The Enemy of What’s Best
It is up to us. We can choose to have optimal (the best) health or just-getting-by health–the best parenting skills or just-getting-by parenting skills. Stress-free Discipline teaches optimal parenting.
Remember, what’s OK is the enemy of what’s best.
“Watching television for two to three hours or more per day is linked to significantly higher risks of developing diabetes and heart disease and dying from all causes, according to a new analysis from the Harvard School of Public Health.” (June 15, Journal of the American Medical Association.)
If it were just health, some parents would ignore the need to change TV habits. But wait! Thinking ability is also at risk here.
A New Yorker study indicates that “A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some…a reader and a viewer even think differently.” (Crain, 2007, 135)
In several cited studies, illiterates resisted giving definitions of words, grouping like objects, and making logical inferences about hypothetical situations. (Crain, 2007, 137) Moreover, “in an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon…” (Crain, 138)
Detailed and consistent decline in reading and thus in thinking ability have been reported by the National Endowment for the Arts…
It is much harder to compare viewpoints and ideas between streaming media than to analyze the written word.
Juxtaposed images give the impression of cause and effect where none exists. Logical thinking and learning words become a strain. Social and communication skills suffer. Experienced teachers and social workers have noted the trend. Teamwork, highly valued in the global marketplace and in parenting, is suffering.
According to the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt, Crain says, (2007, 138) “it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.” My experience on the Navajo Reservation corroborates all of the above.
Recall is also enhanced by reading, as opposed to merely viewing. Moreover, viewers from the age of eight to sixteen months begin loosing word power for every hour of baby DVD’s and videos they watch daily, according to Crain.
Data on more than a million students worldwide by Micha Razel “found ‘little room for doubt’ that television worsened performance in reading, science and math.” (Crain, 2007, 138)
The N.E.A. reported recently that “readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theatre, paint, go to music events, take photographs, and volunteer.” (Crain, 2007, 139)
If parents cannot read, their children will not be encouraged to learn more than the minimum to get by. Thus, each generation will become more ignorant.
Apply the Bingo test: is reading, good health and the ability to live a richer, fuller life worth changing your TV habits?
Hidden Costs of Family Breakdown
self-discipline, child discipline, happiness, healthy relationships, self-control, family breakdown.
Personal financial hardship is only one cost of divorce.
According to CitizenLink.org, a study done by the Institute for American Values has found that the breakdown of families costs U.S. taxpayers at least $112 billion yearly. The national, state and local costs–which add up to more than $1 trillion over the last decade–are caused, in part, by high poverty rates of single, female-headed households, which lead to higher spending on welfare, criminal justice and education programs.” (Williams, 2008, 1)
What could the government do with a trillion dollars to create jobs and a better quality of life? What could parents do with a little more in their bank account and lower taxes for preventable problems? This is not rocket science. It has to do with self-control and intelligent work toward family health.
The human cost of family breakup cannot be calculated. While the average mother looses quality of life as she enters the ranks of the poor, there are many hidden costs. If she got a divorce wanting control and freedom, her impulse control problems have bad consequences. She is so overwhelmed with an additional work load–an impossible blend of the need to provide adequate income and good parenting–that she is unable to discipline her children or teach them essential skills.
Happiness research by Dr. Ed. Diener of the University of Illinois indicates that we are most happy when our ability and the task at hand are closely matched.(see www.psych.uluc.edu/~ediener/research/research.html). Poor parents can only be miserable, single parents are all stressed, and both children and parents suffer the kind of pressures which lead to poor health, depression, dysfunction, violence and full-blown mental illness. Read the rest of this entry »
Hidden Agenda in Legend of the Guardians: the Owls of Ga’Hoole
What’s a symbol for? Do people merely react to symbols? Can they recognize how symbols move our feelings, motivating us to act, and then can people thoughtfully consider whether their action is right or not?
Symbols are a brain short-cut: they bypass thinking
Because the flag of the United States is a symbol of all our history, struggles and victories, we have great feeling when we see it. Groups of symbols can quietly manipulate our feelings into, for example, buying a car because it is advertised with a beautiful woman who lovingly touches it. Our subconscious mind thinks, “chick magnet!” Desire is aroused by a symbolic association, without words and without appeals to logic. Read the rest of this entry »
T.V.: Functional Truth is no Truth at all.
Teaching a child to know the difference between fact and opinion.
Technorati Tags:fact,opinion,T.V.,truth,Bill O’Reilly,Dr. Archibald Hart,depression,mental health,emotional health.conflict,thinking skills.
When I was six years old I came home to report a fight at school. “I said there IS a Santa Claus because my Mommy told me and my Mommy doesn’t lie!” If passionate intensity is the measure of truth, I had the truth and knew it.
Child discipline includes discernment training: what is truth?
