good news from psychoneurobiology research: the underlying processes associated with bonding now reassures parents that skin-to-skin contact is also one of the primary triggers for oxytocin’s release. Oxytocin being the stock for the chemical soup that is parental love. Simply holding our child triggers a release of love-inducing chemicals (opiods, for example—those pleasure-giving, rewarding neurochemicals that calm us, relieve pain, and generally reward life-sustaining behaviors).
It has also now been established that though breastfeeding has obvious benefits for both mother and child; it is the association between a mother’s antecedent sensitivity to her child which lends breastfeeding its secondary social attachment benefits. Noriuchi, Kikuchi, & Senoo’s (2008) study showed that there is a strong association between a mother’s sensitivity to her infants’ cries (versus smiles) and her decision to breastfeed. They concluded that observation as biologically significant and related to our ability to adapt to the specific demands associated with infant care. Other researchers, too, have concluded that it is the quality of mother-infant interaction at six months, rather than the type of feeding, that predicts security of attachment (Britton et al., 2006).
We can all cuddle our newborn baby while we bottle-feed, snuggle our newly adopted child, wipe the tears on our stepchild’s cheek, or hold our foster child’s hand. The more sensitivity and responsiveness a caregiver can show an infant, the more securely attached a child can become.
How do we know when we’re being sensitive and responsive enough? Our child usually stops crying (unless of course, colic or other medical issues need attending to). Infants, it turns out, are training us to be good parents as much as we are training them in the art of attachment.
As a parenting coach, I always make sure to assess whether or not the bonding between a parent and child was a difficult or easeful process. I ask how the couple managed the transition to parenthood, or how the individual adapted to his/her role as caregiver/adoptive, foster, or step-parent. My clients and I revisit any lingering questions, regrets, or concerns that may have impacted early parental bonding. In the case of any traumatic history impacting parent-child bonding, mental health/family counseling may be recommended. Then, if need be, we begin the process of revisiting those weaker links in the bond between parent and child to strengthen the connection.
It is never too late to strengthen the bond between a parent and child. The primary building blocks for secure attachment being emotional accessibility and responsiveness. Sometimes, however, admitting the areas where we could grow stronger as a parent takes the most courage of all! Yesterday, for example, when my daughter came bursting through the door after school and I was absorbed in writing a blog post on my computer, she let me know “It feels like there is an invisible wall between you and me when you are on the computer.” We’re still adjusting to having busier schedules and more technology in our lives now that my children are older. I’m also very focused when I’m writing. You can only imagine how much fun I was finishing my Doctoral dissertation! I later found a note written in my daily planner “hug me today” and “hug my brother” scheduled for tomorrow. Thankfully, my children offer me a daily wake-up call to live more in the present and make sure, as often as possible, to stop what I’m doing and offer my full attention to who they are, what they are up to, and prioritize what’s most important in life. Fortunately, sometimes healing a rift in a parent-child bond is as simple as closing the laptop and offering a hug!
How do you stay connected with your child and nurture your parent-child bond?
Sources:
Britton, J., Britton, H., & Gronwaldt, V. (2006). Breastfeeding, sensitivity, and attachment. Pediatrics, 118,
Gordon, I., Zagoory-Sharon, O., Schneiderman, I., Leckman, J. F., Weller, A. & Feldman, R. (2008). Oxytocin and cortisol in romantically unattached young adults: Associations with bonding and psychological distress. Psychophysiology, 45, 349–352. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2008.00649.x
Johnson, S. & Whiffen, V. (Eds.) (2003). Attachment processes in couple and family therapy. NY: The Guilford Press.
Noriuchi, M., Kikuchi, Y. & Senoo, A. (2008). The functional neuroanatomy of maternal love: Mother’s response to infant’s attachment behaviors. Biological Psychiatry, 63, 415–423.
40 countries that is! We would like to say “Thank You” to all our readers in the 40 countries who have visited Lion’s Whiskers to date.
Please continue to share your parenting experiences and wisdom with us by posting your comments! We welcome your feedback as we research, write about, and develop our ideas about nurturing courage in our children.
We recognize the importance of preparing our children to have courage in life, even if they have yet to face their most difficult moments. We also recognize that sometimes we don’t have the opportunity to prepare for the kind of devastation that our readers in Japan, for example, are currently facing with such bravery.
