30 December 2012

Adding Relevancy and Rewards to our Goal Setting


As we get close to the end of the year and the start of a new one, it is goal setting season!
If you have ever attended a workshop on goal setting, most likely the workshop covered the aspect of SMART goals, which is a specific formula for reaching your goals. SMART goals need to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-specific.
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Read rest at:

27 December 2012

Looking back at past family habits

A family therapist, Murray Bowen, believes you can understand a family and a person within the family unit when you investigate and analyze their past three generations. Even though everything is not biologically inherited, nor is everything a learned behaviour, it is interesting to see patterns that can be found when looking back three generations.

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Read rest at:

14 December 2012

Sounding the alarm about violence against women


After the early December suspected murder-suicide allegedly involving NFL linebacker Jovan Belcher, there has been an inordinate amount of attention given by the media to the topic of violence against women and suicide. While the latter has had avid attention since Amanda Todd took her life, the former has garnered some unique attention from the media, activists, bloggers and other pundits.

There have been claims that violence against women is an epidemic in the NFL, and some other major sports. The women’s shelters, and validly so, are pointing out the problem, too. But this is one of those classic examples of the 10-90 rule. That is something that happens 10 per cent of the time is getting 90 per cent of the attention, and what happens 90 per cent of the time is only getting 10 per cent of the attention.

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Read rest at:

06 December 2012

Pursuing what matters most in life; Being in the moment with those around you

It has begun to strike my heart that life is fragile, that this daily routine of striving to make a living and being with family can be gone, oh so quickly. A year ago, my family relocated to a new city. We were in the process of transferring records and the like when my then three-year-old daughter started complaining of back pain to the point of wanting to see a doctor. And when your child, at that age, asks to see a doctor, you take them.

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Read rest at:

23 November 2012

Creating a safe haven and secure base


It’s been almost two years since Brene Brown delivered her YouTube sensation TED talk about being vulnerable. She related how for humans, our core need and desire is security, and to do that, we have to be open and vulnerable with one another.

Back in 1957, Harry Harlow started conducting studies on rhesus monkeys where he removed the monkey from their mother and had them raised by machine mother monkeys. In some cases, there were two mothers the baby rhesus could choose from, one that was soft and covered by cloth, but did not dispense food; whereas the other was wired and could provide food. What is fascinating is that the baby monkeys chose comfort over food. Something different from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. These monkeys spent roughly 23 hours of their day with the cloth machine mother monkey, and only went to the wire mother machine monkey when they were hungry.

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Read rest at:

21 November 2012

Creating a Safe Haven & Secure Base



It’s been almost two years since Brene Brown delivered heryoutube sensation TED talk about being vulnerable.  She related how for humans, our core need and desire is security, and to do that, we have to open and vulnerable with one another.

Read the rest at Notes on Parenting.

09 November 2012

Looking back at past family habits

A family therapist, Murray Bowen, believes you can understand a family and a person within the family unit when you investigate and analyze their past three generations. Even though everything is not biologically inherited, nor is everything a learned behaviour, it is interesting to see patterns that can be found when looking back three generations.

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Read rest at:

29 October 2012

Adding relevancy and rewards to goal setting

If you have ever attended a workshop on goal setting, guaranteed the workshop covered the aspect of SMART goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-specific.

The specific part needs to be just that, specific, such as becoming more proficient at using Excel. To make the goal measurable, you need something to let you know you have completed your goal, such as participating in a three-weekend workshop on Excel that has three levels. Attainable means you have to attend those workshops on Excel. Realistic means that you don’t set the deadline for this goal to one week from now when the workshop is over three weekends, and that it fits with you. Time-specific means you set a specific end date for the goal to be accomplished, for this case, the day after the last-day of the workshops. Follow those steps, and you have a SMART goal.

Read the rest at Battleford's News Optimist.

17 October 2012

Take the Genogram Challenge: Looking back at past family habits


A family therapist, Murray Bowen, believes that you can understand a family and a person within that family unit when you investigate and analyze their past three generations.  While not everything is biologically inherited, nor is everything a learned behaviour, it is interesting to see patterns that can be found while looking three generations back.

Read the rest at Notes on Parenting.

