The SixSeeds Parents Study group is comprised of a group of thoughtful Bay Area parents. They convene regularly to read and reflect about raising children who enjoy material prosperity.
The group consists of diverse backgrounds, parenting styles, and ages of children. All of them play a primary role in day to day child rearing, as well pursuing some other part time vocation (noted below).
Present at the discussion were:
- Jody Chang (board member of a family foundation) : 2 girls, Mei-Mei age 8, Ellie age 4.
- Jill Bekaert (expert in the spiritual development of children): 2 boys, Conor 6, Nathaniel 3.
- Amber Stime (nonprofit leader): 3 boys, Endalkachow, 25, Demoze 21, Alemayu 7.
- Mark Phifer-Houseman (pastor): 2 boys Ephrem 22, Muhr 18, 2 girls, Yodit, 15, Beti, 13.
- Aimee Heeren (high school guidance counselor): Alaina (5), Marin (2) and Maya (2 mos.). Her husband Scott has joined our discussion group as well.
- Cheryl Zirbel (preschool teacher - Jody’s, Jill’s and Aimee’s kids have all had her as a teacher!): Zachary (9) and Isabel (5).
Recently, the group met to discuss the book, The Family Virtues Guide: Simple Ways to Bring Out the Best in Our Children and Ourselves, by Linda K. Popov.
The conversation followed the book’s description of four key parental roles:
Counselor, Authority, Guide, and Educator.
On Being a Counselor
Jody: The book’s section on the “counselor” role encourages questions to draw out your child’s feelings. I find that my introverted and reserved child won’t come out with verbal explanations of her feelings. If I keep trying strategies like the one outlined in the book (see page 46), I’m not sure she’ll respond.
But as we’ve discussed here before, it’s hard not to just impose advice and solve their issues for them. It’s a discipline to let children grow and find their own center. That’s why I like the book’s discussion of the parent’s need to bring compassion and detachment together. That combination is a good description of what a counselor does.
Cheryl: Eckhart Tolle is also a good thinker about this notion of detachment. As parents we want to solve things for our kids. As the book said, we need to “avoid doing for kids what they can do for themselves.” This is true even for figuring out emotions. My son’s emotions rise up when his sister bugs him or things don’t go his way. The mantra in our house is “it’s your journey.”
Aimee: Detachment is very freeing for me with my kids. I can coach the kids much more effectively when I am aware of my emotions and can separate them from those of the kids.
Cheryl: The counselor is just one of the parenting styles; I liked how the book was different from most parenting books which emphasize just one style above another. It was more positive than critical of other models. And all of the styles/roles it discusses are important.
Jill: I liked all the examples. The dialogues felt very realistic to me.
Mark: Although I have to say as a parent of teens, I found that the dialogues seemed unrealistic with reference to teens. It’s just not that easy.
On Being an Authority
Jill: My family was not explicit with authority roles. I am finding that in my own parenting, becoming the teacher or other roles during key moments with two kids is tough. The book is timely because I find I am using more language that just asserts control these days, like “Go to your room!” What was helpful from this book is that authority is setting up agreements about how we are all trying to live. The boys fight and because of their development stages, the rules are changing so quickly. We as a family need some structure to go back to our family’s vision and rules, and not just to more commands I issue throughout the day. We don’t like to post stuff on the walls, but we do need to have our agreements and rules explicit, especially at this time.
Cheryl: For their age, the visual is a key reminder.
Mark: I think the parental role of authority is also very important with teens: firm boundaries need to be set. I always think of the example of when my brother was a teen and he tried to force his way out of the house to go out. My parents literally stood in the door and barred the way. They told him that if he hit them, he couldn’t live there anymore, because as parents they wouldn’t hit him back, but they wouldn’t live with a kid who hits his parents.
Amber: If you don’t instill the authority/respect when they are young, it’s hard to instill it later. My older boys went to play out in the country when I went to town to do errands. The neighbor told me something about what they were doing, and I mentioned it just as an aside to them. They felt very ashamed and I was actually happy, because it means that I matter to them. In a funny way, their shame means that even when they’ve disobeyed, they still recognize and respect my authority.
Jody: Did you find that with the teens, you had to stop them from certain actions just by asserting your authority?
Amber: It’s important to have some tools. I had my son on my insurance and he was going out and working very late without telling me where he was going. So, I took his keys and said that since I paid the insurance he couldn’t drive. He told me where he was going after that.
Now we’re going through why do others get to do things and say things that we don’t? I use our family as the standard. “In the Stime family we don’t speak to each other this way. Go talk to your uncles.” He is paying a lot of attention to what people are doing outside our family.