As we develop the blog, we will continue to feature everyday and heroic tales of courage. We will also be including interviews with families who are both laying the foundations for courage with their children and who have already faced great difficulty with inspiring courage. We will continue to offer lots of 5-Minute Courage Workouts, activities, and stories that we hope you will find useful in promoting courage in your own lives. If you wish to share what you are learning about how you are nurturing courage in your children in everyday life and/or during times of crisis, please contact us and share your story, or post your comments.
Please continue to share our blog link, join our subscription list (it’s anonymous and spam-free), become a follower, tweet us, “Like” us on facebook, and spread the courage word!
Here’s a great courage quote for today:
“Don’t stop. Knocked down, get up; pushed back, keep pushing forward, if it rains down on your dreams, forget shelter, get wet and keep moving.” ~ Cory Booker’s tweet yesterday on Twitter, the dynamic young mayor of Newark, NJ
Like most adoptive parents, I have no birth story to share with my daughter. I wasn’t there. As a poor substitute I thought maybe I could share mine with her.
“I don’t remember a thing,” my mother informs me dryly. “I’ve blotted everything out. All of it.”
This is my mother’s standard response to questions about my early years. Don’t get me wrong – there was no trauma, no tragedy, no tumult. I suspect it’s just the accumulation of unremarkable details in a stable and secure environment – the pot roasts cooked, the laundry folded, the hours spent outside piano lessons or dentist visits or dance class, the birthday presents bought and wrapped – that my mother eventually put behind her like an outgrown shell; with that shell went the pearls, too, I guess. In 1961 fathers were not routinely welcomed into delivery rooms, let alone with cameras, let alone with video cameras. For my birth story I have to be content with a minute examination of my birth certificate, the first record of my existence.
Most noticeable, of course, is my footprint, the first involuntary step in my journey. How small it is! How unlikely it seems that that could have represented me. Time of birth, 5:45 p.m on Friday, May 12, 1961. Waltham, Massachusetts. While folks were stuck in rush-hour traffic in Boston and Cambridge, my heroic journey was getting underway close by, totally unmarked by those people! They could have been listening to the radio: “Take Good Care of My Baby,” by Bobby Vee, or Bobby Darin’s “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” How fitting that soundtrack was, and they had no idea! Where was my sister, then two years old? My dad? The only thing I can confidently assert is that at that moment, I was there and so was my mom.
The birth certificate can only tell me so much about that story, the opening lines and nothing more. Beyond that is a blank, a formless void until the arrival of my consciousness. This is how most origin stories start: in the beginning there was nothing, and then eventually the people became themselves. Creation stories and origin myths tells us much about how a culture views itself and what it counts as important, where it came from and where it is going. The sheer variety of these stories from around the world is dazzling, each one with its own local details and deities. The Maasai’s creation myth accounts for animal herding, animal hunting, and crop farming. Japan’s earliest origin stories describe the creation of the islands in the sea, and not surprisingly the Norse creation myths describe a universe of frost and ice.
Whether we know our own birth stories, whether we share our children’s birth stories with them or not, we are, in a way, each responsible for our own creation myth. We build it over time, as our journey unfolds, as we become ourselves. May we all have the courage to tell that story. I wish that for my daughter most of all.
What does our child’s birth have to do with courage? Birth triggers similar neurological mechanisms and the release of many of the same neurochemicals associated with courage. If you don’t think it takes courage to give birth, to adopt a child, or unconditionally love another human being then stop reading right now!
Let’s start at the beginning. I didn’t have the “perfect birth” with either of my kids. READ: quick, soothing music, no emergency interventions and/or numbing chemical infusions, surrounded by family/friends/a birthing coach/midwife/massage therapist all focused on giving me exactly what I needed when I needed it, maybe even at home! The kind of birth I’d read about in some of the baby and childbirth books I’d found. The kind of birth other expectant moms and I proudly and excitedly whispered to each other about having in our childbirth education class or whilst we stretched our swollen limbs together in prenatal yoga class. Or the “natural births” other moms bragged to me about at baby showers or in grocery store lineups where I was, yet again, buying the weirdest combinations of food to stave off my pregnancy cravings and nausea whilst ensuring a hefty weight gain. Well, maybe they weren’t bragging, but as a slightly competitive person myself (note the understatement) I definitely heard the brag. Honestly, I even skipped over the Cesearean sections in all the baby books. I figured: not going to happen to me, don’t need to read it! Boy, was I humbled and deeply grateful that an OB/GYN I trusted happened to be on-call.
