http://www.wendymogel.com/ en Copyright 2010 2010-07-14T20:03:20+00:00 http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/new_york_times_sunday_magazine_article_profiling_dr_mogel/ http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/new_york_times_sunday_magazine_article_profiling_dr_mogel/#When:22:37:00Z New York Times Sunday Magazine profile of Dr. Mogel. By Emily Bazelon View this article in its original context. October 1, 2006 SO THE TORAH IS A PARENTING GUIDE? Enough with the overparenting. Wendy Mogel is a child psychologist who says the key to properly raised kids is Jewish law. And Jews aren’t the only ones listening. BY EMILY BAZELON In the third century, the rabbis who put together the Talmud instructed fathers to teach their sons to swim. It’s safe to say that most American Jews aren’t familiar with this directive, whether or not they take their kids to the lake or the pool. But one morning this past summer, a group of mostly non-Jewish parents puzzled over its meaning in a classroom at the Carolina Day School, a nonsectarian private school in Asheville, N.C. These mothers and fathers were accidental students of Judaism. They had come together because they often felt flattened by achieving the modern ideal of successful children. They were seeking relief in a weeklong course based on the book “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children,” by a Los Angeles clinical psychologist named Wendy Mogel. Genevieve Fortuna, a 58-year-old former preschool teacher who has been teaching classes on raising children for 30 years, wrote the Talmudic quote about swimming in blue marker on the classroom’s white board. The half-dozen or so parents, dressed in summer-casual shorts and sandals, looked up at her from their seats around two child’s-height tables. Fortuna opened her copy of Mogel’s book. “Jewish wisdom holds that our children don’t belong to us,” she read. “They are both a loan and a gift from God, and the gift has strings attached. Our job is to raise our children to leave us. The children’s job is to find their own path in life. If they stay carefully protected in the nest of the family, children will become weak and fearful or feel too comfortable to want to leave.” “This is the most difficult part for me,” said Marie-Louise Murphy, a mother of three. “My husband is really protective of our girls. Even more so now that they’re older, because it’s such a critical period for them.” Her 14-year-old daughter is eager to baby-sit, Murphy explained, but her husband “is having the hardest time with it.” Increasingly, not being involved in every aspect of a child’s life and letting children take risks that used to be a matter of course feels like an act of negligence to many parents. To resist the forces of judgment, internal and external, the parents in Asheville were in search of what every countercultural movement needs — a manifesto. Wendy Mogel’s book may seem an unlikely one, with its reliance not only on the Bible but also on the Talmud and other intricate rabbinic texts. Published in 2001 with a print run of 5,000 and little publicity, it went largely unreviewed, and bookstores often shelved it with their bar-mitzvah fare. Yet five years later, “Blessing” has sold about 120,000 copies at a pace of more than 20,000 a year. It’s the kind of book that has influence beyond its sales figures. Principals press it into the hands of mothers, who read it and then buy it in bulk to give away as baby presents. If you have children of a certain age, chances are that someone you know will own a copy or have lent one away. Strikingly, Mogel’s book is being used as a text for classes and discussion groups that take place not in Jewish settings but in churches or schools like Carolina Day. Mogel, who gives about a speech a month, has been a keynote speaker at the annual meetings of the National Association of Independent Schools, which represents 1,300 private schools, and the American Camp Association, an umbrella group for 2,600 summer camps and youth groups. This fall, the National Association of Episcopal Schools will give her top billing. Mogel’s diagnosis of the ills of middle- and upper-class modern American child-rearing — that children too often don’t learn to take care of themselves — resonates with the educators who deal with these families every day. In thinking about this issue, Mogel finds her psychological training useful but insufficient and turns her audience’s attention to the laws and teachings of old Jewish texts. Wendy Mogel wasn’t to the religious manner born. Her grandfather was the president of his Orthodox synagogue in Brighton Beach, N.Y. But her father fell away from strict observance, and her mother never knew it — “she was as close to a shiksa as he could get,” Mogel says. Mogel was raised to know the difference between cherrystone and littleneck clams, not to follow the Jewish proscription against eating shellfish. At Middlebury College in Vermont, Mogel majored in art history. She spent the summers as a counselor at a camp for emotionally disturbed children, working alongside her husband to be, Michael Tolkin. After marrying, the couple eventually moved to Los Angeles. Tolkin’s father wrote for the TV series “All in the Family.” Tolkin entered the family business; his best-known movie is “The Player,” directed by Robert Altman and based on a novel Tolkin wrote. The sequel, published recently, bears the mark of spousal influence: it creates a world of Hollywood sharks let loose on the process of high-powered private-school admissions. Mogel has lived in Hollywood for almost 30 years now, and she is of it without being captive to it. At 55, her style is part girlish, part granny. Her hair is unbleached and her skin un-Botoxed; on the night I visited her, she wore a white T-shirt, a pink flowered skirt and low-heeled green sandals. Her voice is commandingly deep and throaty, except when she’s excited and lets out a thrilled squeal. (“Me too!” she squeaked when I confessed my poor sense of direction.) Mogel did her doctorate work at the Wright Institute in Los Angeles — “very alternative, Marxist-Feminist,” she says — and interned at the “totally mainstream” Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Mogel got her license as a clinical psychologist in 1985. She opened a dual practice, doing therapy for children and families and also testing for disorders and disabilities, like dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder. For 15 years, the work was fulfilling. The hard part of Mogel’s life lay elsewhere; she and Tolkin struggled for several years to have a child and went through many miscarriages, including the loss of a premature baby born on the way to the hospital. None of this hardship moved Mogel toward religion. When she was 35, Mogel gave birth to a girl, Susanna, and four years later, to a second daughter, Emma. Mogel continued to practice after her daughters were born, and by 1990, she was seeing a disturbing shift among her clients. Mogel lives in a sumptuous house near Hollywood — the garden features a fountain, a pool and climbing roses — and the kids Mogel was treating came from similarly well-off homes. In the testing part of her practice, Mogel long dreaded telling parents of a diagnosis that could disrupt their high hopes for their children. Now, however, she noticed that many families seemed to want her to find something clinically wrong that could be fixed. Much of the time, the children didn’t have a pathology that she could name and treat. “But my child is suffering!” parents would say. And Mogel tended to agree. Anxiety pervaded her office. “Everyone — parents and children — seemed off course, unmoored and chronically unhappy,” she writes in “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee.” The kids weren’t sick. But their family dynamic was. It wasn’t just parents’ outsize ambition for their children that was the problem — after all, for generations, children have faced high expectations. It was what parents with means did to protect their investment. Worried about their children’s future in an increasingly competitive world, parents would expect everything at school — and then compensate for these inflexible demands by expecting almost nothing at home. The words “I have a test” automatically relieved children of any other obligation, Mogel says. Instead of being left to muddle through — and to learn from adversity and their failures — kids were whisked off to tutors and coaches and extra classes. Pressured in one sphere and pampered and overprotected the rest of the time, their lives were too difficult in one way and too easy in every other. As a result, they often didn’t learn to solve problems on their own or gain the strength that comes with independence. College counselors and deans see these kids so often, Mogel says, that they have come up with terms for them, “teacups” and “krispies”: fragile and burned-out undergraduates who crumble once they’re away from home. Other psychologists have joined her in charting this territory. Madeline Levine, whose clinical psychology practice is in Marin County, Calif., recommends Mogel’s book to her clients and recently published her own book on the topic, “The Price of Privilege.” She, too, saw many unhappy teenagers who said they felt bored, passive and empty. “Indulged, coddled, pressured and micromanaged on the outside, my young patients appeared to be inadvertently deprived of the opportunity to develop an inside,” she writes in her book. “They lack the secure, reliable, welcoming internal structure that we call the ‘self.”’ Mogel knew that to help her child clients, she needed to help their parents. But she felt as if her psychological training was failing her. She had been taught to refrain from making judgments, yet she felt increasingly judgmental. She went back into therapy herself. It didn’t help. Instead, like the parents trooping into her office, she felt increasingly drained. At home, she wanted to make everything just right for her own daughters. She tore ragged pieces of lettuce off the corners of their sandwiches and woke in the night to fret over their school art projects: did the teacher who sent home a note asking for the cardboard tube from a paper towel roll expect her to make a pile of paper towels to get at the cylinder inside? Then one night in 1990 on a lark, Mogel accepted a friend’s invitation to go to a service for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. She thought of the excursion as cultural anthropology: she’d had a good time with her daughter Susanna at an international mask and dance festival; “now we could see how these people, the Jews of West Los Angeles, celebrated their ancient holy day,” she writes in “Skinned Knee.” But Mogel listened to the prayers and found herself crying. She went back a second time. Then she decided to go alone to a Friday-night service at a Reform synagogue near her house. By listening to a tape, she started learning the Hebrew prayers and their melodies. She and her husband began celebrating the Jewish Sabbath — first by stumbling through the candle-lighting and going out for Thai food (shrimp included) and gradually adding the full liturgy and a traditional meal. “It was always the same, which was what I loved about it,” Susanna, now 19, remembers. Mogel baked challah. Tolkin made poached salmon. Every family member and guest said their “gratefuls,” naming the events of the week they felt thankful for. The family never took the full leap into Orthodox Judaism, with its restrictions on food and travel on Shabbat and relatively fixed gender roles. But they sent their daughters to schools at Reform synagogues for a good part of elementary school and tried out different L.A. synagogues — from Reform to modern Orthodox to the exploratory Mountaintop Minyan. The rituals were soothing, but Mogel was most moved by Jewish learning. As she began to read the Torah and the Talmud, the massive compendium of rabbinic teachings on Jewish law and commentary on the Bible, she felt she was on the trail of the sort of wisdom she’d been missing. In 1992, Mogel decided to take a break from her practice for a year and study the old Jewish texts full time. Her office partner was taken aback. So were her parents. But she proceeded even though Jewish study didn’t come easily to her — she took basic Judaism and introductory Hebrew three times. Her studies helped to repair her frayed ends. “This is going to sound too pious, but I started thinking about my children in terms of a higher mission,” she told me when I met her at her home in June. “I didn’t need to be the mom who cut the ends off lettuce leaves. That is idol worship, and it’s exactly what Judaism says you shouldn’t do.” She spent more time with Susanna and Emma and less time worrying about them. She stopped waking up to fret and plan in the middle of the night. Mogel missed the regular contact with her clients and their troubles. But when she reopened her practice, she focused on teaching child-rearing classes and working with families rather than just doing traditional psychotherapy with children. And she started using Jewish teachings. “It wasn’t that the Jewish