Five Ways to Help Your Brain

Here are five non medication and inexpensive ways to help your brain work well:

1. Eat a healthy diet.  We forget that the food we eat breaks down to become the chemicals that provide fuel for our brains, but it is true.  Feed your brain well. It needs fuel when you wake up like fruit and cereal, a mid morning snack, lunch with protein, a mid afternoon snack that has additional protein, and dinner with protein and healthy carbs like vegetables.

2.  Get some exercise that you can enjoy and look forward to.  During these dark winter months it is great to get outdoors for a walk in the middle of the day even for 1/2 hour.  You may find it lifts your spirits and is great for your brain (and the rest of your body too).

3.  Ask your doctor if it is okay for you to take Omega 3 Fatty Acids, like fish oil or flaxseed oil.  Eating fish like salmon and tuna is good as well.

4.  Get lots of sleep. Establish a good sleep routine. For example take a hot shower or bath at bedtime, and have a glass of warm milk with a little honey in it.  Read a book or listen to music.  However watching TV or being on the computer in the last few hours before trying to go to sleep has been found to make your brain stay awake, so no screens before bed.  

5.  Learn to meditate.  There have been many health benefits found in meditation.  In addition you can train your brain through meditation to focus where you want to focus not where it wants to go.  There are many ways to learn to meditate.  Transcendental Meditation is one way (www.tm.org), and Mindfulness Meditation is another (www.eomega.org). 

Family meetings

Regular family meetings can be a great way to improve communication within a family.  Make it fun; serve popcorn, ice cream sundaes, or some other fun food to go along with the meeting.  Consider having each of you take a turn talking while the other members of the family listen.  The only rule is that everyone has to listen to each other respectfully (no eye rolling!) and without interrupting.  You can set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes and each person gets to talk about whatever is on their mind. The Time Timer works great for this purpose because it is a visual reminder of the amount of time that has passed and how much is left (www.timetimer.com).  After you go around the family once, everyone could decide they each want another turn.  If at the end parents need to provide some education and information about a topic that came up, this is a good time to do so. If conflicts arise then different perspectives can be shared. Perhaps some problem solving strategies can also be discussed for problems that arise in these discussions.

At the end of the meeting everyone can talk about the upcoming week. Each person can write or draw on a calendar about important events that are happening that week.  Each family member could choose a color that is theirs to write with.

Keep the calendar can be kept in a public place in the house, like the kitchen, for everyone to see.

Eating together as often as possible is also a good idea.  In this rushed society of ours, we can forget the importance of eating together.  Family dinner can be a great time for sharing peoples thoughts and feelings.  There would be no harm in going around the dinner table and letting everybody talk about their day for a few minutes, taking turns talking and listening to each other. 

A key goal of parenting is to raise an independent person

I am often reminded how dedicated the parents are who come to see me.  They are so worried about their children and will do anything for them.  So often they say, I just want him/her to be happy. I heard a story recently about a young man who was 22 years old, living in his parents basement playing video games all day.  When he arrived in the therapist's office at his parents demand, he said, "But they always said they just wanted me to be happy and I'm happy playing video games all day!"

Consider asking yourself if that is what you really want for your child.  Of course you want them to be happy, but for most of us the goal of parenting it to raise an independently functioning 25-30 year old who is  a contributing member of society.  (I used to say 25 year old but so many of this generation seem some extra time to figure out how to be fully independent).

In addition it seems to me that we want our children to learn some of life's lessons like good behavior earns good consequences and bad behavior earns bad consequences.  As an adult if you go to work and do a good job you get paid; if you don't go to work and do a good job, you get fired.  For a child, school is their job and the teacher is their boss.

What are you doing now with your child that will help them survive in the adult world?  What are you doing that will help them or hinder them as they try to become independent?  Our job as parents is not to make life so easy for them that they stay with us forever.  Our job is to help them learn the necessary skills to live on their own.  This means learning to wake up by themselves and go to sleep by themselves, learning to cook and clean and do the laundry and balance a check book.  It means learning to tolerate boring tasks and learning to do things we might not be eager to do like prepare our tax returns or take out the trash.

Is there one thing you can do today that will move you and your child in the direction of more independent functioning?

Keep it short and simple (KISS)

I once heard the acronym KISS for parents to think about when talking to their kids - Keep it Short and Simple.  This apparently is extremely hard to do.  One of the most common parenting traps I have heard of is the lecture.  Parents go on and on yelling at a child about what they have done wrong - be it getting bad grades or staying out too late.  Kids tell me they listen to approximately 12 words.  That's it.  After that they tune out and think about something else.  I think what parents are trying to do is to explain to their child why they should behave differently and hope the child will come around to see it their way.  I guess we hope they will see the wisdom of our brilliant thinking and say something like, "Aha, Mom of course you are right!  I should be getting better grades!  It is extremely important to my future!  Of course I will now buckle down and study and do all my homework and turn it in on time from now on!"  I guess the expectation is that will be the end of it and we will all ride off into the sunset happily ever after.  Obviously it doesn't work this way in real life.  Parental lectures don't work; they don't change anything.  They may just make things worse by increasing the anger level in the child who has to sit there and listen quietly without talking back.  What does work is telling the child exactly what you expect and then providing appropriate reinforcement when the child makes efforts to improve his or her behavior.  Encourage small steps in the right direction.  You wrote your assignments down and brought home the necessary materials?  Good job!  You did all you homework tonight?  That's great!  Your work is all caught up this week and all assignments are turned in?  You get extra privileges this weekend!