That all said, when my kids ask about the day they were born, I fluff up my fur (a.k.a. my crazy curly hair) with pride, wrap them inside my protective lion mama arms, and whisper how I fell in love with them on the day they were born. I tell them how brave they were (in their own specific ways) and how their cries could be heard far and wide awakening the world to their arrival. How their dad and I wept with joy when we first saw them and heard their cry. But most of all, how grateful we are to know them, to witness them grow every day, and to be their parents. Turns out it’s the most “natural thing” in the world to love your child!
Just like the quest for the perfect wedding, it’s nice if everything goes according to plan and it doesn’t rain…but it’s the marriage that really matters. So, I worried about not having had the “perfect birth” for about as long as it took me to bond with my babies—not long. As soon as I was able to hold them, we quickly discovered we fit perfectly together. I was just happy that they, and I, had survived the whole experience! In large part due to my husband and aunt’s loving support. That’s the whole deal with bonding: it helps us survive. If we aren’t bonded as a species, why would we care enough to have the courage to save each other and our planet?
Friends of mine who’d been brave enough to walk the path of parenthood ahead of me taught me a valuable lesson: accept your experience—and your child for that matter—as the perfect learning for you. Other friends and clients of mine, who’d suffered the losses and, sadly, the self-recrimination sometimes associated with miscarriage, infertility, or even a C-section—as if these physical realities were personal failures instead examples of the arbitrariness of life—showed me the way to walk with courage over the hot coals of our own and others’ expectations, judgments, and often limited perspective about the learning deep in birth narrative.
The other thing you need to know about when I had babies: I had my basic needs (food, water, shelter, quality healthcare) provided for—and could therefore ensure my baby’s basic needs were met—and I had a loving partner (even if sometimes asleep) beside me. Many mamas on this planet don’t. Yet another reason to develop courage in ourselves and our children to share our plentiful resources with the rest of the planet, therefore ensuring the survival of our species.
When my babies were born, I wasn’t chronically or significantly stressed. Chronicity and intensity of stressors being correlated with a decrease in human resiliency. Like any new parent, I was stressed to the extent I could pay close attention to my own and my baby’s needs. My limbic-hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (LHPA-axis) was releasing enough cortisol to boost my now-understood female “tend-or-befriend” responses (Taylor, et al., 2000). I had enough cortisol to boost not only my ability to form a secure attachment with my baby, but to boost his/her neurological development also. But I wasn’t stressed enough to prevent oxytocin’s ability to mediate the effects of the stress-hormone cortisol from stunting the parent-child bonding process. That’s why advice like “Nap when your baby naps,” or “Accept all the help you can get,” and anything else that helps take the stress level of becoming a parent down a notch, is good advice to heed.
When we are neurochemically in-balance (as much as is possible for any new parent), we are able to promote the bonding process. We are able to provide the necessary cues for emotional regulation that begins the process of ensuring we can be a secure base for our infant. Clients and friends of mine who have had to navigate the dark corridors of post-partum depression are often best-served by short-term psychotropic medication (i.e. an antidepressant) intervention at this stage, often combined with some psychotherapy to help ensure the effectiveness of the intervention. The good news: as long as those periods of emotional disregulation are brief and not chronic, the human being (whether in infancy or adulthood) is resilient to withstand such stress.
Fire can be magical and provide necessary warmth. It can also be hazardous. Our children need to be prepared to deal with emergencies in life. Talking about and preparing for emergencies are not meant to be activities to create fear. Preparedness helps reduce anxiety (anxiety being defined as “the fear of something threatening, uncontrollable, and/or unmanageable”). Being proactive and preparing yourself and your child to deal with any number of expected, unexpected, tragic, and/or otherwise disastrous events, like those happening this year in Japan, is meant to build the necessary confidence, skill, and courage needed to cope.
One of the most effective ways to conquer a fear is to face it. Henceforth, we offer frequent courage workouts by age range to help you and your child develop the necessary courage muscles to handle both the expected and unexpected, tragic and heroic, events that shape our lives. We take small steps with these workouts and hopefully make learning to be courageous educational and fun. Here’s more on why to teach your children how to use dangerous things.
Grab Some Lion’s Whiskers Today!
Toddler: make dinnertime magical tonight. Find a candle for the table. It could even be a used birthday candle hiding at the back of the utensils drawer. Light it, and like your lesson about the kitchen stove, say “Hot” and pull your hand quickly back.
Preschooler: show your child how you light a candle. Hold their hand and have them help you light a candle. Teach them to feel the heat and respect the power of fire. Move your own hand closer to the flame and say “Ouch” when it gets too hot. Get them to light one candle from another, so they get to see how fire can spread. Then, blow out the candles together. Now, make sure you store your matches or lighters in a safe place, higher than your average toddler and preschooler.