texts had a brand new idea that psychology had never come up with,” Mogel says. “But they came at it from a different angle.” Like the concept of the yetser hara, the bad impulse within us that is a source of passion and an impetus to creativity, and the yetser tov, the good and proper impulse. “They’re very different from the id and the ego and the superego. Psychology textbooks don’t typically say that your child’s worst trait is also the seed of his best traits.” In her book, which evolved out of a group for parents that she ran for three years out of her office, Mogel relates a Talmudic legend about men from a great synagogue who wanted to kill the wild yetser hara. They captured it and locked it up for three days. But during that time, not a single new egg hatched anywhere in the land. The men understood that the yetser hara was the source of procreation — without it, there could be no creative life force. So they let it go. The yetser hara is tov me’od, the rabbinic authors concluded — very good. Most Orthodox Jewish child-rearing books that Mogel read prescribed devout Judaism as the single path to raising moral children. Mogel wanted to use Jewish teachings to “show you how to raise good people, not just good little Jews,” as Genevieve Fortuna put it to her students. To the psychologist, the yetser hara is a way to think about the root of longing and a reminder that passionate desire isn’t all bad. “Without it, there would be no marriage, no children conceived, no homes built, no businesses,” Mogel writes. So children shouldn’t be blamed for their desires. But that doesn’t mean they should be placated either, a phenomenon Mogel heard about frequently from parents. The wildness of the yetser hara can’t be stamped out, and shouldn’t be. But it doesn’t get to run the show. There is also the good impulse of the yetser tov to be cultivated, which means teaching a child to hold herself in check. “As her parent I accept my dual responsibilities: one is to respect her zeal, her yetser hara, and the other is to help her develop a strong yetser tov,” Mogel writes. “So I will say a calm and emphatic no to the Beanie Babies and the moon bounce, but I will not criticize her for desiring them, for that is her right.” Fortuna read that passage to her parents, and they talked about how to expect generosity from children — like giving away old toys — without blaming them for resisting. Within Judaism, applying concepts in a time and a place removed from their original context is a respected method. “There is a longstanding tradition of interpreting Talmudic texts not only literally but as symbols for larger constructs or life lessons,” says Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, a professor of Jewish history and thought at Yeshiva University. “The connection she’s making is homiletic. It’s what rabbis do when they give sermons.” Another way that Mogel uses the Jewish texts in her thinking about child-rearing is to embrace the importance of action as opposed to pure faith — what she calls “deed over creed.” In Jewish law, there are hundreds of mitzvahs, or sacred deeds, that Jews have been traditionally encouraged to do, ranging from not taking revenge to saying grace after meals. They are to be performed whether or not one feels moved to. “The hope is that you will have kavanah, or deliberate intent, when you do these mitzvahs,” explains Elazar Muskin, rabbi of the Orthodox Los Angeles congregation Young Israel of Century City. “But at the end of the day, the rabbis say that if a person does the act, then there was some kind of intent. And over time, we hope the kavanah will follow.” Mogel points out that cognitive behavioral therapy shares the same premise: Changed behavior can lead to changed feelings. (Christianity also teaches believers to perform good works but emphasizes the transformative power of faith in Jesus Christ as a means to salvation.) Based on this principle, Mogel urges parents to press children to contribute at home even if they whine and resist. And she discourages long rational-minded explanations about why a child can’t have something she covets. “Don’t bother talking to the yetser hara,” she instructs; instead, be clear about what your kids are entitled to and stick to it. From rules, kids learn their roles in the household, and from chores they learn practical skills — when they go off to college they will know how to do their laundry. And if your children know that their behavior at home matters, they have an opportunity to feel good about themselves that’s not tied to academic success. In her work, Mogel often sees children and teenagers who are petulant and awkward — young people who refuse to extend the simple courtesy of a greeting, or who feel too uncomfortable to respond to adults’ well-meaning questions. As a template for reasonable expectations, she looks to the Talmud’s instructions on social obligations. The rabbis came up with detailed guidelines for derekh erets, a phrase that means “way of the land” and basically describes an ancient version of etiquette. It includes the mitzvah hakhnasat orkheem, or hospitality. People receiving guests at their homes should greet them at the door and escort them inside; be cheerful during the visit; offer food and drink; ask the guests about themselves; and escort them to the door when they leave. Mogel urges that teaching children accordingly counters a “culture of narcissism,” as she puts it, in which children are encouraged to express their feelings even when the result is a show of bad manners. “The Talmud says the mitzvah of hospitality is as important as Torah study and a way to honor God. That’s because all of this trains us in the habit of thinking about other people’s feelings,” Mogel says. “The rabbis understood how we learn compassion.” At St. Matthew’s Episcopal church in the Connecticut town of Wilton, Rev. Janet Waggoner, the assistant rector, read “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” with her Thursday-morning Bible study group last fall. She sandwiched Mogel’s book between the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew. Waggoner added some New Testament passages about the themes that Mogel discusses but points out that Episcopalians often look outside the denomination for texts. It’s part of the church’s relatively liberal orientation. Wilton is an affluent town with a high-performance school system that starts the push toward college as early as first grade. In other words, it’s a breeding ground for hyper parents, some of whom, like the parents in Asheville, long to resist. A frequent complaint is the time crunch, Waggoner says — the unending procession of school and work and scheduled events and activities. Mogel’s answer to this is the Jewish Sabbath, which makes the day holy by prohibiting work, broadly defined. The Wilton Episcopalians weren’t about to stop driving or answering the phone on Saturday (or Sunday). “We don’t have the same structure for the Sabbath,” Waggoner says. But in the course of reading “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee,” Waggoner realized that St. Matthew’s was obstructing a goal that Christians share for the Sabbath: spending time together as a family. The church youth-group meetings had always taken place during the Sunday dinner hour. Waggoner changed the meeting time to afternoon. It seemed obvious in retrospect — so obvious that Waggoner was rueful that she had to be reminded of a Biblical commandment to come up with a simple scheduling change. But the congregation didn’t see it that way. “People said, ‘Thank you, thank you,”’ she said. “It turned out that was the one night of the week when the whole family could sit down for dinner together.” Mogel says that she originally wanted to call her book “The Blessing of a Broken Leg” in honor of the bone she broke falling off a horse at camp while riding bareback one summer. Her agent talked her out of the harsher title, but her point is that kids need more than tightly controlled doses of risk. That’s what the Talmud is trying to teach by requiring parents to teach their children to swim, Mogel argues. The passage has been interpreted as an instruction to pass on the tools of survival. Rabbi Schacter agrees that the larger lesson is that children need to learn to fend for themselves. But that’s not an easy or comfortable process. It involves some flailing and swallowing water. For the professionals who work with children — principals, teachers, camp directors, school psychologists — that lesson is worth the price of Mogel’s paperback. “If you ask parents, Do you want your children to learn new things, they all say, ‘Of course,”’ says Peg Smith, C.E.O. of the American Camp Association. “Well, we can’t teach new things without exposing kids to discomfort. We are desperate for parents to understand that.” When Mogel broke her leg at camp, she learned after a lot of frustration how to get around on crutches and thought about what it would be like to be handicapped. “That was my best summer in 16 years of camp,” she says. These days, it’s the rare camp that would let a child ride bareback — a good thing, probably, but also, as Mogel sees it, a loss. Mogel says that “sometimes I think I wrote the book to remind myself of all the things that I don’t want to do that I’m still doing” in raising her children. Now that her daughters are teenagers, that means trusting them to venture into the world on their own, despite the risks involved. Emma baby-sits regularly and spent part of the summer in England. Susanna took off in June to trek through Cambodia, Laos and Thailand and came home and got a job at a jewelry store. It’s been harder for Mogel and her husband to curb expectations of traditional achievement. They sent their older daughter, Susanna, to a public junior high with a program for gifted students. She went on to a highly competitive private Los Angeles high school and is in her sophomore year at Haverford College. Mogel isn’t sure that Susanna’s high school was the best choice for her daughter. Neither is Susanna. “I might have done better at a more progressive school,” she says. “It was a little — I might have been happier.” Emma, perhaps, is reaping the benefits of coming second. During eighth grade, she asked her parents if she could leave her high-powered private school the following year. “This was a difficult decision for Michael and me,” Mogel says, acknowledging how hard it is for parents to give up the premium academically competitive opportunity for their children. But they decided to respect their daughter’s wishes and switched her to a more relaxed school. “I often see parents eager to send their child to the most selective school that will have them. And then I see children who might’ve flourished wither instead.” To help parents keep perspective, Mogel advises them — in her practice and at lectures — to adhere to her 20-minute rule: spend no more than 20 minutes a day “thinking about your child’s education or worrying about your child, period.” It’s a concrete goal, and she finds that it helps some parents control their excesses. Mogel’s attitude toward school is an aspect of her approach that is particularly hard for some parents. If you don’t push kids, parents often retort, they sit like lumps and then are sorry later. “I teach math,” says Linda Lawson, a college professor who attended the Asheville class and has a 7-year-old son. “I see a lot of kids who don’t mature until two or three years into college. If they haven’t taken the courses they need to do what they want to do, they’re stuck. Parents push kids so they’ll have opportunities.” Mogel counters that the point is to refrain from pushing a child to excel in an area that’s not her strength. “Your child is not your masterpiece,” she writes. It’s worth noting, though, that for this view she didn’t find much direct support in mainstream Jewish texts. (In the end, the Talmud is bigger on promoting Torah study than swimming lessons.) So Mogel turned to Hasidic Judaism, a movement dating to the 18th century, which rebelled against the idea that only the Torah scholar could be an upstanding Jew. There is a Hasidic saying that Mogel quotes, “If your child has a talent to be a baker, don’t ask him to be a doctor.” By definition, most children cannot be at the top of the class; value their talents in whatever realm you find them. “When we ignore a child’s intrinsic strengths in an effort to push him toward our notion of extraordinary achievement, we are undermining God’s plan,” Mogel writes. Mogel also tries to calm the education frenzy by stressing the family as a sphere of influence, arguing that the example parents set at home matters more than stellar schools. But that is ultimately misleading, argues Judith Rich Harris, author of “The Nurture Assumption,” a compilation of evidence showing that children take cues from peers far more than parents. Perhaps the most important thing parents can do, Harris concludes, is to send their children to school “with smart, hard-working kids” who will make them want to be smart and hard-working. Harris agrees with Mogel that organized religion is one of the most effective means of instilling an