On Being a Guide
Jill: When I increased to 20 hours last January in my work, it changed our whole family system. My work can bleed into the evening time at home, especially with email and phone. I’m finding this is eroding my ability to guide my son.
Conor is a deeper thinker and he processes not in the moment, but at the end of the day. The other day he hit a kid with a bat really hard and he felt bad. He needs to acknowledge the hurt and apologize, but he runs away because he feels so embarrassed. He can’t close the loop. We are trying to guide him to that step but that sort of guidance takes a lot of time and attentiveness, which can be in shorter supply these days.
Amber: Sometimes we do the close the loop at the end of the day, but currently Alemeyu (7) feels that I am overly keeping track of things or holding on to it. Still, I don’t want him to think that once a situation has happened, we don’t process it any more. Sometimes you don’t have time to provide full guidance in the moment. We have had a situation where I invited an evicted friend and her son to live with us. The mom will say about their conflicts, “It’s just kids’ stuff.” I have had to speak to her, “It’s our job to guide them.”
Cheryl: I like the way the book talked about not using the “should” language.
Jody: Mei-Mei just doesn’t like the conversations at the end of the day. She feels guilt, I think? She wanted me to sing a song about the conflict she had with another child—as a way of processing it but in a lighter way.
Mark: Have you tried to interpret for her the feelings she may be having? Like, “I know you are feeling guilty right now and that’s a hard thing”?
Jody: Our best talk was about a time that she was very mean to another child. I was able to be very detached even though it was the hardest talk to have. But it worked because I was so detached and she was not defensive. The time she was upset with another boy was harder because Jill and I were not available to guide the kids.
Jill: This boy was having behavior trouble because of divorce in his family.
Jody: When Jill and I got involved, we were doing the information gathering work with a lot of energy and the kids could tell I was just going to impose a judgment, not really guide them in the process they needed to have for themselves.
Cheryl: When our conversations with our kids don’t go well, I think about how I brought an attitude into the conversation that didn’t foster honesty. It was big for me to get to the point where when my kids are telling on each other to me, I let them solve it on their own.
Mark:I wish the authors had discussed the need for a “Nurturer” role. Often my kids need a parent to simply cook a nice meal for them, and then they’ll have the chance to feel loved and safe and work out their problem on their own. Also, my teens often want their experience to be fully their own versus to have their parents in the role of guide, interpreting their experience. This was especially true about their recent service trip to Honduras.
On Being a Teacher
Cheryl: I am trying to teach our kids about how they can make a difference in the world by their words and deeds. My son dropped the F-bomb the other day in his bedroom about a girl he was angry about. My husband and I both ran down the hall. He had been telling us that night by his tears and words how angry he was, but we weren’t paying attention earlier. He told us, “That was the one word I felt I could use that would let you know how angry I was.” We had to really try to teach him about how to deal with those feelings.
Aimee: We just had a new baby, and the two older girls are having melt-downs when I make them wait. So we’ve had to teach them the difference between patience and impatience at our family meeting, so they can recognize what they are doing. As a family, we actually play acted out the difference. Now the girls know what patience actually looks like in different situations. They can’t do it all the time, but now they have a language for it and can identify it.
Jody: Our kids are very visual, so it’s important to have our key family virtues up on signs and posters. We also have a jar that they put beads in when each member of the family practices a virtue. Curtis and I also put them in when we practice a virtue. When it is filled, we will go to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk to celebrate. We also do take the beads out when they are violating the virtues. It will take us probably 12 weeks to fill the jar. We know it is an extrinsic reward, but we feel like we need some very visual tool to get the process going.
Jill: How did you decide to take them out?
Jody: We set it up to visually depict consequences. We had to have something small and incremental because one of our virtues is respect and kindness, and they can violate that virtue with squabbling about 40 times a day. We are definitely more generous about putting them in than taking them out.
Aimee: A formal family meeting really works for us. We need visual cues that set aside our time, so I bought a special rug and we have a special candle for each of the kids at our meeting. I see my older daughter really respond positively.
Mark: I find that with teaching teens about virtues, I need to connect their positive actions or skills with the underlying virtue. It’s easy to say, “You are good with kids;” but it takes more work to say, “this shows your joyfulness, patience, etc.”
Jill: What I liked about the book’s list of virtues is that it increases the vocabulary of good things to see in my kids. I am not sure we will build our family system around the virtues. Our family needs very simple, quick ceremonies because our boys have such short attention spans. But the list is very helpful to me because I want my boys to know what these virtues are.
Cheryl: The other day my son picked up a book at the store that had fallen off the shelf. I said, “What if the person working here had had a bad day? That might have really encouraged them to not have to clean up the books.” I want to teach them the positive consequences of their actions.
There is no one magic formula. But what are the different roles we parents can play to bring out the best in our kids?
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