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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.