parenting – Inspiring Change LLC

Why You Should Learn to Cook

A recent survey conducted by a food industry consultant Eddie Yoon (printed here and reported on elsewhere) finds that 90% of American adults hate to cook. This 90% is comprised of folks who don’t know how to cook, don’t like to cook, or do it reluctantly some of the time. They are purchasing pre-packaged food (fresh, frozen and dried) in grocery store isles as well as in take-and-go options such as Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, as well as the familiar fast food restaurants like McDonald’s and Subway.

That leaves just 10% of Americans who continue to prepare food from fresh ingredients and who have mastered at least the basic skills once taught to most middle schoolers in Home Economics. In his article, Yoon advises the major suppliers of groceries to get with the trend and embrace more technology in food preparation as well as diversifying their ownership in alternative on-the-go food restaurants or brands that show an upward trend. The writing is on the wall on this, he advises. There seems to be no turning back.

If this is the case, and most of the industry is turning to preparing food for us and seeing the kitchen as a place to store food and eat it, but not prepare it, why should you buck the trend and get firmly in the minority food lane and learn to cook? I can think of several reasons, all of which are quite important to me. Maybe one or more might be important to you, too.

Your long-term health and the health of your children. Why are we an obese nation and just keep getting fatter no matter how hard we try to slim down? Because we let other people prepare our food for us, filling us with unseen but powerful fats, salt, artificial fillers and preservatives and chemical flavors. Even with the recent trend to label the calorie content of your Big Mac or Chipotle burrito bowl, most of us will eat more than our bodies need if a meal is presented to us on our plate and we are in a social (loud, busy and people-centered) environment.
Cooking is a human art, and it’s crazy to lose what we have spend tens of thousands of years figuring out as a species. I am particularly thinking about the women who have throughout the generations toiled in field, barnyard and kitchen to feed their families. Using tools and ingredients common to their culture, it has been the traditional work of women to manage the preparation of food for families in their homes. I’m not willing to give this part of my gender identity over to some multinational corporation. I want to know something of what my grandmothers and earlier generations passed down to one another, in prosperous times and in depressed.
Food is a gift of God to and in creation, and when I am gardening, or shopping, or cooking at home, I am participating in the work and renewal of creation. Am I thinking such high theological thoughts when I am boiling my brown rice and marinading my chicken breasts? Uh, no. But give me a minute and I will tell you that I pray with my family over our dinners and I pause to think about the gift that good food is in a world in which so many are starving. I marvel at how many wonderful foods are available to me in America. And how many will keep me healthy.
Real food is more than fuel. Real food is medicine and learning about and committing to preparing it creatively is community building. It is a creative necessity, and a way for families to take time out daily to look at one another and talk face to face in their home. Children who eat dinner with their families grow to have a sense of belonging in their families, know their parents better, learn to talk with adults, and have so many less food addiction and eating disorder issues than their peers who don’t have families who eat together. And in these families, children can slowly and with confidence learn to cook so they can eventually cook for themselves as adults.

With the fantastic television shows about cooking that are on right now, you’d think we would all be inspired. Apparently not. Even the Great British Bake Off can make food preparation look like the work only of experts. We all have to eat. I just want to eat well, eat to care for my family, eat to keep this amazing human art form alive. It’s not impossible. If you can reluctantly learn a thing or two about sifting flour in 7th grade, I know that you can learn as an adult by reading a good simple recipe, getting the right ingredients, getting a few essential tools, and having patience as you become better skilled. Your body will be healthier, your mind clearer, your budget better balanced, and your family life calmer. It’s worth your time.

Dividing Family Loyalties When You Marry

There is nothing like bringing home a close friend or partner to shine a spotlight on the unspoken rules by which every family, your family, lived and lives.

Every family that lives with one another for some time develops a set of patterns for emotional engagement that soon feels like the “family rules.” These expectations for behavior may start within a marriage and strengthen their grip as children are brought into the home. Once the children catch on to these patterns, they begin to live by them. Only family members know how that family works, even though no one may have ever spoken these powerful expectations out loud.

Many of these rules are quite helpful, and create a kind of emotional shorthand that members count on. Some rules families frequently live by are: this family lets one another know our whereabouts; this family goes to church/synagogue/mosque; this family values education; this family values friendship, and this family works hard. Others might be less helpful. They might be expressed as: this family avoids conflict; this family never questions mother/father; this family relies on men for money, women for support; this family doesn’t live outside our region; this family keeps secrets, and this family doesn’t trust anyone outside the family.

With these internal rules, members keep the connections of their family relationships, even unhealthy ones, intact. Once we bring another person into close relationship with this family system through marriage, the rules become more obvious; our new partner has no way of knowing or observing these internal rules except by bumping into them. Because they don’t have the years of unconscious training in working within the boundaries of these family expectations, newcomers invariably stir up distress and even conflict by disregarding these rules or even openly disagreeing with them. This is one way newcomers remain permanently on the outside of their partners’ family systems.