identity that resists the majority culture. But she says that is because religious children mold each other. “Mogel’s children behaved like good little Jewish girls even when they were outside the home because they went to school with other children who came from similar homes,” Harris wrote in an e-mail message. “Had her children not learned these things at home, their behavior outside the home would have been the same, because they would have picked up the culture from their classmates at school.” Mogel recognizes the importance of Harris’s contribution. But she’s still convinced that parental influence is profound. Her second book, “The Blessing of a B Minus,” which Scribner will publish in 2008, is about everyday ethics for parents of teenagers. One of Mogel’s favorite lessons comes from the car-pool drop-off lane at school: When you cheat in line, you signal that you don’t care about rules or other people. “And believe me, your kids are watching,” she says. “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” highlights the value of religious observance, in addition to Jewish wisdom, in raising young children. In her second book, Mogel concedes that outside of insular communities, religious rituals and synagogue (or church or mosque) attendance may not work as well as a structure for family life during adolescence. “It’s too difficult,” she says of forcing observance on recalcitrant older children. “You get a kind of anguished compliance that can break the bond between parent and adolescent. On this one, you trust them.” It is one way to step back and let teenagers find their own path. Mogel’s family no longer attends synagogue regularly. But they still frequently have Shabbat dinner. On a midsummer Friday, I arrived at her house, and Emma opened the door, blue braces lighting up her smile. Her father was away making an episode of a series for ABC, and her sister was off on her East Asian travels. But a small group of family and friends soon arrived. The men put on kipas, and everyone took a turn lighting a candle, passing a long match from one person to the next. Then Mogel called together the four girls and women in the room. They bent their heads, and she blessed them in Hebrew with the traditional prayer for daughters: “May God make you like Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah. May God bless you and watch over you. May God shine his face like a light upon you.” The dinner menu featured halibut and lamb sausages instead of the family’s traditional poached salmon. Mogel served up an almond cake she baked that afternoon, breaking off a rose blossom from a nearby vase to set in its center. The teenagers sat at one end of the table and the adults at the other. When Emma started describing a pair of pleather pants to her friends, Mogel broke in. “Pleather?” she asked. It was an irresistible moment for adolescent eye-rolling. But Emma said easily: “Yeah, Mom, plastic and leather. Like the ones in ‘The School of Rock.’ Susanna bought them for like $2.” She added for reassurance, “We just wear them around the house.” After dinner, Mogel prevailed on her brother-in-law to drive Emma to a party in Beverly Hills. That gave her a couple of hours to drink tea, call her husband and breathe in the peace of an empty house. But on this evening, Emma needed an assist — a ride home. There is a time to let teenagers swim on their own. And there is a time to recognize that they’re not ready. It’s a balancing act, and that night it tipped in favor of making sure Emma got home safely. Mogel waited for her daughter to call. At 1 a.m., she got her summons, headed into the cricket-filled night and drove to Beverly Hills. For the full article please download the pdf. Media about Wendy Mogel 2006-10-09T22:37:30+00:00 http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/the_one_parenthood_book_i_couldnt_live_without_child_magazine/ http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/the_one_parenthood_book_i_couldnt_live_without_child_magazine/#When:22:53:00Z Where do celebrated writers turn when they need advice and comfort on their journey as parents?  Read on as 13 authors share their favorite books—and the very personal reasons why these titles made a difference. By Elizabeth Fishel CHILD Magazine, March 2005 By Elizabeth Fishel The One Parenthood Book I Couldn‘t Live Without  Our children don’t come with an instruction manual, but a good book about parenthood can be the next best thing.  Here, 13 notable American writers reveal their favorites.  With a few classics, old and new, and a few surprises, these are the books that guide, inspire, reassure, and nudge us to grow as parents along with our children. —Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon The Blessing of a Skinned Knee by Wendy Mogel, Ph.D. “We like the emphasis this book places on the parents being the center of the wheel of the family and the importance of raising children who appreciate their place in the world and their obligation to be mensches [Yiddish for ‘people of integrity and honor’].” —Waldman is the author of Murder Plays House and Daughter’s Keeper; Chabon is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Final Solution, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and Summerland.  They are the parents of Sophie, 9, Zeke, 7, Ida-Rose, 3, and Abraham, 23 months. —Joyce Maynard Expecting Adam by Martha Beck “This is a book I have reread more than once.  Beck tells the story of her discovery, early in her pregnancy with her second child (and while she was a student at Harvard Business School), that she was carrying a fetus with Down syndrome and of her decision not to abort.  In no way a treatise against choice, the book quietly explores what is to me the true essence of parenting: namely, that the decision to raise a child inevitably represents a huge risk, offering no guarantees, and that the ultimate joys of parenting have little—no, nothing—to do with your child’s IQ or potential to get into Harvard himself.  Written with a distance of enough years from the birth of her son that it had become clear what a gift he’d been to her family, the book stands as a soaringly optimistic affirmation of all the things our children give us that we weren’t asking for (which is lucky, given that so much we thought we’d get may elude us).  Beck reminds us that we do not simply raise our children.  They raise us too.”  —Maynard is the author of At Home in the World and The Usual Rules and the mother of three grown children. —Jacquelyn Mitchard Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock, M.D. “When I became a mother, I had no mother:  She’d died when I was 19.  And I had no mother-in-law, no older woman to show me the ropes.  And so I had to learn from Benjamin Spock literally how to put on a diaper and wash a bottle.  Dr. Spock has a special place in the souls of those of us who came to parenthood without role models (or with awful ones) for giving us the operating manual.  His reassurance was of inestimable comfort.  He told us babies couldn’t be ‘spoiled’ by picking them up when they cried.  He told us that fostering love and protectiveness in older siblings was more important than protecting a baby from germs.  He insisted that what we felt was important to do for our children probably was the right thing.  I once interviewed Ben Spock.  He said reflectively that he had not been, perhaps, the best parent he could have been.  I answered, ‘But you were a wonderful parent…to me.’  My copy of Baby and Child Care, tattered and much taped, lasted through the first five children; I had to buy a new one for the younger two.”  —Mitchard is the author of Twelve Times Blessed and The Deep End of the Ocean and the mother of Jocelyn, 28, Rob, 21, Dan, 18, Marty, 15, Francie, 8, Mimi, 5, and Will, 1. —Po Bronson Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott “Prior to actually being a parent, but in the expecting phase, this book was—and remains—my favorite because it helped teach me that for the first year of my child’s life, I just need to give love and milk and shots, and I could do that.”  —Bronson is the author of What Should I Do With My Life? and the father of Luke, 4, and Thia, 9 months. —Mollie Katzen How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish “I learned from this book how to ‘play back’ to my daughter her gripes and upsets instead of judging the situation or trying to fix it.  This was especially challenging in cases where she was totally irrational (often!) and had trouble calming down.  My solution, as gleaned from Faber and Mazlish, was to become neutral in demeanor and to let her tell me as best she could what was bothering her.  I would then try to say the whole thing back to her, in a ‘let me see if I understand this correctly’ framework.  I could not believe the calming effect this had on my explosive child.  To have a parent listen and then replay her story, with eye contact, soft tone, and zero judgment, created an emotional salve.  She felt heard and validated.”  —Katzen is the author of The Moosewood Cookbook and Honest Pretzels and the mother of Sam, 20, and Eve, 13. —Michael Thompson, Ph.D. All Kinds of Minds by Mel Levine, M.D. “When our daughter, Joanna, was struggling and unable to read in first and second grade, she became frustrated, discouraged, and ultimately depressed.  As psychologists, my wife Theresa, and I had explained learning disabilities to other families, but we weren’t having success explaining them to our own child.  Mel Levine’s book gave us a way to read to Joanna stories about other children who suffered from different kinds of disabilities, some of which she had and many of which she didn’t.  It was a great relief for her and for us.  She felt relieved not to be the only kid (after all, there was a book written about kids like her).  The book made us feel less helpless in our struggle to comfort her.”  —Dr. Thompson is co-author of Raising Cain and Best Friends, Worst Enemies and the father of Joanna, 19, and Will, 14. —Jennifer Egan Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Mark Weissbluth, M.D. “I waited to have kids till I was older, and one of the hardest things about parenting was dealing with sleep deficiency over months and years.  This book was useful in helping me figure out how much sleep my children needed.  I thought my first kid didn’t need a lot of sleep because he wouldn’t nap much.  Weissbluth says there is no such kid.  The more a child sleeps, the more he wants to sleep.  This book taught me how sleep cycles should work, and sleeping became more healthful for my sons and for me.”  —Egan is the author of Look At Me and Emerald City and the mother of Emmanuel, 3, and Raoul, 1 1/2. —Cathi Hanauer and Daniel Jones The Seven Worst Things Parents Do by John C. Friel, Ph.D., and Linda D. Friel “Almost all the ‘worst things’ mentioned in this book were things that we were doing and that many parents of our generation do: baby your child, put your marriage last, be your child’s best friend.  The best-friend one particularly resonated with us.  All parents want their kids to like them, but his book taught us that kids need a parent much more than another friend.  It made us feel okay about not being perfect parents and offered suggestions to help without having to change our lives dramatically.”  —Hanauer is the editor of The Bitch in the House; Jones is the editor of The Bastard on the Couch.  They are the parents of Phoebe, 10, and Nathaniel, 6. —David Denby The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim “When my boys got older, this marvelous, imaginative book [about the meaning of fairy tales] really influenced how I thought about their learning.”  —Denby is the author of American Sucker and Great Books and the father of Max, 21, and Thomas, 17. —Hope Edelman Attachment Parenting by Katie Allison Granju “As a motherless mother, I tend to rely on parenting books for guidance.  This book was not only instructive but also a good resource, listing Web sites and groups that led me in useful directions.  I did a home birth for my second child, and this book is for parents who believe in the family bed and the importance of holding their kids, as I do.  In theory the advice was good, but in practice it was more difficult to implement than I expected.  The family bed was a failure for me as a working mother—I was dangerously sleep-deprived at work after eight months of nursing the baby all night long—but the book itself offered a type of community and encouragement for me that was invaluable.”  —Edelman is the author of Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers (in progress) and the mother of Maya, 7, and Eden, 3. —Jennifer Lauck Night Lights by Phyllis Theroux “Theroux was ahead of her time, a divine writer and mother with remarkable boundaries and a loving attitude.  In the last story in Night Lights, her youngest child has gone away to school and her older two have also left home.  She’s walking in her neighborhood where she’s raised her children and she realizes it’s done; there won’t be any more days of diapers or little hands reaching for her.  At the beginning of my mothering days, Theroux gave me a vision of what the end is going to be like.  