Keep it short, simple and specific.   Reward all small steps.  Provide encouragement not discouragement.

The importance of rewards vs punishment

One thing we know for sure in psychology; if you want to see a behavior again, reward it.
The reward can simply be "thank you very much." However we do know that rewards work better than punishments for improving behavior.  What does this mean for you as a parent?  So often I hear a parent say, "I have taken away everything my child values; his Playstation, TV, cell phone, computer, there is nothing else I can take away, and still nothing changes."  Many years ago I can recall meeting with a teenager who said she was grounded for life.  It was just making her more and more angry, and increasingly isolated from her friends and family.

Behavior change is difficult, as you know if you have ever tried to change anything yourself. Have you ever tried to start an exercise program or lose weight?  It is not easy.  Why do we think it would be easy for our kids then? 
It is important to focus on small changes, one at a time.  Once we start a behavior program, the instinct parents have is to try to change the whole child all at once.  It is important to target the specific change you would like to see most first. It is sometimes helpful to think in terms of learning a sport; if your tennis coach tells you too many things to focus on, you can't focus on anything.  If your coach tells you three things to focus on (i.e. eye on the ball, side to the net, follow through) you might be able to keep them in your mind. 

The same is true for our kids.  Give them no more than 3 things to work on, and reward any small changes you see.  Small steps towards a goal still get you there.  In Kazdin's book mentioned in yesterday's blog, he has a list of rewards for kids based on their developmental ages in the back of his book.  He also has very clear ideas about how to implement a reward system to change behavior. 

The rewards have to be chosen based on things the child likes and wants. Ask yourself what does my child enjoy and can I make it contingent on doing what he/she needs to do?  One problem today is that many of our children already get everything they want.  If this is the case in your home, you may need  to change some of your own ideas about parenting.  

There are many parenting books and classes you can take.  In this blog I will continue to suggest those that I think are most helpful.

Essential parenting skills - assertiveness

One of the most essential parenting skills I can think of is assertiveness.  By this I do not mean aggressiveness.  Being passive is doing nothing and just letting other people, including your kids, do what they want.  This often leads to resentment and yelling.  Being aggressive is yelling, hitting, name calling, and threatening.  This often leads to the other person feeling angry and therefore to a cycle of anger.  Being assertive is stating what you want using "I" sentences, firmly and clearly, but without anger.  This is a tall order I know. Here is an example of what I mean:

Situation: Your child leaves his/her dirty clothes and wet towel on the rug in his/her room.
Passive response: Go in and pick them up and put them away yourself, but feel resentful.
Aggressive response: You are a slob!  Why can't you ever pick up your clothes and put them in the hamper?  Do it now or there is no TV for a month!
Assertive response: I want you to pick up your clothes right now and put them in the hamper.  Then I want you to hang up your wet towel.

Often we ASK children to do something, as in "Would you pick up your clothes and towel now?"  This is less likely to get the desired response.  In fact, you may get "no" for an answer.  What do you do then? 

There was a book published many years ago called Assertive Discipline for Parents by Lee Canter.  It has many useful tips for parents on this topic. 

The perils of parenting

Parenting seems to have become increasingly difficult.  The other day I was in a restaurant at 8 pm.  There was a family at the next table with a small child, probably around the age of 2. Clearly they were near the end of the meal and the little boy was restless.  He got up, walked around the room, touching pots and pans lined up on a buffet table and looking back at the grown ups as though he was asking to be told no.  There was no such limit from the grown ups, presumably his parents.  He then wandered off to other tables, including my own, where we were trying to enjoy a late meal.  I worked hard to keep from saying anything to these parents, and just tried to enjoy my meal and hope they would finish up and leave.  Parents seem not to understand that children need limits.  In fact they feel more secure knowing that grown ups and not them are in charge.  It is a scary enough world and if you are two years old, or three or thirteen, you need to know you are not in charge, that someone older and wiser is in charge.  The child may not like this, but it will help them feel safer and more secure.


If you are feeling like you don't know what to do as a parent, there is help.  Alan Kazdin, Ph.D. has published a book that contains the best results from the research that has been done in recent years about effective parenting. The book is called The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child. This book is really for all parents of all children, not just defiant children.  There is a DVD in the back of the book that will help you see what works and what doesn't work.  This book (and DVD) is available from Amazon and other books stores.