After months of waking every two hours with my daughter, I got pregnant with my son. I was a barfer and would get crazy neck kinks from feeding in bed. I grew very impatient and cranky and needed to find ways to get more sleep, quickly. After responding to her every desire for 20 months, I had to find a way to teach her to self-soothe – and so began the journey of trying to teach my kids to have a strong self-esteem, but that is another story. My husband and I dabbled in letting her cry herself to sleep because it was supposed to be the most efficient, and therefore least harmful to my relationship with my daughter. It struck us as a bit odd thought that a lot of deep crying for four days was supposed to teach her how to sleep.  Like time-outs, it was too hard on our nervous systems and intuitively we weren’t comfortable ignoring the need of our baby for comfort. The book we were hearing about from a lot of parents was The No Cry Sleep Solution. So I photocopied the workbook and took notes every night and watched over about three months as we slowly worked at finding new soothing tools for our daughter while simultaneously weaning her, first of daytime, then night time feeds. I had a list of 14 ideas for helping soother my baby, and I was trying to find the magic solution. It took months of analysing to get her sleeping more through the night. Two days after fully weaning her, she slept through the night.

With my second child, at about 17 months, I saw that I was beginning to need more sleep again and that I was losing presence with those around me. Seeing the early signs of my need, I began to introduce pacifiers, bottles and stuffies a little earlier, before beginning to wean. Our son began to sleep through the night at 19 months, after he was fully weaned and it felt much more naturally acquired. I do have little pangs of guilt knowing I didn’t make it to two years with either of the kids. I’m trying to pump milk for another few months to give our son the physical health benefits, and hope I can get more than an ounce every couple of days, argh. I waited until I was weaning to start pumping. My bad. For replacement of the emotional support the kids had from breastfeeding, we make time for good quality cuddling – the entire family is well-versed in ‘hugs and smooches’ and we encourage lots of massage.

In the beginning I thought that I could breastfeed during the day only and have the kids sleep at night. I learned that with both of our children, it was full weaning that brought sleep back into our house. We do still play musical beds when our one-and-a-half year old is teething or our  almost-four year old wakes from a bad dream. I feel though that we found a good balance of caring for them in their tender ages, and caring for our needs too. Now we can count on a few good nights of sleep a week, which really helps us to be better with ourselves and each other.

Written By: Nicole LeBlanc Charlwood

Parents in the Kootenays should be grateful to know that support workers in our communities are being exposed to research and ahead-of-the-curve perspectives on caring for and raising children. Success By Six, Selkirk College, The Family Place, School District 8 and others sponsored “Love Grows Brains”. My attachment-parent heart was aflutter when our daughter’s pre-school caregiver Laura brought this conference to our attention. Dr. Gabor Maté was going to be speaking. We couldn’t wait!

At the lectures, I and many others were like giddy school kids in the presence of a rock star. So when he walks in, wearing all black, looking tired and disheveled, I thought, great and he’s human too. Here is a smattering of what stood out for me.

Friday May 8, 2009 – Selkirk College, Castlegar BC

Inspirational with a swift boot-in-the-ass reminder that parenting well these days is a lot of work.  Dr. Maté and his co-author friend Dr. Gordon Neufeld both like to say, and I paraphrase: It shouldn’t be this hard. But despite knowing more about how to parent, it is more difficult than ever to do it well. Attachment parenting is made more demanding because it does not fit the modern day mould that encourages the punishment-reward model of altering our children’s behaviour.

Maté talked about the confusion we seem to have between “bad behaviour” and the “process of a person becoming a person.” A mom in the audience asked about coping with her kids bad behaviour. Dr. Maté returned with a question: What is the poor behaviour your child is exhibiting? She described it as: He’s one and a half and gets into things he shouldn’t. Maté’s response: Well that is what he should be doing at his age. He is acting instinctively curious, demonstrating the behaviour we would want to see developmentally.

As parents, how often do we say, “I hope this is a stage”? If it takes us understanding the development of our children better to give them more compassion, let’s try to find a simple model to follow along as our kids grow.

A father in the audience asked if: in the heat of a melt-down or siblings at each other physically, is it o.k. to physically address a child… such as picking them up and removing them from a situation.  Maté came back with: sure, when it is reducing harm and not creating it. Do the least amount necessary to keep anyone from harming themselves or others. Love them and calm them down – demonstrate how to do this by modelling the behaviour you want them to do.