It humbled me.  Even when parenting sometimes feels like an 18-year sentence, she impressed on me the value of savoring each precious moment and drinking it in.”  [Note: Night Lights is out of print but may be available at libraries and through used-book dealer.]  —Lauck is the author of Blackbird, Still Water, and Show Me the Way and the mother of Spencer, 7, and Josephine, 3. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Elizabeth Fishel is the author of several books about families, including Sister and I Swore I’d Never Do That.  Her favorite parenthood book is Jane Lazarre’s The Mother Knot.  Says Fishel:  “Lazarre’s book showed me the tangled connections between the way we were parented and the way we parent and suggested how to begin untangling those patterns across generations.” Media about Wendy Mogel 2005-03-01T22:53:58+00:00 http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/guilty_secrets_of_slacker_parents_parent_map_magazine/ http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/guilty_secrets_of_slacker_parents_parent_map_magazine/#When:19:03:00Z Are you ruining your kids with your lazy parenting ways? View this article in its original context. JULY 14, 2010 Guilty secrets of slacker parents! Are you ruining your kids with your lazy parenting ways? BY KRISTEN RUSSELL DOBSON You know who you are. Yes, you, in the stretched-out yoga pants, juggling your latte and iPhone as you load your toddler into your DVD-equipped car. You whip the wrap off a Lunchables and hand it back to the kid, then crank up The Backyardigans for a little slack-jawed commute to the gym day care. Supermom? As if. You landed that helicopter years ago. You are so over sweating the small stuff; the kids will be fine! Or will they? Good news, slacker parent! The experts are on your side (for the most part). Turns out, “helicopter parenting” can have unintended — even harmful — results. Instead of growing into the hypereducated, self-actualized person you envision, your kid may become an über-precious and entitled member of the so-called “T-ball generation,” in which every swing gets a standing ovation. The antidote? Slacker parenting! We’re here to help. We asked top local experts to weigh in on your top 10 “bad habits.” Some are OK, some are no way! Read on — and then get slackin’! IS “FROOT” A FOOD GROUP? Hey — it says “fortified” right on the label, so how bad can it be? You have a sneaking suspicion that you should be paying closer attention to your kids’ nutrition. Maybe you give them a daily multivitamin to take up some of the slack. Is that good enough? Not according to Dr. Janice Woolley, a retired Mercer Island pediatrician and the co-author (with writer Jennifer Pugmire) of Food for Tots. “There’s a lot more to food than vitamins,” Woolley says. “We need the fiber, the phytochemicals that we are just beginning to understand, and of course, it’s ideal for a child to learn to enjoy a variety of healthy foods.” If you’re not dishin’ up the leafy greens, you’re not creating healthy eating habits, Woolley says. “It’s likely that the child’s growth won’t be stunted, but there are bigger long-term problems, like obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and other chronic illnesses, that can be the result of lifelong eating patterns.” But the news is not all bad. “Will an occasional Happy Meal be a huge problem? Of course not,” Woolley says. “But good nutrition — including eating plenty of vegetables — is an important goal to work towards.” Woolley says veggies often go down best when served raw with dips. As for Froot by the Foot? “Nothing trumps fresh fruit,” she says. BABY ZOMBIES “It’s educational!” you tell yourself, as you plop your tot in front of the tube. Hey, it’s the only way you’ll ever see the inside of your shower! Are you melting baby’s brain? “I think the majority of parents feel guilty about their child’s use of media,” says Dr. Dimitri Christakis, “and I don’t think that’s very constructive. It leads to them not taking appropriate actions to use media wisely.” Christakis would know. He’s the director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and the author of The Elephant in Your Living Room: Making Television Work for Your Kids. Christakis has studied a lot of slacker media moves. His bottom line? “Don’t focus on quantity — which is what most parents worry about — focus on what they’re actually watching. The truth is there are a lot of programs for young kids that are actually good for kids.” But, go easy there, slacker. Christakis says the typical Northwest toddler watches two to three hours of TV a day (and if they’re in home-based day care, add another two to three hours) — and that’s just too much. Christakis’ advice to parents: “Keep it short and keep it good.” MY LITTLE VIDIOT Your 10-year-old locks on right after finishing his homework. You figure those video games are better than TV, because at least they’re interactive. Are you fooling yourself? “It’s complicated,” says Christakis. “It comes back to content. Violent video games are very bad for children. And I have real concerns about some Internet games which put kids at risk for Internet addiction.” Once again, the message is moderation. “Be mindful of what is being displaced by video games,” says Christakis. “What else might your child do?” DINNER AND A SHOW Bonus points for this superslacker move: Feeding the kids dinner — in front of the TV! Maybe you have work to do. Maybe you’re just exhausted. Is eating with iCarly all that bad? “It’s a terrible habit!” says Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson, pediatrician and the author of the popular Seattle Children’s blog Seattle Mama Doc. “Some of us grew up doing it. It’s called ‘distracted eating.’ Rather than listening to your body and how the food is making you feel, you overeat.” Besides contributing to the obesity epidemic, Swanson says, having the TV on during dinner obliterates the benefits of family meals, such as better family bonding and success in school, and reduced delinquency and incarceration rates. And Swanson points out that many commercials that air during the dinner hour are for foods that are terribly unhealthy. “Look, we all do this crud to get through our lives,” Swanson says, “but in reality, why is the TV on? Is anyone watching anything that’s necessary?” SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE It stays light until 10 p.m., and besides, the kids are not UN hostage negotiators! How well rested do you need to be to play clappy-clappy and make mud pies? You let bedtime slide — especially in summer. Are your kids at risk of chronic sleep deprivation? “A late bed time here and there, you can’t beat yourself up about it,” says Swanson. “But what you have to think about is this: If you’re doing it all the time, you may be phase-shifting your kids.” Phase-shifting is the process of actually readjusting your child’s natural melatonin spike, which usually hits around 8 p.m. Mess with beddy-bye too much and you could reset that spike to 10 p.m., and that, Swanson says, can lead to sleep deprivation. And that can lead to irritability, inattention, poor school performance, and plenty o’ tension in the house. “You’re maybe setting them up for picking a fight, screaming at you — you may pay for it in another way,” Swanson says. General rule: Toddlers need between 12 and 14 hours of sleep. School-age kids: nine to 10 hours (yes, really!). And from about age 13, kids had better be getting between eight and nine hours of sleep. KINDERMUSIK YOURSELF! Forget Mandarin lessons and music enrichment! You don’t sign your kids up for anything — school and real life are plenty. Are you setting your child up for failure? “One problem with not signing our kids up for anything is that it really feels like neglect,” says Dr. Wendy Mogel, author of the New York Times bestseller The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children. “Since everyone else has swallowed the Kool-Aid, it feels as though you are depriving your child of essential social, academic and cultural opportunities, and that they will slide right off the track that would lead them to future success.” Gulp. OK, but really, Dr. Mogel says she doesn’t like to see a child with no extracurricular enrich­ment whatsoever. The problem, she says, comes with overkill. “All of this adult-supervised activity, where you can do things right or wrong, is kind of creepy,” Mogel says. “I want kids to have time where they can make up the rules of their own games, use their imagination, get dirty, get skinned knees.” But Mogel warns parents not to slip into the trap of too much downtime: “Kids will say, ‘I’m fine! I’m happy not to have all of these enrichment activities! I’ll just sit with Nintendo all day.’” THE “ROOM MOM” DASH You know the one, where you bolt for the door when you see that clipboard being passed around? Heck, you’re not signing up for anything! You’ve got a life! Maybe a job or two! When it comes to field trips and class parties, you’re strictly a no-show. Are you disappointing your kids by not stepping up? “What the schools say to me a lot of the time is ‘Oh, my gosh! How can we get these parents out of the classroom?’” says Mogel. “School is a little haven of privacy for kids, away from parents’ prying eyes.” Still, your total slacker avoidance of all things glue-sticky might be a little extreme. “Kids have a good feeling when their parents are part of the school community,” she says. “Moderation is what’s appropriate. “Just being present to listen to them talk about what interests them without asking a million intrusive, nervous questions is just as good as being room parents,” Mogel says, and thousands of slacker parents everywhere stand up and applaud. PLUG UGLY He’s 4 years old and still using a pacifier. Are you stunting his speech development? “Most specialists and studies find that pacifier use doesn’t cause speech delays,” says pediatrician Swanson, “but it really makes me wonder if it causes them to talk less. If that kid’s got a wad of silicone in his mouth, he’s not going to communicate in the same way.” Swanson recommends getting rid of the pacifier at around 6 months of age, before it becomes a serious habit. “Most people — including myself — blow right past that deadline,” she says. “My next deadline comes at age 2,” because after age 2, pacifier use often causes malocclusion of the front teeth (i.e., “buck” teeth). And besides, “You’re just showing them that non-nutritive sucking is normal and acceptable,” Swanson says. And that undermines a very important safety lesson: Don’t put things in your mouth that are not food. 10-SECOND RULE Your baby’s pacifier just fell on the kitchen floor. You pick it up and pop it back in. Are you introducing deadly microbes into your baby’s fragile system? Rejoice, oh slacker parent: The 10-second rule is real! That’s according to my new best friend, Erika Schreder, staff scientist for Washington Toxics Coalition. “I have looked at studies that basically confirm that the 10-second rule isn’t altogether off,” Schreder says, then goes on to kill the buzz: “This is assuming that you do clean your floors at least once a week.” Errr . . . what? “You do have to vacuum at least once a week,” insists Schreder, and you also have to mop the kitchen floor. “Toxic chemicals build up in house dust — everything from lead to phthalates to toxic flame retardants — so we recommend you damp dust and vacuum at least once a week.” Schreder does offer a glimmer of hope for us no-scrub slackers, though. “Skip the obsessive cleaning! You’re actually doing your kid a favor by not bleaching your countertops.” According to Schreder, those harsh, expensive chemicals are unnecessary. “Soap and water is fine for cleanup of practically anything in your home.” BOOSTER MADNESS For years, you’ve meticulously strapped, unstrap­ped, restrapped, tight­ened, heightened, rotated and relocated that child’s car seat. You even have a special designated rearview mirror just so you can keep one eye on Precious and one on the road. Now that your child is 7, you don’t always bother. Should you? “When you look at how kids die, this is a big one,” says Swanson. “The odds of injury are 59 percent less in a booster than just a seatbelt. It’s super clear.” Booster seats reduce injury in car crashes because of the way they distribute the crash forces, says Swanson. They place the seatbelt over strong bones, rather than soft tissue. Without a booster, “You can get these horrific exo-spinal injuries,” Swanson says. “Your child’s body is going 60 miles an hour. Without a booster, they can just be ejected.” When your child is 40 pounds, he can make the transition to a booster seat. But he can’t transition out of that booster seat until he is eight years old . . . or 4-foot-9! “Which could mean you have near-teenagers who you know will be safer in a booster,” says Swanson. That can be a tough sell, but it needs to be a hard and fast rule, she says. “There should be no bending. You are trying to protect your child in the best way you can. It’s not anything to negotiate.” Kristen Russell Dobson is ParentMap’s managing editor. Her fave