This is where the partner, whose family of origin is the one getting stirred up, has to bring his or her best self to the party or he/she will end up offending and damaging the new family and partner. If the rule is “no one can challenge the way Mom behaves,” Mom can run roughshod over the new wife of her son and her son gets caught between his loyalties toward his family of origin and that toward his partner. Because the loyalty to one’s family of origin is older and deeper, chances are that is the one that most easily wins.

In families where emotional connection has never been particularly intense or expected, this kind of division of emotional importance happens automatically. Parents have children, raise them, and expect that once their children marry, the old family changes. The new has come, and everyone has to adjust. In more emotionally intense, enmeshed, or distressed family systems, blending a new spouse and/or grandchildren into the mix may require an our-way-or-the-highway kind of behavior from the newcomer that can make for chronic distress for everyone.

I counsel couples who find themselves in conflict over family rules to think about loyalty as an emotional quality of relationships that can and must be shared unequally. One can be loyal to both one’s family of origin as well as to a new spouse, but the most successful marriages have partners who transfer their primary loyalties to their new partner. Mom or Dad may still be core relationships, but if there is any important conflict, decision, schedule, or issue to decide, the default must move to the spouse and couple.

If you and your partner seem to be in constant conflict over your visits back to visit your parents, your time spent with siblings, or the ever-present sense that you care more about pleasing your parents than you do your spouse, check in with yourself regarding that unequal balance of loyalty. If you feel miserably caught in the middle, it’s time to shift your focus. Unplug some of that urgency from your family of origin and give it to your new partner and children. And, of course, if it’s just not as easy as that for you, consulting with a local marriage and family therapist will help you more easily make that emotional transition.

(Originally written as a post for GoodTherapy.org, April 2013)

What is Structural Family Therapy?

I’m grateful to Sal Minuchin for helping us as family therapists understand, conceptualize and maneuver within the dynamic structures of families: the way that the emotional and legal connections of parents to their children over generations create fluid as well as fixed patterns of hierarchies, loyalties, rules, subsystems, coalitions and boundaries. While we may know these experiences instinctively, his theory gives us a vocabulary, structure and system of talking and thinking about these automatic family features.

I’m particularly glad for the way his ideas give us a way to talk about family power. How are marriages formed? How do parents use their power over children? What does it mean to be a grandparent, a sibling, a twin, a youngest or oldest child? Who creates the family rules? Who breaks them? Of critical importance is the way that this theory helps me to conceptualize children’s emotional dysfunction. I don’t have to think simply in individualistic, intrapersonal terms. I’m free to think, speak and intervene with children’s pain interpersonally by helping their parents better manage their own functioning, power, and relational well-being.

Every time I draw a new genogram, and hear about a conflicted marriage, a stressed child, or cut-off grandparents, and think about rules, power and family structure, I draw upon the core ideas of Minuchin and generations of clinicians after him who have helped us all become students of family structure.

1/2021: Here’s a great detailed look at Structural Family Therapy from a new counseling resource, Choosing Therapy: https://www.choosingtherapy.com/structural-family-therapy/

13 Reasons Why NOT

13 Reasons Why is a video series available on Netflix. If you’ve been told you NEED to watch this drama in order to understand teens now, I want to argue the opposite. I don’t believe that watching this series is necessary in order to understand teen cultures. Many viewers make this series sound as if it is presented as a documentary; it is not. It is a sensationalized, emotionally wrought fictional presentation of hours and hours of teen suffering and feels voyeuristic in its brutal and graphic portrayal of suicide. I managed to watch about 15 seconds of that scene and was so repulsed I turned it off.

Fictional, video streaming accounts of high school are not the way that our youth their own experience their lives. Parts of it, yes. Intense, highly edited with a powerful sound track? No. What this series does, I’m afraid, is double down on the visual trauma our youth are exposed to regularly. And we wonder why they are anxious, depressed, afraid and suicidal in greater and greater numbers?

If parents or counselors are curious, then watch a half hour or so. You won’t need any more exposure than that. I suggest it is completely unsuited for anyone, never mind teens. Watchers of any age are participating in reinforcing trauma. As a pastoral counselor and family therapist, I see the effects of too much trauma exposure daily. It’s very difficult to heal.

When Empathy Goes Awry : Mirror Touch Synesthesia

How do we come to understand another person’s emotions?

Within our brain are a cluster of nerve cells that scientists call “mirror neurons.” These cells and circuits turn on and develop when, as infants and toddlers, our primary caregivers express on their own faces what they sense in us. We are wailing because we are in pain? A caring parent has some of that same suffering in their facial expressions. We laugh and smile when we begin to recognize our mother’s face, and our mother smiles and laughs with us. This is how the human baby begins the long process of understand the self, what s/he is experiencing, and who others are, and what they are experiencing.