My daughter has pointed out to me in heart-breaking ways that I have picked her up hard and upset her a couple of times. When she is scared of me, she acts out. When she is loved, we find our middle ground. I’m also learning how to communicate with her after the fact, when everyone is calm and rational, to apologize to her for my poor behaviour and sometimes to discuss why something she did was upsetting to me. This approach has really cut down on unnecessary melt-downs, those that happened because I was too unaware of my own issues and how I played them out on my kids. If being yelled at, for example, by someone is stressful for you, think of how much more true it would be for a child who’s not yet developed the capacity to cope. Conversely, just because you think your kids should handle whatever you throw at them, doesn’t mean that you are teaching them how to handle it. And that is your job, not theirs.

Many times during the five hours of lecturing and discussion, Maté raised the issue of expectations. If we as parents and caregivers could get over our neurotic selves (my words, definitely not those of Buddhist Maté) change our perspective on what we expect of our kids, we will reduce stress in our and our childrens lives. This will provide for them a better environment in which to grow healthy and productive lives. On Saturday he discussed that we put too much emphasis on genetic inheritance of disease and behaviour, that both are related to prenatal and early childhood stresses. As people get more and more serious illness and as more of us and our children are not emotionally equiped to handle the stresses of life, we need to go back to the idea of strengthening our relationships. We should really be stepping up to our responsibility as parents and communities to provide much less stressful environments for our children. One that provides more love, attention and presence.

I really appreciated how the audience was willing to say: “But can you tell me exactly how you would handle blah blah blah situation?” He could eventually be brought to advice… reluctantly.

Saturday, May 9, 2009 – Rossland, BC

The Biology of Loss – What happens when attachments are impaired and how to restore our children’s mental and emotional health

Dr. Maté started the morning by noting the large audience – approximately 200, and the clear interest in understanding our relationships with our children better. Referencing his books on addicition, stress, parenting and AD(H)D, Dr. Maté wove for us the connections between the loss of good relationships with our children, the level of stress parents face today and the large and growing number of children on medications for developmental and psychotic behaviours. He quotes:

“The paradox remains, how could the absence of something or somebody [attached relationships] create such disturbances… There must be a biology of loss, and we must find it.” Dr. Myron Hofer

“Developmental experiences determine the organizational and functional status of the mature brain.” Dr. Bruce Perry.

The brain is responsible for the following functions: pain relief, pleasure, attachment, impulse regulation, emotional self-regulation, stress regulation – all not fully functioning in people with addictions. Adicts brains are not fully developped. “The necessary condition for all these brain circuits to exist is access to a consistently available, emotionally stable, non-stressed nurturing parental care giver.” Dr. Daniel Siegel says: “Human connections create neuronal connections.. For the infant and young child, attachement relationships are the major environmental factors that shape the development of the brain during its period of maximal growth… Attachment extablishes an interpersonal relationship that helps the immature brain use the mature functions of the parent’s brain to organize its own processes.”

The effects of biology of loss can be experienced as prenatal stress of parents, early separation – emotional and physical, postpartum stress and childhood abuse (including emotional unavailability of parents). We are told now that “… people are influenced by past experience without any awareness that they are remembering.”

Maté blames the general malaise of parents today on their loss of power to parent. He described how the pervasive use of coercive power – use of punishment and rewards, win or lose – only pushes children away from parents and into the arms of less capable and usually less mature people – their peers, or as Maté refers to them: the enemy. He used a simple example both days to demonstrate the human instinct to counter coersion – what Dr. Neufeld calls “Counterwill.” He asks someone in the audience to stand and put up a hand to touch his hand, like they are going to play the mirror game. With hands touching, Maté starts pushing. In both instances, the people instinctively met his force with an equal and OPPOSITE force. An analogy for when we demand our kids do things rather than having the patience to guide them to be motivated to do it on their own.

We are equipped with the coercion model of parenting that doesn’t work. Combine that with being less and less physically and emotionally available to our children, and they naturally seek support they need in other places. Read Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peersfor more on how we are driving our children into the arms of other children to teach them their life skills. It is a lot of work to raise kids well, and he is opptomistic that the shifts we need to make to get on the right path again are really doable.

And parents can’t do it well these days because the ideal of a neuclear family is pervasive, separating us from each other. We need to build ourselves new villages and focus on rebuilding our relationships, not just with our kids, but with everyone.

The he says emphatically: “Don’t take your kids to play groups and preschools.” At once I got a huge lump in my throat and up went my hand. Choking back tears I asked him to reconcile for me the need to build village and the need to keep our kids collected, or close. ” We connect with our community and find like-minded parents at playgroups and our daughter goes to preschool”… I start pointing at Laura who is a row ahead of me, taking deep breaths and babbling to everyone about what a wonderful elder she is. We chose to have Laura in our lives, to help support us in raising our daughter. Maté moved from the black and white, don’t do it, to the grey, do it well. He reassured me that if I am going to these playgroups and participating with my children, not sitting on the side, then we are doing fine by our kids. If my daughter’s teacher is loving and supportive, and we as caregivers are connected, then it can be done without injuring our relationship with our child.