parental slacker moves include Eat Dessert First Night, “hemming” pants with safety pins and “educational” Mythbusters marathons. She is a fully recovered room mom. Media about Wendy Mogel 2010-07-14T19:03:20+00:00 http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/a_reading_list_for_harried_parents_the_new_york_jewish_news/ http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/a_reading_list_for_harried_parents_the_new_york_jewish_news/#When:18:29:00Z View this article in its original context. June 23, 2010 A READING LIST FOR HARRIED PARENTS by SHIRA VICKAR-FOX I’m not one to read parenting guidebooks — who has the time if they’re truly parenting? — but I adore Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of A Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children (Penguin Compass, 2001). Her book is easy to read and her approach is sensible. She and my mother are my two voices of parenting reason. I anxiously await the October publication of her new book, The Blessing of a B Minus (Scribner). Lenore Skenazy is a humorous author and her Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts With Worry) (Jossey-Bass, 2010), recently released in paperback, is a lot of fun. Skenazy blogs at freerangekids.com, and she is a firm believer in taking your kids outside and leaving them there — alone. It’s no wonder she recommends,  Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005) by Richard Louv. If you want to know more about the harmful effects of micro-managing our children’s lives, read Hara Estroff Marano’s A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting (Broadway Books, 2008) or The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon by David Elkind (Da Capo Press, 1981). Elkind’s book has been updated to reflect technological advances and more, but his main theme remains relevant more than 25 years after its initial publishing. Carl Honoré takes a global approach in Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting (HarperCollins, 2008).  For tools on how to remove you and your children from today’s hectic pace there’s The Overscheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap (St. Martin’s Press, 2000) by Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise. Mommy Guilt: Learn To Worry Less, Focus on What Matters Most, and Raise Happier Kids (AMACOM, 2005) uses experiences from real moms and dads and aims to make the burden of parenting an enjoyable one. No one said it would be easy. – Shira Vickar-Fox Media about Wendy Mogel 2010-06-23T18:29:45+00:00 http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/tips_for_avoiding_overscheduled_family_syndrome_the_new_york_jewish_week/ http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/tips_for_avoiding_overscheduled_family_syndrome_the_new_york_jewish_week/#When:14:33:00Z View this article in it’s orginal context. June 23, 2010 Tips For Avoiding Overscheduled Family Syndrome STAFF WRITER When parents sign up for ice skating lessons on Thursdays and yoga on Mondays they have the best interest of their child in mind. But the constant running and shlepping to after-school activities can be draining for parents and in fact, harmful to children. (Not to mention the expense of class fees, sports uniforms and meals purchased on the go, rather than prepared at home.) “We’re stealing from them downtime and time to fart around and accomplish nothing and have fun,” said Wendy Mogel, clinical psychologist and author of the popular Jewish parenting tome, The Blessing of A Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children (Penguin Compass, 2001). Enemy No. 1 in the battle to protect our children’s best interests is the lack of unstructured playtime. “Kids do need down time to see what they gravitate to besides the television,” said Lenore Skenazy, mother of two boys and author of Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts With Worry) (Jossey-Bass, 2010). Skenazy’s free-range movement is about common-sense parenting and giving kids the freedom to be well, kids. “You can’t discover stuff if it’s all presented on a platter as an educational activity,” she said. Children need the opportunity to explore and discover hobbies and activities on their own terms.  Lily Langer, a mother of four in Scarsdale and part-time export manager, limits after-school activities to one per semester for each child. She didn’t let her sixth grader try out for the town’s traveling softball team. “It’s 25 games, it’s a lot of traveling and there are so many other things you could be doing,” she told him. “I’m a huge believer in opening the front door and letting the child play outside.” Devra Renner, a social worker who is co-author of Mommy Guilt: Learn to Worry Less, Focus on What Matters Most and Raise Happier Kids, had one client who found an adapter for her crockpot that plugged into her minivan. “If you are cooking in your car and you think having an adapter for the car is brilliant, then that’s a definite sign” that you need to scale back those activities, she said. Moderation is a word associated with diet but it can also be applied to our child’s enrichment. “Somehow we’ve gotten into this world where good is the new bad,” said Renner. “You can have a good amount of activities; you don’t have to have the most excellent amount of activities.”  One way to reduce the stress in your home is to color-code your family’s activities on a large wipe-off calendar, recommends Renner. Assign a color to each parent, child and another one for family time. “Then when you look at it you can see who is really overscheduled,” said Renner. “You have a visual key there. It also helps you figure out, wait we’re not getting any family time.”  Choose activities that work into your schedule. “I pick the ones that are the most convenient and check off the most things I want to accomplish,” said Susan Marder, a mother of seven and clinical social worker for 11 years at the Westchester Day School in Mamaroneck. She chooses ones at school, where she can easily form a carpool, or reserves activities for Sundays. She also recommends making the most of the chosen activity to reduce the frenzy. “What’s your attitude while you’re doing these things and how can you best utilize the time?” she said. Take advantage of travel time to ask your child about his or her day. Make sandwiches before an evening baseball game and have a picnic beforehand. Tzippy Cohen, a mother of three living on the Upper West Side, packs after-school activities into the beginning of the week. On Thursdays and Fridays her children come home after school. “I don’t want to feel hurried, but I don’t want them to miss out on these activities,” she said. “This is the way I found that works for us.” Protect your child’s bedtime, advises Mogel. “Parents need to be valiant and courageous defenders of their children’s spirit and energy,” she said.  Assign a homework deadline by which time all homework must be completed. Make sure parents get enough rest, too. “It creates a really cranky country where we all just need a nap because we’re overscheduled,” said Renner.  No parent wants their children to look back on their youth and remember mom and dad screaming, “Put on your shoes, we’re going to be late.” “It’s not about you running ragged,” said Dr. Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center and professor of psychology and child psychiatry. “It’s about time together.” Media about Wendy Mogel 2010-06-23T14:33:22+00:00 http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/trying_eyes_better_homes_and_gardens/ http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/trying_eyes_better_homes_and_gardens/#When:22:55:00Z ...Make peace with the eye-roll, a tween girl’s rite of passage that can feel oh so wrong. -by Rachel Simpson View this article in its original context. May 2010 Trying Eyes… ...Make peace with the eye-roll, a tween girl’s rite of passage that can feel oh so wrong. By Rachel Simpson Lucky me.  Just in time for Mother’s Day, my 11-year-old daughter has mastered a new skill:  the eye-roll.  I suspect this “gift” will be one that keeps on giving.  When she wonders what’s for dinner and I innocently answer “hamburgers,” she rolls her eyes.  I ask her to put her laundry away and this time I get a sigh to go with the eye-roll.  No matter how vividly I can recall doing this to my own mother, my feelings are still hurt.  (And my own mom just shakes her head and valiantly refrains from telling me “I told you so.”) IT’S INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT NOT TO TAKE IT PERSONALLY. -PSYCHOLOGIST AND AUTHOR WENDY MOGEL The classic adolescent eye-roll, says Wendy Mogel, a psychologist and author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, is one of the ways that a child can show you she has complete disdain for what you’ve just said, how you run your home, who you are—the complete adult-ness of you.  And no matter how many of your friends are experiencing the same thing, it’s always a tough pill to swallow, she adds.  “It’s incredibly important not to take it personally,” she says.  “Nearly all mothers of girls go through this.” These ocular expressions of contempt usually begin at about age 11 and occur more frequently with girls than boys, says Catherine Steiner-Adair, a Harvard psychologist specializing in girls’ issues.  Anything can set them off.  And while it’s some comfort to know that it’s not you, it’s her, there are some strategies for dealing with this stop on the adolescent express. Don’t react in the moment, Steiner-Adair advises, especially if the eye-rolling happens in front of her peers.  Wait until later, and then say, “You seemed mad.  Is there something I should know?”  Sometimes that’s all that’s needed to open the door to a conversation the child wants to have but doesn’t know how to start.  Another tip:  Make sure you aren’t answering too fast.  She may feel as if you’ve made up your mind before she even finished. Knowing how to handle the eye-roll is one thing, but what about the hurt it causes?  There’s only so miuch you can do, Steiner-Adair cautions.  “If it’s really starting to hurt you a lot, call another mom, commiserate, and get some support.”  In other words, get used to it.  And be comforted by the knowledge that, to some extent, the girls really can’t help it. “Part of it is just hormonal,” says Mogel.  Changing levels of hormones and the uncomfortable processes of brain development make adolescents anxious and irritable.  And girls, in general, are closer to—and interact more with—their mothers than anyone else, whch is why we get the brunt of it.  “They are worst to their mothers.  They’re lovely in school, good with friends, nice to their dads, and just hideous with their moms,” Mogel says.  Perversely, that hideousness is a sign of your good parenting, the goal of which is to produce a healthy, strong individual adult.  Eye-rolling is a lead indicator that that’s happening.  Really. It’s an adolescent’s job to be this way—to ridicule her parents—because it’s such a long process of breaking away and becoming an independent adult,” says Trisha Thompson, mother of two teenage girls (14 and 17) and a frequent blogger on her life with them at thefastertimes.com. While those rotating eyes might look a lot like disdain or embarrassment to you, “It’s the way girls punctuate their transition from little girlhood to adulthood,” Steiner-Adair says.  It’s just another perfectly appropriate developmental stage behavior.  “When they were little they would get upset and cry,” she explains.  “But now, instead of doing that, they doubt you and question your not letting them be as grown-up as they think they are.” Until then, however, we parents have to negotiate their job with ours:  setting limits, instilling respect, growing decent adults.  Which also means not doing what Thompson says she’s always tempted to do—roll her own eyes back at her daughters in an even more dramatic fashion.  “That doesn’t make anything better,” she says. WHERE THE BOYS ARE Boys share with girls the same need to separate from their parents, but manifest it with a different optical tic:  Avoidance.  “Mainly what boys do is try to hide,” says psychologist Wendy Mogel.  Avoiding all eye contact with parents (and other adults) is typical.  One technique they use, she adds, is to spend a lot of time with their eyes glued to a screen “so they don’t have to look at that awful parent.”  Another is pretending to get a text when you’re talking, just so they can divert attention to the phone and away from you. Tween boys are desperate for privacy.  “Puberty bathes their brains in hormones and there’s just so much going on with them,” Mogel explains.  Think voices—and other things—changing.  “They’re so self-conscious,” she adds.  They don’t have words for the way they’re feeling and often don’t understand what’s going on, says Mogel. Boys need compassion and respect and, yes, privacy.  Grant them space, don’t take it personally and when you can, find ways to engage them.  Try listening to their music and discussing it or get them talking about technology—they probably know more than you do.  Remember, this is not the epic documentary or their life.  