01 October 2012

Pursuing what matters most in life; Being in the moment with those around you



It has begun to strike my heart that life is fragile, that this daily routine of striving to make a living and being with family can be gone oh so quickly. A year ago, my family relocated to a new city, we were in the process of transferring records and the like. When my, then 3 year old daughter started complaining of back pain to the point of wanting to see a doctor. And when your child, at that age asks to see a doctor, you take them.

Read the rest at Notes on Parenting

27 September 2012

University of Manitoba: 10 Questions for a Visionary


A Human Ecology Graduate celebrating her 50th year since graduating from Human Ecology. She answered 10 Questions for a Visionary that appeared in the Visionaries: Stories of Inspired Philanthropy

It's always great to see past and current members of the faculty in the news!

18 September 2012

My Profile is up for COTR Education Council

It is time to "toot" my own horn. I love, and have always enjoyed, being involved in committee's, groups and council's at work and in my community.

Most recently I am campaigning for College of the Rockies Education Council CUPE Representative position.  It was exciting to see my profile posted today.

If you work at COTR, on Oct 1-3 vote Lockhart!

12 September 2012

07 September 2012

Research Study on Blogging and Social Networking

A colleague of mine is looking for participants in his research, here is his statement:

We are currently gathering participants for an online survey that deals with adults' use of blogging and social networking to potentially connect with others. We would like to ask you to complete the survey and also pass the survey on to others whom you know qualify, such as your friends, family, classes, and other organizations.

To qualify to participate, one must be 18 to 40 years old and able to understand English proficiently. Responses are completely anonymous.

We would ask that you please complete our survey by following this link (the survey is hosted securely by Qualtrics.com):
Click Here To Take Our Survey

Compensation: Those individuals who complete the survey will be entered in a drawing to win one of four prizes (a Kindle Fire Tablet or one of three $20 Amazon gift cards). Your chances of winning also increase for every person that you refer who also completes the survey. The survey will take you approximately 20 to 45 minutes to complete, so please allow adequate time. As long as you leave the web browser window with your survey open you can always come back to the survey later to complete it.

We would also ask that you pass this information on to others whom you know that qualify, such as your friends, family, classes, and other organizations.

In addition, although anyone between the ages of 18 to 40 qualifies, we would like to obtain a large sample of mothers and fathers. If you know or interact with parents between the ages of 18 and 40, please pass the survey along to them.

Thank you for your assistance,

Brandon McDaniel
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Ph.D. Student
Human Development & Family Studies
The Pennsylvania State University

*Note that this research has been approved by our university's Institutional Review Board.
Here is the exact link to the survey: https://byu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_3arT6FbIqwmW53m

29 August 2012

Go ahead dad, it is time to pitch in


The first day of school is coming up, if it already hasn’t. Summer is drawing to an end. This usually means an end to the frequent play days, late family movie nights and other fun activities. Typically these are dad led, or highly involved activities.

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Read the rest at Notes on Parenting.

28 August 2012

Perceptions and Relationship Satisfaction


Mark Young, a counseling professor at Gonzaga University, did research around what makes couples “healthy” and “happy”.  He found that there were key themes in the healthy couples he interviewed.  These themes were security, perceptions, expectations and interactions.  However, there seemed to be the most emphasis on perceptions.

Ones perception of the relationship informs and influences the expectations of the relationship. The expectations of the relationship influence how one interacts in the relationship. Interactions then confirm the perception. Or the interactions may reject the perception, but couples may discount the interaction to maintain the perception. The perception needs to change when the interaction disconfirms the perception, but that is an uncomfortable process.

Think of this example, a wife calls her husband the 10 minute father, meaning she perceives that he only spends 10 minutes a day interacting with the children. She wants him to stop being so involved with work and become more involved with the children. The wife was given a challenge to time how long her husband actually interacts with the children for a week. Much to her surprise she found he was actually spending hours a day, and many hours on the weekend, with the children.  Actual reality was contradicting her perceptions of reality.

The wife now has a choice, maintain the perception and be dissatisfied with her husband’s contribution, or she could change her perception and realize that her husband is contributing to the family. If she changed her perception, she would expect her husband to be with the children a couple hours a week, and the interactions between her husband and the children could change for better, thus confirming her new perception. This could also impact her relationship with her husband and with her children.

Now this isn’t to say that perceptions are the end all and be all of relationships. The wife’s perception of a 10 minute husband could have been true. This would then mean an intervention would have been needed at the interaction point, so that the husband would start spending more time with the family.
This logic of perceptions informing expectations, and expectations influencing interactions, and interactions confirming perceptions can be applied to our relationship with ourselves, with our children, with coworkers, and so on.