Most human beings have adequate care as children; their caregivers give more or less consistent emotional feedback to them day-to-day, and the emotional skills of knowing how we feel and how other might be feeling develop naturally. Those children who suffer early life deprivation (e.g., orphans in mass care settings, like those in China) may never completely catch up with their peers who were raised in small family groups. Others, who may have the terrible fortune to be born to uncaring, chemically addicted or violent parents, will suffer personality changes that will hamper their natural capacity to feel their own emotions and care about others for the rest of their lives. Those early life experiences of caring, love and emotion are that important to normal human development.

But that is the normal or mainstream human experience of noticing emotion in others, understanding what they might be feeling, and sharing human experience. What if those mirror neurons don’t stop developing? What if those experiences of feeling another person’s pain actually become your own body feeling not your own emotions, but those of people you see and feel?

That is the extremely rare and the terrible lost-self experience of those with Mirror Touch Synesthesia. These folks have mirror neuron circuits that in some mysterious way over-developed. Out among people, they “catch” the emotional experiences of others in such deep ways that it is hard for them to know what is their own emotion and not the experience of others. This disorder seems to run in families, and has the capacity to ruin not only individual experience, but the relationships that person tries to maintain.

Want to hear more, including an interview with a woman who suffers from MTS? The new NPR podcast “Invisibilia” just included a story on this phenomenon — here’s the link for the January 29, 2015 broadcast:

http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia

It’s fascinating, and disturbing. As it turns out, helpful empathy, the kind we want our parents, friends, teachers, chaplains and therapists to cultivate in themselves, has normal limits. None of us, it turns out, wants to so inhabit the emotional lives of others that we don’t know exactly what it is we are feeling. Because what we feel is the center of who we are.

We Can’t Choose our Parents

It’s true; we can’t choose our parents.

Whatever skills or deficits they possess as people: their readiness or disinterest at caring for us, their physical and mental health, and their ability to meet basic needs for food, shelter and safety have an immediate and lasting effect on our own development. The human brain is shaped every day by the way we are cared for by those closest to us, and grows fastest during the first two years of life.

If a child is born to a parent who neglects their needs, is addicted, or who is violent, abusive or mentally ill, the effects are devastating. A human mind can be ruined if not helped and supported to develop in a healthier, more stable and flexible way.

It’s also true that in America the first time a failing family may come into contact with an institution that could help it recover is with the justice system or the public schools.

In this wonderful episode of This American Life radio show, stories are told of educational and therapeutic systems that work to re-parent our cultures disordered parent-child relationships. If you’ve ever wondered how schools cope, or how family and in-home therapy works, take a listen. It’s great.

The American Life : Back To School, Episode 474

Attachment Parenting : You’re Mom Enough Without It

The cover of TIME magazine (5/21/12) with the beautiful 20something mom breastfeeding her 3 year old son had me shaking my head.

What WAS she thinking taking that picture, and having her full name on the magazine cover? Ten years from now her son is going to have to face his friends when they ask him what it was like to suck his mother’s breasts. Because they have proof. A million covers of TIME magazine, internet pages and downloads later. Really. The social insensitivity of that photo takes my breath away.

As for the topic, the so-called Attachment Parenting style advocated by Dr. Bill Sears, well. That, too, has it’s serious problems. Let me be brief:

Attachment Theory describes the emotional or relational attachment between a developing infant and mother. It was first studied in depth by John Bowlby (and later by Ainsworth, Main, Cassidy, Hazan, Shaver, and others) in the 1950’s. It posits that the emotional attachment between mother and child is the main determinant for that child’s internal sense of self-in-relationship throughout life. The mother, if she is relatively consistent in her caregiving, responsiveness, and mirroring of the child’s emotions, creates a “safe haven” for a developing self against the world. That same mother, as her child begins to reach out to the world beyond her, creates a “secure base” from which a child explores the world and can return to mom safely and with support for a developing independence.

This science has been studied for the last 50 years, and has developed a deep collection of research, data, and process that I subscribe to as a relational psychotherapist. About 55% of us are fortunate enough to have mothers that welcomed us to the world, sheltered, fed, changed, disciplined, loved, laughed, cried and protected us well enough that we emerged from our infancy able to approach others for support, and not worry too much about relationships. This is called having a “secure attachment” style. The rest of us, because of our mother’s own anxieties, environmental stress, illness, or other issues develop an anxious, withdrawing, or mixed attachment style that we carry from childhood through adulthood at about a 75% rate.