It’s just another phase.     Media about Wendy Mogel 2010-05-01T22:55:13+00:00 http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/smart_empathy_independent_school_magazine/ http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/smart_empathy_independent_school_magazine/#When:18:07:00Z —Cultivating a self-reliant parent body in times of crisis View this article in its original context Smart Empathy Cultivating a Self-Reliant Parent Body in Times of Crisis WENDY MOGEL Winter 2010 Walking down Wabash Street in Chicago last fall, I stopped to admire a grand Gothic-Moorish building with the words MEDINA spelled out in terra cotta blocks under a majestic dome. Turning the corner, I saw another sign at the front entrance: BLOOMINGDALE’S HOME. In an article announcing the opening of the store, the property owner stated, “The 140,000-square-foot Medina Temple property had been owned by the Shriners, but was out-of-date for its original purpose as an auditorium and was unused.” The paradox of the repurposing of the building hit me when I went inside. It was lovely, quiet… and empty of customers. Even those who find uplift in retail therapy were staying away. Times are tough all around. In my 35 years working in and around independent schools I’ve never heard as many sad stories as of late. I’m not talking about the sad-style stories of parents inappropriately asking schools to make their lives easier in some way. I’m talking about the real heartbreakers. Take, for example, the family accustomed to paying their two children’s tuition with income from the father’s bonuses alone and then reaching into their pockets to cover the full tuition for a scholarship student. Now, even with mother working full time, the family finds itself short. A handwritten letter from their shy fourth grader is tucked into the packet of financial-aid forms. It begins: “Ten reasons I love [this school] and ten reasons I hope you will let me stay.” But, when the numbers are crunched, this family does not qualify for financial aid. There’s the reaction of a lower school head upon learning that one of her students, an unusually sweet-natured, able, and hardworking sixth grader from a low-income family, has been waitlisted at every secondary school to which she applied while full-pay classmates of lesser academic credentials receive multiple offers. There’s the anguish felt by a third grade teacher on hearing this question posed by a parent: “We’re in a bit of a tough spot right now. The medical insurance provided by my wife’s new job won’t cover treatment for the recurrence of her cancer. Marissa’s birthday is coming up in three weeks. I know this isn’t really a school-type problem, but any ideas about how to do a low-cost party that the other kids would still find fun?” One financial aid officer I interviewed for this article said, “It’s been a very unusual time around here. One third more of our full-pay families are applying for aid than in any time in the past. Usually the tissue box on the desk in my office lasts a whole year. This year, I’ve gone through a few already. Some days I’m so tired that I think about walking away and becoming a surfing instructor.” Independent schools have always had families facing hardships. But now, so many of the troubles have troubles: illness plus loss of insurance coverage, school placement competition plus limited tuition funds, the normal stresses of raising a family plus financial insecurity. And these mounting worries are creating a new dilemma for schools. In his book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, before the current economic downturn, Robert Putnam, professor of public policy at Harvard University, described how the collapse of American civic, political, and social organizations (Rotary Clubs, the League of Women Voters, bowling leagues, and even the frequency with which people give dinner parties or attend Sunday picnics) has created a sense of disconnection and social isolation, a loss of what he calls “social capital.” The loss of Shriners and bowling leagues didn’t have a negative impact on independent schools in the flush years of the past two decades. On the contrary, schools graciously — and perhaps eagerly — filled in the social gap. Besides a broad menu of committee opportunities, parents were invited to be involved in community-service projects for families, picnics, parties, career-day lessons, parent education programs, and camping trips. These levels and types of involvement strengthened the community and created great parental loyalty and generosity. Schools flourished as social hubs and a source of identity for families. But now, facing an increasingly competitive, unsettled, anxious world, the school-parent relationship has become increasingly tense — too close and, at the same time, too indulgent, insensitive, and shortsighted for the health of either party. Some of the parental expectations that were fostered and encouraged in times of economic abundance are now depleting the emotional coffers and patience of school leaders and the resources of schools. How far should a school go in helping families with their myriad problems? Where are the lines now? Empathy is admirable. In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink even describes it as one of the six essential qualities necessary for success in the 21st century. But schools need to get smarter about how and when and in what form they provide support for their families. YOU’RE MY EVERYTHING:  PERILS OF CLOSENESS People who choose to work in schools are, by nature, eager to help others. But institutions are weakened by trying to be all things to all people. As in marriages in which a partner is expected (or tries to be) a best friend, business consultant, decorator, thrilling playmate, moral barometer, accountant, and shrink, your greatest assets get diluted or overlooked when you aren’t forthright and firm about your talents, interests, and limits. Even those with great intentions, big hearts, and high energy can’t sustain such broad, unrelenting demands. A school’s commitment to parents is to educate the children it admits as best it can. If administrators and staff act as payday loan windows, pastoral counselors, marriage therapists, experts in every special need, and all-around pals, it isn’t possible to do much of anything very well. Schools don’t have the time, the money, or the expertise. Almost every administrator I talk to tells me about his or her own jitters: diminished endowments or stalled construction projects, a smaller applicant pool or fear of losing students, more open slots in upper grades. When families come asking to be delivered from pain, many school leaders are tempted to spring into action both because they genuinely care and because of a desire to keep their customers happy, but also because other people’s problems are a great distracter. Listening to a suffering parent, educators may think, “Wow, this is interesting,” or, “Wow, my problems aren’t so bad,” or, “Wow, it sure would feel good to fix this little corner of the world.” But, of course, doing so won’t help the school with the issues that are pressing hardest on the schoolhouse door. In our troubled times, schools can remain compassionate and vibrant communities, only if they resist pity, overindulgence, or overidentification with families — even those who are favored or aggressively miserable. This means having a clear view of responsibility, of who owns which problems. If you spread yourself out too much, you’ll get weary and dispirited, and you won’t be able to serve your core mission well. Besides, too much caring quite often backfires. This is the dark side of empathy. It’s a paradox, but when you try to help those who can help themselves, at first, they kiss your hand, then they sue you. It’s like teenagers who get into the habit of punting their problems over to parents and then blame those same parents when they get a C-minus or a jail sentence. In independent schools, overly kind habits of the heart can lead to feelings of betrayal, an erosion of parental self-reliance, and a weakening of the community. Like the therapist who thinks he or she can fix a patient’s problems, the school that believes its mission includes providing a balm for every distress for every family will quickly find itself feeding its own distress. It’s an admittedly tricky line to walk. Parents will ask and ask. But you should not feel obliged, say, to have a full on-campus memorial service under a tree on a cloudless day for anyone in the community who knows anyone who has died. Nor are you obligated to accommodate every single learning style of every child in the school just because you don’t test the children entering your early childhood program. Parents may be suffering at increasing rates in this down economy, but that doesn’t mean you must fill in the financial gaps for families living above their means until they get back on their feet. Eking out resources in attempts to solve or soothe this category of parental discomfort inevitably creates frustration, disappointment, and layers new troubles onto old. I’m not saying that schools shouldn’t accommodate families and parents in a compassionate, generous, and personalized fashion. My usual formula is this: Schools should cater to parents less than parents think is appropriate and more than teachers do. But with more families with urgent and broader needs in the school population — more than the usual five percenters — it’s easy to get swamped, confused about priorities, and to start sticking fingers in the dike or applying band-aid after band-aid, rather than stopping to reflect, to adjust your vision, make thoughtful choices, and then, where appropriate, tweak your systems. WHAT TO DO INSTEAD:  CONDUCT SOME REALITY THERAPY When parents ask: Can’t you get my daughter to join a club? Play on a team? Have more friends? Talk my son into applying early decision to Penn? Tell my daughter that her mother and I are separating? Retool the math curriculum? Grade on a curve? Call my sister to offer your condolences over the death of her father-in-law? Stock up on red washcloths so if any of the kids in pre-K get a booboo, they won’t get scared by the blood? Listen to me dump my misery about how my bipolar, pill-addicted, unemployed ex-husband is poisoning my relationship with my son? Base your financial-aid formula on income divided by debts and expenses instead of expenses divided by assets? Instead of saying, “I’ll see what I can do!” you can think about the power, potential, and majesty of reality. Marcus Hurlbut, head of Saint Margaret’s Episcopal School (California), described his school’s adjustment to the economic downturn as “a crisis we couldn’t afford to miss.” He explained that it served as a reality check and brought the school down to earth after an era of yearly add-ons and donations so sky-high that both the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times reported on the gifts as news items. “Now we’re giving financial aid to 60 kids from existing families who were formerly full-pay customers. In general, we’re more efficient because we have to be. We’re taking seriously the advice of several trustees who have long said, if we add a program, we need to consider sunsetting another. We’ve cut down on transportation costs, and are making better use of existing resources, all without any reduction in program or staff.” When I queried him about Smartboards — those pin-up girls of the prospective parents’ tour — he replied. “Exactly. This is a great piece of equipment but the kids used to ask: ‘Why are they here?’ Now we’ve figured out how best to use them.” Hurlbut notes other ways that basic shifts in perspective have both improved the efficiency of the school and led to a stronger community. “We don’t just assume people can just write the tuition check,” he says. “At back-to-school night, I let the parents know how much the faculty and staff appreciate the sacrifice parents are making to have their children here. Everyone is taking his or her obligations more seriously than ever.” This crisis-as-opportunity model can strengthen families as well. When schools resist applying palliatives, or making special allowances, or proceeding as though tough times are temporary, families have a better chance of making necessary adjustments. For example, some families applying for aid for the first time are reassessing priorities. Studying their monthly budget is illuminating. In many cases, what had been seen as essentials get redefined as luxuries. Living above their means in order to keep up with classmates or protect their children from reality no longer seems prudent. Non-working parents are getting jobs, grandparents are chipping in, families are cutting out skating lessons and extended or distant vacations. The children’s education is treated as a serious investment worthy of serious sacrifice. But other families are slower to face either their need for help or their need for self-discipline. For these families, a different brand of empathy is in order. Effective empathy is not secretive and scattershot, but systematic and transparent. Set the stage. Say to the faculty: This year, we’re going to have families with illnesses of loved ones, changed financial circumstances, and marriages falling apart. When appropriate, direct the parents to any school resources of which they may be unaware, or refer them to your division head, a dean, or counselor — but always remember that your job is to be an empathic and respectful teacher of children, not a therapist or problem-solver for parents. Correct false assumptions. At back-to-school night or grade-level meetings, relieve misplaced parental anxiety about the economy by reporting any reassuring trends that you’ve observed in your community or have learned about from colleagues. Mothers who find themselves needing to go back to work are often convinced that any problem their child develops is due to their absence around the house. You can explain that this is rarely true. In some cases, it may even have a positive effect. Those working moms who tended towards excessive hovering find that going to work is both a helpful antidote to over-devotion and provides an opportunity for the children to develop more self-reliance and resourcefulness. At college counseling meetings, you can warn parents not to encourage their child to apply to a school the parents don’t intend to allow the child to attend because of out-of-reach tuition or travel costs. “But he’ll feel good if he gets in” is a good-intentioned but misguided rationale. Besides, in some cases, it really means that the parents will feel good if their child gets in. The amount of after-tax income needed to pay tuition for two children for 13 years adds up to enough money to cause any middle-class family to quake. You can remind parents that you are aware of the great cost of an independent school education, and that any family may find itself needing help at some point along the way. Then, in a discreet and encouraging snail-mail letter home — not in an announcement hidden deep in your website — invite existing families to apply for financial aid. Be a role model of holding onto standards and expectations even in crisis. Saying, “No excuses accepted in this class!” after a grandparent dies or a family faces other kinds of distress is a display of institutional heartlessness. But it is appropriate to say, “Yes, of course, we’ll give Jack a few days or a week grace period, but after that, homework is due on schedule.” Rather than acting as though students are fragile and easily traumatized, schools can acknowledge grief while also respectfully normalizing natural changes in life circumstances, even painful ones, as opportunities for developing resilience. Holding your ground on requests for accommodation to unnecessarily nervous demands (which are often displacements from personal worries) also helps to steady a community. School leaders can say, for instance, “Just because there’s been a school shooting in another state doesn’t mean our students are in any sort of danger. We are committed to maintaining an open campus in our own safe neighborhood, and have made a firm decision not to hire a security guard to stand at every access point of our school.” Keep volunteers attuned to humble realities. Most schools need a third to half more financial aid than they did a few years ago. This means that the parent association can be tasked with raising money for scholarships for existing families, rather than for the more delightful embellishments of years past like the Hawaii trip for the senior class or expensive equipment that the school can do without. Remember that, in hard times, small acts of thoughtfulness put money in the bank of good will and morale. Consider providing school supplies and pre-paying for tickets to the annual fund-raiser and sports banquet for families on full financial aid. Make podcasts of parent education events so those who can’t attend for any reason or don’t wish to hire a babysitter will have access to the information provided to the attendees. Out of consideration to families weighing college scholarship or merit money over U.S. News rankings, consider taking down banners and posters of “prestige collection” schools in the college counselor’s office — or keep them up while also highlighting the colleges that offer the best aid packages. Teach a man or woman to fish. School personnel may not have all the answers to adult problems, but schools can offer resources to help parents with their pressing issues. At the Center for Early Education (California), librarian Lucy Rafael has created 65 different bibliographies on a broad range of topics, including: adoption issues, cancer, children and trauma, death and dying, divorce, the vocabulary of emotions, fear, stress, working parents, stepfamilies, and resilience. This is a real “take home” because the Center’s parents can find every one of the titles in the school’s 5,000-book “parent library” collection. Be respectful if you need to part ways. Many corporations offer highly developed outplacement services as part of the process of terminating an employee. Schools are not obligated to provide the full service of an outside school placement specialist, but in an era of more fluid traffic in and out of schools, remaining ignorant or naïve about alternatives is no longer a respectful or appropriate position. The support of an in-house resource person with knowledge of charter, magnet, and public options lends dignity and partnership to the transition. Consider that giving more upfront may mean less knocking at the back door. Over the past five years, Lakeside School (Washington) has developed a remarkably robust Family Support Program. The original mission was simple: the school wished to fulfill its commitment to diversity by both attracting and retaining families new to independent schools. It wanted prospective families to feel confident about choosing this potentially intimidating educational option and existing families to have the resources to succeed once they joined the community. Jamie Asaka, Family Support Program coordinator, explains that this perspective required a paradigm shift from family involvement to active family support. “We first evaluated the school culture and the systems currently in place in many different categories: transportation to and from practices and games and the cost of equipment for athletes, the need for interpreters at every school event, access to technology for families and students and support for families in any kind of crisis.” Using the example of technology, she described how, a few months into the school year, teachers discovered a puzzling pattern of missing student assignments. Some sleuthing revealed that, even though all students in grades seven to twelve were provided with laptops, once they arrived home, some were lacking a key but overlooked resource: Internet access. Out of embarrassment, these students never went to the teacher and said, “I can’t get online at home.” Instead, they scrambled to cover up this gap. They went to the library or hoped to find unlocked wifi in the neighborhood. Many just gave up and, with no explanation, simply didn’t hand in their work on time. “Now we survey all families at the beginning of the year and ask: Do you have Internet access? What kind? Is e-mail a good way to communicate with you? If they don’t have access to the web or e-mail, we help them get it. If they don’t want it for any reason, we send them hardcopies of all communications.” The Family Support Program has clearly strengthened the Lakeside community, Asaka says. “When all families are freely offered a whole set of specific resources for community participation, they feel encouraged and supported. Then they not only use the resources, but get involved and help others.” Walking the mourner’s path together. In the days of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, the commonality of various experiences of loss was publicly acknowledged. A special separate path was set aside not only for those mourning the death of a close relative, but for those who faced other losses as well. In her wise and moving book, Mourning and Mitzvah, Rabbi Anne Brener writes, “It was understood that economic reverses, personal illness, relocation, and the illness of someone close required attention similar to that given to mourners. As it says in the Talmud: ‘Who are they who circle to the left? A mourner, an excommunicant, one who has someone sick at home, and one concerned about a lost object.’” As the example of Lakeside School so vividly illustrates, at one time or another, all parents lose something precious to them and rightfully take their place on the mourner’s path. A message board on a private page of your school’s website can serve as a vehicle for the exchange of goods and services. A school’s “mitzvah” or loving hands committee — where volunteers bring meals, drive carpools, and plan birthday parties for families in crisis — is a sparkling example of social capital embedded in the core of the community rather than parked in the office of the head of school. A national financial downturn with no predictable endpoint brings its own special grief and fear. When schools focus their energies on being the best educators possible rather than being all things to all people, families have an opportunity to mature and to learn to take care of themselves and each other. Finding opportunity in this crisis both strengthens the community and grows healthy social capital in a time when it’s so desperately needed. Articles by Wendy Mogel 2010-01-01T18:07:04+00:00 http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/camp_blessings_canada_camps_for_parents/ http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/camp_blessings_canada_camps_for_parents/#When:17:38:00Z Camp Blessings January 2010 There are many benefits to a camp experience, but for well-known psychologist, Wendy Mogel, some of the top ones for parents to remember are mud, dirty fingernails and bugs.  Canada Camps for Parents sits down with the author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee to get her thoughts on why parents should send their kids to camp. CHALLENGES OF TODAY’S PARENTS The default challenges of loving, devoting, intelligent parents are over protection, over scheduling, over indulgence and expecting kids to perform at a higher level in every area except for respect for adults.  Today’s kids that are bubble wrapped don’t develop immune systems because they are too protected. HAVE CHALLENGES CHANGED When I was a child, children could go play outside on a summer night without adults knowing where they were until dark.  When I was in school, the kindergarten curriculum included making an ashtray and learning a couple of songs and how to clean up after a snack.  Today, schools are preparing kids for standardized tests.  The academic pressure is very different and the 24-hour news cycle and the love of terrifying parents has made parents phobic about giving their kids much freedom in nature.  Parents have an image in their mind of a pedophile or child abductor spending most of their time trying to figure out how to target their child—the odds of that happening are extremely miniscule.  They are also fearful of giving them privacy.  Parents are so brainwashed that they think private means danger.  Instead, private means time to daydream, fart around and accomplish nothing, to rest or for spiritual growth. CHILD DEVELOPMENT & CAMP The biggest symptoms psychologists and school administrators complain about in today’s kids are anxiety, entitlement and general high maintenance.  Camp is the opposite of that.  At camp, you are just a bunk member. ROLE MODELING The most important thing for parents to remember is role modeling.  If the school has a sign saying no left turns out of the parking lot and the parent makes a left turn, a six year old recognizes that.  Very small acts have a big impact on little people.  The amount of cheating done in high schools and universities is greater today than 15 years ago.  These kids, every minute of every day, believe their whole future is on the line.  This is what we have created—an unethical atmosphere by our own actions as parents and putting our kids in situations where the bible would call it a “stumbling block before the blind.” This is how you create, especially in boys, demoralization about school, and rowdy, acting out behavior.  They are so frustrated at being asked to do work they are not ready to do.  This is not how you create life-long, enthusiastic learners. EXPERIENCE WITH CAMP MOVEMENT I went to camp for 16 years.  I went to a day camp and was a camper, Counselor-in-Training, staff member and senior staff member.  I grew up in New York City and it was tradition to send kids to camp for eight weeks.  I loved camp.  It was so different than being at home.  We would just sit around the pond and gather frogs.  Camp has so many good things for kids:  mosquitoes, mean kids in your bunk, times when you feel too hot or too cold and a lake which is really cold. CAMP EXPECTATIONS What I want parents to expect is that at the beginning of the summer, their child might petition to go home.  Camp is antidote to everything I mentioned in the beginning:  over protection to over indulgence to too much focus on academics.  