If we perceive ourselves as worthless, we will most likely behave in a way that meets our expectations. If we believe our kids are lazy, we will set a low expectation for them. Note that we tend to only look for interactions that confirm our perceptions. We don’t like change, so we don’t usually look for evidence to counter our perceptions.

Let us start developing healthy perceptions of our relationships, and become ever more aware of how our perceptions skew the reality of our relationships with others.

25 June 2012

To My Loved OnesL Living With Alzheimers

My friend and colleague, Lindsay C., wrote this poem about living with Alzheimer's.

To my loved ones;

I have experienced many things in my life,
which I cherish and hold deep within me.
I wouldn’t trade them for the world,
because I am able to re-live them in my memory.

I have noticed slight changes in myself,
from wrinkles, energy, mood and mind.
But I don’t let it bother me,
because a long happy life is hard to find.

At times I am forgetful,
and my memory isn’t as sharp as it was in the past.
But forgetting things is normal with age,
so I am not concerned that it will last.

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Read the rest at Notes on Parenting.

15 May 2012

Substance Use In Adolescents

I recently had the chance to chat with and listen to a seminar delivered by Dean Nicholson around substance use and sexual abuse.  Nicholson is the administrator of East Kootenay Addiction Services in Cranbrook BC. He recently conducted award winning research surrounding substance use and sexual abuse in youth.

Before diving too deep into his results, it is important to outline that drug and alcohol use occur on a spectrum. To start, there are none users. Next isexperimental users, this is 1-3 uses of a particular substance. Moving along there is social/recreational users. This means that usage occurs less than once a week, and the reasons for using are for socializing with peers. These levels are completely normal for adolescents to use. It should be noted that in these categories use typically occurs on weekends.

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Read the rest at Notes on Parenting.

24 April 2012

Establishing Trust With Your Infant

According to Barbara and Philip Newman infants (birth to two years old) experience the psychsocial crisis of Trust vs Mistrust. A psychosocial crisis is a predictable life tension during a certain stage in life. Psychosical in this sense draws to the point that the crisis is due to societal and cultural influences as well as psychological. Crisis in this sense refers to a normal stressor instead of an extraordinary event.
It is a crisis, in that an infant will either develop trust like attributes or will develop attributes of mistrust. It is amazing that it is at this young age that this is when trust is first developed.

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Read the rest at Notes on Parenting

21 March 2012

Eliminating the Poor-bashing around us



It was about five years ago that the CBC reported that forty percent of the world’s wealth was owned by one percent of the world’s population.  There has been an ever increasing gap between the wealthy, and the common-day worker, as the occupy movement so overtly showed.  It has been claimed that the wealthiest in North America are so out of touch that they needed to go undercover and perform work expectation tasks (that they usually cannot complete in adequate time) in a reality show called “Undercover Boss”.  This show is meant to encourage the boss to feel sympathy for the lowly worker.  However, Jean Swanson, an anti-poverty activist, would argue that this is a form of poor-bashing.
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Read the rest at Notes on Parenting.

02 March 2012

War On Boys, Part 2

From AMCAP & Deseret News

In the middle of a crowd of kids waiting for the bus in front of a westside middle school, one of the girls drops her book bag and two boys scramble to grab it, nearly bumping heads. She's 14 going on 17, all makeup-enhanced eyes and curled hair and dazzling smile. The boys are more like 14 going on 12, gangly and haphazardly dressed — and eager to get her attention.

They are the prize in the war on boys.
Read the full article at Deseret News.

01 March 2012

War On Boys, Part 1

From AMCAP & Deseret News:

This is Jared just days before his 15th birthday: He has mostly B's and C's on his report card, but the lone F is a parent-enraging reminder that math's not his thing. He doesn't get it and he's not receiving a lot of help. He likes basketball, video games and a girl named Libby, because she's "hot," though he can't tell you much about her or how she feels about things, including him. At school he is alternately bored and lost. He'd rather play God of War than study and it was that video game his parents used as a reward to get him to bring up his grades last semester, though he couldn't get the math mark to budge.

In eighth grade, he figured he'd go to college. By ninth grade, he was leaning more toward a technical school. And midway through 10th grade in his northern Utah high school, he shrugs and says he doesn't know. Maybe he'll get a job or join the military.