Now, here’s my issue: There is nothing in the research of Attachment Theory to indicate that mothers must breastfeed their infants and toddlers, co-sleep with them, or never put them down in order to create secure emotional attachment. Nothing. What the research indicates is that mothers who do their level best to hold, look at, speak to, and provide consistent emotional responsiveness to their child’s distress, and support to their developing independence despite issues like also being a spouse, or working, or using daycare, or tending to other children in the family, or having friends or hobbies, usually produce relationally secure children. Period.

So if you love your children, are relatively secure yourself, have the most stable marriage or partnership you can create, have good health, and manage the details of your life pretty well, you don’t have to give up your body, mind and self out of the fear that your child isn’t getting what they need. Pending unseen catastrophes, they will, they can, and they do.

Most of all, I’m sad that mothering can feel so overwhelming to some of us that following the direction of one single doctor seems safer than following one’s own common sense and the collective wisdom of the millions of mothers and fathers who have gone before us. Attachment parenting? Dump the pseudo-science and let your child sleep in their own bed. It’s safer for them, and you may actually get a (mostly) full night’s rest even when you’re up at 3am to nurse, change or rock them back to sleep. Honest.

College Mom: I’m Trying, But It’s Hard

We dropped our first born off at university this week. We have spent the last year plus supporting him as he got ready. From taking AP classes and exams, to doing half of his senior year of high school at our community college, our son was looking forward. We thought frequently about how the transition to college would be for us all, and he and I often would tell each other that we would certainly miss one another and that it would, yes, feel very weird.

Well, it does. I didn’t even shed a tear until I walked into the house after we drove home without him. Our house, minus one of our children, just doesn’t feel like our home. Walking into his bedroom brought me to tears. The boy is gone, at least until Thanksgiving break, and I have to get used to the change.

We left him seeming excited and confident, and for that, I am deeply grateful. He is competent to meet the academic challenges ahead, and has support for everything else.

I’ve been comforted by the texts we have sent back and forth a couple of times a day since we separated. Does that qualify for a helicopter parent? I don’t think so. I have told my husband that I think my/our job continues to be to love and support our son. As for decisions and problems? They now belong to him. And he needs to confront them so he can develop his individual skills with people and their strange, strange ways.

Of course, sharing space with others is always a challenge. I want him to be able to get his own needs met, live with compromise, and assert himself. This is what I am struggling with. He is a really, really nice guy, and doesn’t always speak up for himself. I’d love to swoop in and solve an issue or two, like a therapist could. But I. Must. Not. Interfere.

He knows where we are. He knows how to speak his mind. He knows what he needs. As my friends who have traveled this road before are good at reminding me, we have taught and modeled problem solving all his life. He has a set of values that are worth defending. I need to let him figure out his own boundaries, and how he is going to manage them. He’s just getting started.

Just so you know: it’s a lot easier to say than to feel. I think I have more to learn about this change than my son does. I used to know what being his mother meant. It’s something very different now. It’s pretty hard to stop being his champion, defender, provider and comforter just like that. But just like that, that is exactly what my life is asking of me now.

Thank you, God. Help us all.

Parenting is Still an Artform

As the summer ticks away, I am spending a lot of time with and for my teenagers. It has me thinking about this generation of youth, how they have been parented, and how many have bemoaned their development. I’ve written about it in my latest GoodTherapy.org blog posting. I hope you’ll visit it there, comment, and let me know how you feel about the children of the Baby Boomers.

Parenting is Still an Artform

Parental Authority vs. Family Leadership

When I meet with families and teens, the form of family that most often seeks family therapy, the issue of Authority arises pretty quickly. It is frequently The Issue when it comes to teenagers and their parents.

As teens grow and develop their nascent emotional self, they need to take on more and more self control, discipline and choice. This conflicts with their parents’ familiar patterns of control, decision making, discipline and tolerance of conflict, the sense of which has been developed in the family through that child’s life. When children become more autonomous, the adults must flex more while maintaining steady goals for the family.

This isn’t easy, and is generally full of conflict. Now add into the mix of many families divorce, step parents and siblings, shared physical custody and chronically changing schedules. The level of conflict and stress can get very high — and everyone begins to act out their frustration and pain.

Unlike much religious and talk show wisdom on the matter, families and teens don’t need more rigid boundaries, more rules and demands, more over-focus on grades and chores and language and privileges. What I work with families to co-create is a new level of parental Leadership. Leadership that is self focused, flexible, sacrificial and cooperative. A family that has high expectations, but can allow a steady measure of teenage development. A parent system that is talking more to each other about how the family is doing and is less critical of their teens who, I know, are always trying to do the best they can.

Dr. Sal Minuchin, an early pioneer of family therapy, describes what we’re after this way:

“I describe family values as responsibility towards others, increase of tolerance, compromise, support, flexibility. And essentially the things I call the silent song of life—the continuous process of mutual accommodation without which life is impossible.”

Mutual accommodation — that’s what true family leadership looks like.