Later I asked Laura if it was ok to call her an elder – she laughed and said, “Well I am. I am a mountain with snow on top.”

Another mom asked Gabor Maté about reconciling where we come from and who we are trying to be for our children. She talked about a challenging relationship with her father, wanting to honour his role in her life, and the stress she feels because they don’t see eye-to-eye on parenting. “Don’t worry about what other people want, just do what you can and feel you should do ” .  This really hit a chord for me. My husband and I have both struggled at times with what was going on for our parents when we were raised and wanting to shift things for our children. Maté suggested: “Just polietly thank them for their advice, and go ahead and do what you want.” Sounds so simple…

Maté’s final quote: “Action has meaning only in relationship and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action.” J. Krishnamurti

Yesterday I was at Mother Goose – teaching parents and kids to bring song into their lives – and a mom, Meredith, asked me how the conference went. I answered that it was affirming of our choice to attachment parent, and a strong reminder of how hard it is to do so. Her perspective is that we are evolving, and we can only do what we can do in the grander shift that needs to happen. I hope the amazing woman and mom I met, who fell into a depression after the conference, can find some comfort in this idea.

Written By: Nicole LeBlanc Charlwood

I invite those who were present at either of the Dr. Gabor Maté sessions to comment below with your perspectives.  To all readers, we are interested in your real examples of his perspectives working for you and your family or clients.

I like the idea that I am just a small blip on the evolutionary path of the human race. I don’t have to figure out our ever-changing world, and my place in it to know what to do as a parent. If change is inevitable, I see my job in the human continuum as helping to ensure we are shifting or evolving in a positive direction. The challenge is to identify the difference between evolved change, and change for the sake of itself.

Our children have the ability to live more fulfilling lives than simply being an animal of the stock-market food chain. But I often feel at a crossroad when faced with big parenting decisions. Parents that have the ability to marry the good of past ways with thoughtful new ways, are the trend setters that will help keep kids and parents on the right path.

Have you noticed that rarely do you see spanking in public anymore. Spanking used to be seen as an appropriate response to child behavioural issues. It’s true that this form of negative reinforcement has temporarily been replaced by the ‘time-out‘, but this can be seen as just a step on our evolutionary path away from anger and reinforcement of bad behaviour. We now understand more about children and what motivates them to behave and be happy. More and more we seem capable of setting aside our egos and unrealistic expectations of children, allowing us to get to the root of our family problems and to guide children through them. Without alienating them.

To all those out there who raised us and are watching and supporting our work as parents, please don’t take it as a personal affront if we do things a little differently. Be proud that you were a piece of the evolution of parenting. We are who we are because of you.

Root Concept:

We are evolving as human beings and this has a profound affect on parenting.  The continuum concept is the idea “.. that in order to achieve optimal physical, mental and emotional development, human beings require the kind of experience to which our species adapted during the long process of our evolution.” Natural selection for the body, mind and spirit. We can’t simply change who and what we are overnight, for our convenience. An example of the staying power of our evolution is the desire of babies to be kept close to a parent most of the time until at least six months of age. Parents who haven’t learned to sling or hold their babies to make them happier, should be able to intuitively know to hold them close, but many don’t. We are out thinking our evolutionary legacy of parenting experience.

What Experts Say:

Stephen Pinker ’s work in evolutionary psychology discusses how , because of natural selection, our brains are equipped with a set of tools to deal with problems faced by our ancestors.

Developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld teaches attachment parenting concepts and reassures us that we can tap into our evolved internal knowing (intuition) for the right answers in raising our children. See a clip of him speaking below.

Gabor Maté M.D. and co-author of Hold On To Your Kids, looks at how adolescents are evolving as caregivers for their peers, in place of their parents, because they aren’t getting the guidance and support from us that they need.

Try This:

My evolved friend suggested this variation on the time-out. If you feel the need for a shift in your young child’s behaviour, take a time-out with them. It is your job to teach them how to look disappointment in the eye and find a way to be ok with it. Making them go away to cope on their own only makes them feel bad about themselves. Try a change in venue to remove them from a negative situation, but stay with them. Even if you are on opposite sides of the room. When they come out the other side of the tantrum, you can experience the rawest kind of love because they know you saw them through. Staying calm and present with my children through their percieved hardships has been challenging, but very rewarding.

Success Story:

My daughter’s teacher told us that she is very capable when it comes to letting things roll off her back, and I believe this is because we have chosen the way of guiding through disappointment rather than punishing their immature emotions.

Bottom Line:

We can be very hard on ourselves as parent. Give yourself a break knowing that you are part of an evolutionary process that provides natural intuition and the opportunity to get better over time.

Dr. Gordon Neufeld speaking about what makes a child easy to parent.