Not to mention lack of respect for adults.  At camp, because counselors are not the kids’ mommy and daddy, they won’t coddle them like they are used to being coddled. PSYCHOLOGICAL MATURITY Parents have to understand that social and emotional development and self-reliance and self-regulation—examples of psychological maturity—are what predicts adult success much more than learning specific skills that will look good on your transcript.  I’m sorry to see camps getting more structured, more technically focused and less the final outpost for childhood.  I want kids to play with all five senses in three dimensions, instead of on a computer screen or in a structured class during or after school. GETTING OVER THE FEAR I like camp folk to talk to parents about what their fears are and why these fears are misplaced.  I like to call this “preventative mental health” for camp parents. THE BENEFITS OF CAMP Bugs, dirt, extremes of temperature, dirty fingernails, being with kids [that are different] from your home town, church, school or synagogue, learning all sorts of things to do, sitting in a field when you are feeling down, having your own resources to take care of the natural fluctuations in moods that kids have, hiding from the prying eyes of nervous, devoted parents, and doing sneaky things and not getting caught.  I think the best avenue to spiritual elevation in life is singing in nature, and at at camp you can do this. Media about Wendy Mogel 2010-01-01T17:38:10+00:00 http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/under_pressure_middlebury_magazine/ http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/under_pressure_middlebury_magazine/#When:20:03:00Z A psychologist and author turns to the Talmud to help children and parents, alike. View this article in its original context. WINTER 2009 Under Pressure? by Catherine O’Neill Grace ’72, Photography by Max S. Gerber A psychologist and author turns to the Talmud to help children and parents, alike. These days, no one’s too surprised to hear about parents who write a high school daughter’s college entrance essay, or even call a young adult son’s prospective boss to discuss the terms of a job offer. That’s parenting, 21st-century style. But as Wendy Mogel ’73—author of the perennial bestseller, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children—was gathering material for her forthcoming book, The Blessing of a B Minus, she heard a tale that pushed the limits even further. It was about parents who got a divorce but didn’t tell their kids, worrying that it might upset them. The explanation for Dad’s absence? He was on an extended business trip. Such stories distress, but no longer surprise, Mogel. The clinical psychologist and author has spent much of the last decade traveling around the country talking to worried parents from all walks of life. Her primary objective is to help parents understand how important it is to let their children make—and learn from—their mistakes and to understand that shielding them from life’s lessons can be counterproductive. Mogel lives in Hollywood and is married to the successful producer, screenwriter, and novelist Michael Tolkin ’74. She has found that parental anguish is particularly intense in the perfection-obsessed private schools and palatial homes of Los Angeles. These are the kind of parents she saw in her clinical practice and the kind she feared she was becoming when her children were little. “I was a regular old clinical psychologist—and then I had little children and I found Judaism,” Mogel says, of the faith that changed her view of parenting. With a friend, she began attending services and found herself moved, and supported as a parent, by what she found there. Suspending her practice, she spent a year studying Judaism full time; her young family began celebrating the Sabbath at home. (Today, she and Tolkin belong to Temple Israel of Hollywood and have supported the Jewish community at Middlebury College for many years.) “When I began studying Judaism, one of the first things that struck me was how directly it spoke to the issue of parental pressure,” Mogel writes in Skinned Knee. “According to Jewish thought, parents should not expect their children to be anyone other than who they are. A Hasidic teaching says, ‘If your child has a talent to be a baker, don’t tell him to be a doctor.’” Skinned Knee, which grew out of the lectures Mogel developed for a Jewish parenting class, started out small. “They printed 5,000 copies of what they thought was a nice Jewish parenting book,” Mogel says. In spite of a rave review in Publishers Weekly, news of the book traveled mainly through word of mouth, from parent to parent, teacher to teacher, school to school. “Some independent schools give a copy to every new parent, others to every teacher. I’ve heard of acting classes using it, and it’s used in seminaries. So sales do remain brisk!” Ten years after that first modest press run, there are some 300,000 copies of Skinned Knee in print, and the book has gone back on press 28 times. “The surprising thing is that it became an important book in the non-Jewish community, especially in the world of independent schools,” she says. “People overcame their prejudices about a parenting book that used religious thought as its foundation. They were willing to embrace traditional Jewish thought, and see it as universal, as something that is old and true—and that’s how I felt when I stumbled upon the Talmud.” In Skinned Knee, Mogel writes that modern parents tend to be like “cruise ship directors who must get [our children] to their destination—adulthood—smoothly, without their feeling even the slightest bump or wave.” That overprotective approach means parents deprive children of essential experience: “Those bumps are part of God’s plan.” Mogel’s bestseller counsels parents to let their children take risks and make their own mistakes. It also turns to traditional Jewish teaching to explore a series of “blessings” that enrich family life and create stability—including honoring parents, valuing work, embracing tradition, and experiencing gratitude. Jewish tradition was not part of Mogel’s childhood in Manhattan. “I was not from a religious family at all,” she says. “Michael had a bar mitzvah and was confirmed, but neither of us had anything to do with religion until our first daughter, Susanna, was three.” As interest in Skinned Knee grew, Mogel was asked to speak all over the country, at schools, synagogues, and gatherings of professional organizations. “I was surprised and very gratified—and I found out that my true calling was not being a therapist or even being a writer, but being a public speaker,” she says. “It’s my favorite thing to do. I am a circuit preacher.” Mogel’s dance card for speaking engagements is sure to be even fuller when The Blessing of a B Minus is published in September. “The working subtitle is something like ‘raising resilient teenagers in a nervous world,’” she says. “I started this book five years ago, and my kids are now 18 and 22.” Older daughter Susanna is a Haverford graduate and teaches nursery school; younger daughter Emma, who enjoys playing bluegrass music and songwriting, is at the University of Chicago. Stories about the girls abound in Skinned Knee, but for B Minus Mogel has drawn instead on the stories that administrators, teachers, and parents have told her as she travels the country. She is well aware of parents’ anxiety—indeed their terror—about their children’s futures. “This was a much, much harder book to write because it’s a harder topic,” says Mogel. She sees teenagers today as both pressured and pampered—a poisonous recipe for raising confident, independent human beings. “We’re constantly taking their emotional temperatures. The reflex is to overprotect, overindulge, and overschedule.” But being protected from reality makes kids much less able to cope with it. School administrators and teachers find that girls these days are anxious, boys emotionally shut down. “They call them ‘teacups’ and ‘crispies’ because they’re so fragile, dependent on their parents and burned out from APs and worries about burnishing their transcripts,” says Mogel. “But I want kids to be able to range free a bit and to be around knives, matches, divorce, cancer, death. I want teenagers to have to make choices about alcohol, drugs, and sex.” Parents have to make tough choices, too—including ethical ones. “When someone calls from school and asks, ‘Is this late slip forged?’ you have to say yes, even if it gets your child in trouble,” Mogel says. There are qualities in this generation of teenagers that give Mogel hope. “They’re so passionate. There is exuberant, tender, relaxed, collegial mutual support between the genders. They are worldly, and they’re not as prejudiced as we were. And when they’re not too stressed, their entitlement shows itself as energetic idealism and can lead to creative solutions to social problems.” Mogel says that she again drew on Talmudic wisdom for the new book, but in a less prescriptive way. Rather, the religious framework of the book gives parents something to lean on themselves—the potential for pleasure in watching the circus of adolescence, a sense of the sturdiness of reality, and the power of human resilience. Says Mogel, “Jewish teachings are really about having faith in the future.” Media about Wendy Mogel 2009-12-21T20:03:06+00:00 http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/a_summer_reading_list_for_parents_new_york_times_magazine/ http://www.wendymogel.com/articles/item/a_summer_reading_list_for_parents_new_york_times_magazine/#When:20:56:00Z By Lisa Belkin View this article in it’s original context Motherlode:  Adventures in Parenting June 1, 2009, 11:32 AM A Summer Reading List for Parents By Lisa Belkin My essay about the end of overparenting in the magazine this weekend gave me a chance to look back in time over the parade of advice given to new parents. It also got me thinking about my own sources of advice, places I have turned over the years with questions. Top of the list are my own parents (I heard you, Mom, even if I didn’t always listen) and my pediatrician. For middle of the night health panics (the first sounds of croup still pop up in my nightmares once in a while) I was lucky enough to be married to a doctor, but also often found myself on drgreene.com for guidance. And while I read dozens of advice books over the years, a few rose to the level of indispensable: The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children, By Wendy Mogel. You don’t have to be religious, you don’t even have to be Jewish to appreciate Mogel’s philosophy that allowing children to fall down and pick themselves up (with kisses as needed) is the way to raise resilient, self-confident kids. Becoming the Parent You Want To Be: A Sourcebook of Strategies for the First Five Years, By Laura Davis and Janis Keyser. Not a how-to book, so much as a how-to-think-things-through-and-arrive-at-the-right-solution-for you book. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk and Siblings Without Rivalry, both by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. Both books walk you through true-to-life scenarios, with small suggestions that “magically” make huge differences when you find yourself having the same kinds of conversations in real life. For a few months a while back, my husband and I each had a dog-eared copy of “Siblings” next to our bed, and I often quickly skimmed a few pages before I raced off to break up yet another squabble. Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall: A Parent’s Guide to the New Teenager, By Anthony E. Wolf. The title alone shows Wolf understands life with teenagers. And like Faber, he gives practical tips for situations that really happen. Quirky Kids: Understanding and Helping Your Child Who Doesn’t Fit In - When to Worry and When Not to Worry by Perri Klass and Eileen Costello. Nearly every child is “quirky” in some way at some time. Klass and Costello, both pediatricians, are good at sorting out what will pass and what needs a closer look. Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, By Anne Lamott I often give this book as a shower gift along with another book of Lamott’s, which is technically about writing but has the best advice I have ever read about raising children. That second one, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions On Writing and Life takes its title from a moment in Lamott’s own her childhood when her brother was sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by piles of books trying to write a science report about birds. He was overwhelmed and panicking – there was just too much to take in at once. Father sat down next to him and said, “son, just take it bird by bird.” Bird by bird – one foot in front of the other, one step at a time. Somewhere along the way you look back at where you began and realize you’ve become a parent, with a philosophy all your own. Where do you turn for parenting advice? What sources would you pass along to parents who are trying to find their way? Media about Wendy Mogel 2009-06-01T20:56:54+00:00