Unfortunately truth is not that easy to find.
Family Life: Solitary Independent Play?
Do you have an optimal family life? What is good by itself may be the enemy of what is best or optimal. Read the rest of this entry »
Inattentional Blindness: Personal Jihad
Technorati Tags: Jihad,inattentional blindness,Personal terrorism,child discipline,Walid Shoebat
Moderate Muslims, we are told, consider jihad a personal struggle for spiritual purity.
Americans ignore the facts that over 100 references in the Koran refer to jihad as genocidal slaughter of unbelievers with only one quote referring to an internal struggle[1]. (Source: www.shoebat.com)
Muslim violence (jihad) supersedes peaceful contemplation in every country now ruled by Islam. Americans are too distracted, too comfortable, to pay attention while Islam gains a strategic foothold.
The American approach to Islam is a perfect example of inattentional blindness.[2]
Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, psychologists, first showed that people who were paying attention to something else in their line of sight were “blind” to something that was right before their eyes.
Feelings vs Truth: Parent Discipline
As manager of a senior apartment complex, I learned a lot about the pressures, perks and pitfalls of aging.
One resident, call her Mary, has focused for years on life according to her feelings. She dwells on her son’s murder, her husband’s infidelity, T.V. and slurs, imagined or real, on her heritage. The bipolar critic who lives downstairs has added to years of unforgiveness, swelling Mary’s bag of complaints. Mary drops that bag on anyone sympathetic enough to stay in range.
Victim-hood for Mary has become a comfortable cloak for reality. For half of my 64 years I created my own reality like that. It doesn’t work. It is not real. Read the rest of this entry »
Dissolving Negative Peer Pressure
Our Culture: Paris Hilton. Pro Wrestling and Steroids. Lindsay Lohan.
It’s an unfortunate fact of life that uncooperative, sometimes hostile, bored, disinterested behavior is catching. Sometimes it can get so bad that desperate parents feel they must resort to outside sources in order to break the cycle. From Teen Options Blog:
Military teen boot camps are known for their no nonsense approach to dealing with out-of-control-teens. In many cases, boot camps are the right solution for a teen teetering on the edge of a full blown discipline problem and likely only needs a wake-up call.
Negative children, especially teens, appear to have dropped their lifelong love for you and your values in favor of something which makes all their problems worse. They may be very good or very poor students. They not only disconnect with you but with most of their peers at school.
They may be gang “wannabes.”
For Parents Fighting Gang Involvement
You may feel intimidated, confused, rejected, helpless and angry. How could they do this to you? Their gang seems all powerful. You feel weak. If you are facing a tag team within your own family they will support each other behind your back, sharing and negating everything you say. Suddenly your influence is nil. Years of effort are gone—useless. Don’t believe it.
Your child, your gift from God, is in that gang because of a need. It may be a need for power, influence, achievement, status. A negative group may help your child escape from the pain of social failure with more positive people.
If relationships outside the negative group improve, your child may prefer to leave the negative status or power group.
Peer Pressure Analysis and Combat
Study recent events which reinforce or cause the negative turn. Does Negative Ned need active listening? Do you need information? Are there biochemical causes? Is this evidence of physical growing pains?
Go into computer mode in your head: feelings are your enemy. They push you into adrenalin-driven rejection of others and stupid choices of correction. Deep breathing is essential to your health.
Pinpoint precise wrong behavior and the consequences. Deal proactively with wrong choices. Impose immediate consequences every time the wrong choice occurs. This is simple (not easy) with Stress Free Discipline. Do not attack group membership or make awful generalizations about the future.
Stay specific and impersonal in spite of their identity with poor choices. Never let them see you sweat. After all, you plus God are a majority. You have taken this to Him, right? Offer a positive course of action after prayer, Godly counsel and lots of active listening.
Stress Free Discipline can fill your child’s needs to be assertive, to have influence and to achieve. You cannot force your child to choose the positive action, but it is really hard to keep up the negative one when you show a willingness to open up, listen, and investigate mutual solutions.
Have you been withholding personal power development by not allowing your child to make some choices? We all learn by wrong ones, within reason. Remember that over-protective parenting is disastrous to personal growth. At the same time, do not let your child work together with a negative peer. Keep your contacts positive ones. I moved into a different town to remove my pre-teens from negative influences. Above all, don’t nag.
Christian Steps
Have you provided a Home Fellowship group which is real, available, and interested in your child? Your child will be more likely to leave the negative peer group if his or her need for status can be filled in a positive, God centered way. You don’t need to be watering the seeds of Truth if your child prefers to connect with a personality unlike yours. Make ways to provide that.
Negativity is so fatiguing and self-defeating your child will gradually begin to desire the relief of real, positive relationships. People usually act in line with the expectations of others.