Early elementary student: build a fire together. Experiment with different fire-building techniques. Learning how to strike a match can be scary at first, but a useful skill. Start with wooden matches and work your way up to a lighter. Find a special, easy to remember, place together to store a flashlight (or 2) for any power outages.
Upper elementary student or ‘tween: by now your child is likely comfortable enough to light a match and blow it out or shake it out before it burns their fingers. Now might be the time to look out for an outdoor education course or summer camp, experiment with a flint, or review your home fire drill procedures whilst changing the batteries in your smoke detector(s) and consider purchasing a fire extinguisher to keep in your kitchen. If you have one already, make sure to teach your child how to use it and ensure that it is visible and accessible.
High schooler or teen: make your teen the fire pit boss at your next cook-out, camping trip, or bonfire. Perhaps they already take care of your family fireplace? Do they remember what to do if a pot is absentmindedly left too long on the stove and the house subsequently fills with smoke? Can they teach a friend or younger sibling what they now know?
Learning how to use and respect fire from you is much safer than with a friend in the attic, under the bed, or in the closet.Fire-making skills may even someday save your child’s life. Fire is something children are often very curious about and it can also be frightening. We, as parents, need the courage to teach our kids to use it safely. For example, asking some children to light a match may call upon physical courage, and for others it might take emotional courage to do the same task. Review the Six Types of Courage to figure out which types your child needs to complete this workout.
We send our care and concern to our readers in Japan and all those affected by the recent earthquake and tsunami around the world…courage dear friends!
I recognize that my lifestyle is very unlike others’. I know that by working at home, and with just one kid in school in a walkable community, I am living in a way that gives me the luxury so many people dream of: time. I have the time to tell my daughter stories. Our weekday mornings look nothing like the stereotype you see in movies or commercials – parents grabbing keys and briefcases while talking on their cell phones, teens reaching for pastries as they race to the bus, kids trying to finish homework while breakfast sits uneaten on the table. Our mornings actually include long conversations!
And yet I also propose that families can find ways to add minutes and hours to their clocks – maybe not every day, but every week? Yes. I think so. One choice I’ve made for my family is to severely limit television and the electronic video gadgets that have such a hypnotic effect on kids. My daughter also has a strict (and early) bedtime, designed to allow at least thirty minutes of relaxed reading before a full night’s sleep. This lets me wake her up at 6:00, giving us plenty of time in the morning before the 8:00 school bell. (I also made the choice to live three blocks away from school, but that might not be a change you can implement today!) How we manage our time as parents is within our control: it’s all a matter of our choices and priorities. Intellectual courage allows parents to consider the implications of our choices. We can gather information, objectively observe how our choices impact our families, and make different choices if we judge that to be warranted. If the choices we make suck our time into a black hole, it’s time to make different choices. Is this choice a net gain or a net loss? Our responsibility as parents is to make that assessment and take appropriate action.
Telling a story and listening to a story require attention, so we have to find ways to get our children’s attention, or notice the times when we already have it or can easily draw it to us – in the car, when they are in the tub, at a meal. Notice the times when they are receptive and relaxed. Is it at the end of the day when the rush is over, or at the start of the day, before the rush begins? Is it driving home from church or Little League or aftercare? Is it while you are playing a board game, or taking a walk or doing the dishes together? Does a weekly ritual such as Shabbat dinner open space for stories? Notice the times when your child needs your strength and encouragement: while waiting at the doctor’s or dentist’s office, after taking a test, before trying something challenging for the first time. Instead of distracting her from her anxiety with activity, give her a story to help her put that worry into perspective. Emotional courage means recognizing and acknowledging that anxiety without pretending it isn’t real, trying to laugh it off, or cover it up with electronic sleight of hand.
Sometimes I find myself in the grim and unsatisfying position of fishing for conversation with K. after school. I ask question after question – open-ended questions, artfully and subtly designed to elicit information or opinion (yeah, right!) while she’s unpacking her lunch box and fixing herself a snack. When I realize I’m insisting she share with me, I remember that I must first give what I want to receive. When I share a story, I can create an opening for meaningful dialogue rather than commanding a tedious recitation of the day’s events.
So, when to tell a story, especially if you feel your time is limited and you want to make the most of your talking time? When you find yourself asking, once again, “How was school today?” and getting, once again, a one-word response – that’s a good time to start.
http://www.emotion.caltech.edu/courses/ss140/May8-1.pdf