Read the full article at Deseret News.

29 February 2012

Divorce Enablers

From AMCAP & Psychology Today.

You thought therapy would save your marriage? And all you got was divorce? Well, feel free to blame your therapist. That's because, for a long time, most therapists have been soft on divorce.

Few fields have played a bigger role in the evolution of America's mental health care system than couples therapists. These days, roughly one million American couples a year seek counselling to save their marriages or relationships. Many also attend pre-marital counselling.
Read the full article at Psychology Today.

28 February 2012

Births Outside Marriage

The Association for Mormon Counselors & Psychotherapists, usually a dormant membership (except around conference season), has been rather active in sharing news sources around the morphing society.  This is the first in a few articles they have posted on their site that I would like to share.

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It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.
Read the full article at the New York Times website.

27 February 2012

Is Spanking An Effective Way Of Disciplining?






Does spanking your child work? Or does it not work?  Is it an effective tool for disciplining your child and teaching them to be obedient?  According to a University of Manitoba Professor, Joan Durrant, the answer to the question is: spanking does not work.

Answering questions from Stockholm Sweden, she said that spanking, and other types of physical punishment, displays an aggressive conflict resolution model; which is a very ineffective model for resolving conflict because of its negative outcomes. It erodes trust in the child. It creates hostility and resentment towards the parent.  Also, physical punishment may create the environment for lying, as a child may begin lie in order to avoid being punished.

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Read the rest at Notes on Parenting.

19 February 2012

Why Doesn't Spanking Work

A professor from my Human Ecology days that I admire has made news again.  Joan Durrant has recently been involved in a study that was released that looked at why spanking just doesn't work.  Have a read of the article here.

16 February 2012

Is texting really an effective mode of communication?

In the world right now, there is one cell phone for every two people. In June 2000, 12 million text messages were sent worldwide. By June 2006, 12 billion text messages were sent worldwide. And my favourite factoid about cell phone domination is: in London they are putting up padding on lamp posts because people have been hurt walking into lamp posts while texting and walking.

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Read the full article at Notes on Parenting.

14 February 2012

Ground Breaking Stats on Teen Substance Abuse

East Kootenay Addiction Services Society has uncovered (something known to front-line workers) a connection between childhood abuse and substance use.  Read the article here.  This is a news item I plan on covering more of in the near future.

It should be noted that this research poster also has won an award.  It is getting it's recognition.

13 February 2012

Husband Day Care Centre

My manager shared this with me.  I think this is a great idea of where to put your husbands when wives go out shopping.


26 January 2012

Community Access Program - Kimberley BC

Shaw TV recently visited the campus that I work and teach at.  They caught me in the act of teaching a computers basics class about photo's and computers.

Here is the segment that they produced (hope you enjoy me little dance):

23 January 2012

Questions Parent's Fear the Most!

Has your child asked you a question that you don't know the answer to? I know for me there are many!  There are some questions that I hope my children will never ask.

Apparently, I am not alone.  We all have questions that we hope our children do not ask.  A study was recently conducted that revealed the Top 10 questions that scare parents the most.

Those questions are:



  1. Why is the moon sometimes out in the day?
  2. Why is the sky blue?
  3. Will we ever discover aliens?
  4. How much does the earth weigh?
  5. How do aeroplanes stay in the air?
  6. Why is water wet?
  7. How do I do long division?
  8. Where do birds/bees go in winter?
  9. What makes a rainbow?
  10. Why are there different time zones on earth?
Notice that they are pretty much all science and math related.  However, what jumps out to me is that half of them are astronomy related. The moon, the sky, aliens, earth's weight, and time zones.  Astronomy is one of my favorite subjects, so those particular questions do not scare me too much.

The best part is, I will be teaching an Earth in Space class through the College of the Rockies Continuing Education department in Cranbrook and Kimberley that will be answering some of those questions! Come check it out.

15 January 2012

07 January 2012

Is the problem really NHL fighting?

As we have seen in the news this year, and especially through the first half of the NHL season, is the major concern over concussions, head shots and fighting.

Of course there have been calls to ban all head shots to prevent concussions. However, if we look at some of the causes of the players concussions this season, they have been accidental collisions with teammates. It’s as if being unexpectedly hit by a teammate, a friend, is more harmful than being hit by an opponent. Interesting parallel to life, isn’t it?

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Read the rest at the Battleford's News Optimist.