After
25 years practicing pediatrics, and caring for thousands of children, I've noticed
some patterns that offer me a deeper vision of health. Here are some of those
invaluable lessons:
1.
Growth and development are not a race.
These
days we’re in such a rush to grow up. In our mechanized, post-industrialized
world of speed and efficiency, we've forgotten that life is a process of
ripening. To get good fruit, you need to nourish strong roots. Pay
attention to the ground that supports your child’s life: Go for a walk with
your child, eat with your child, play together, tell him a story about your
experience as a child.
2.
Creating family traditions encourages strong roots and a healthy life.
This
takes time and practice. Personal traditions are sacred because they promote
exchanges that strengthen bonds of love and intimacy and build the kind of
confidence that will carry your child through this world.
3.
We grow in cycles.
There
is a rhythm and pulse to each child’s life – sometimes fast and intense,
sometimes slow and quiet. Just as each spring brings a renewed sense of
appreciation for life, each stage of a child’s life is a time of new discovery
and wonder. After all, learning is not just a process of accruing information.
It's the process of transforming our ideas, and sometimes this requires
forgetting in order to see with fresh eyes. Some children will take a step
backward before making a giant leap forward.
Growing
in cycles means that we don’t get just one chance to learn something. The same
lesson will offer itself up to us again and again as we pass through the
seasons of our life. There is deep forgiveness
in this way of understanding childhood, which I find takes the pressure off
parents to “get it right” the first time.
4.
Encouragement is not the same as indulgence.
We
are not in the business of raising little kings and queens. Kings don’t do well
in our society. Recent studies have shown that indulgence actually weakens your
child’s powers to survive, deflating motivation and diminishing feelings of
success.
Encouragement
means putting courage in your child, not doing things for him. Create a
supportive context that will open up a path without pushing your child down it.
Unconditional love is the scaffolding that encourages your child to take
chances, to experiment, and to fail without judgment. Sometimes being an
encouraging presence in your child’s life means standing a little off in the background,
there to offer a compassionate hand when circumstances call for it, but
trusting in his innate ingenuity.
There
is spaciousness in encouragement. Indulgence, on the other hand, limits freedom
by inflating a child’s sense of entitlement and reducing the patience needed to
work through obstacles when he doesn't instantly get his way. Indulgence leads
to small-minded thinking.
5.
Pushing your buttons is a spiritual practice, and children are our spiritual
teachers.
You
don’t need an expensive spiritual retreat to become enlightened. Your little
sage-teacher is right in front of you, offering you true wisdom free of
charge!
Children
watch our every move when they're little, studying our inconsistencies as they
try to figure out this crazy world. And they will call you on it. When a child
pushes your buttons, remember: they are your buttons, not hers. Take the
time to listen to what your child is trying to teach you. One of the secrets of
parenthood is our willingness to transform ourselves out of love for our
child. When you're willing to look at your buttons, you open up a deeper
self-awareness that is transformative for both you and your child.
6.
A symptom is the body’s way of letting us know something has to change.
Good
medicine asks what is the symptom trying to accomplish? rather than
simply suppressing it. Our body has its own intelligence and yet so much of
pharmaceutical advertising tries to convince us that there is something wrong
with feeling symptoms. Much of my medical training was focused on stopping
symptoms as if they were the problem. (This is like telling the body to shut
up. It’s rude!) We don't trust the body’s intelligence. We think too much
and tend to be afraid of feelings in our body.
But
children have taught me that a symptom like fever is actually not the problem.
Whatever is causing the fever may be a problem, but the temperature is simply
the body’s way of trying to deal with what’s happening.
Take,
for example, the child with a fever. What other symptoms does the child have?
If he is playful, you may not need to suppress the fever. It means the body is
trying to make metabolic heat to mobilize the immune system. To help it do
this, you can give warm (not cold) fluids so it doesn’t dry out and nourishing
foods like soups to fuel the fire.
7.
Be prepared.
The
one phrase from the Eagle Scout motto that stuck with me since I was a boy was Be
prepared. This is a state of readiness that can be fueled by confidence or
fear.
These
days I practice what I call “preparatory medicine” rather than preventive
medicine, so that getting sick is not seen as a failure. Being healthy
does not mean never getting sick. Life is a journey of ups and downs and the
growing child lives in a constant state of flux. A resilient immune system
is one that learns how to get sick and get better. Living too clean a life robs
us of the information necessary to be fully prepared to recover.
Rather
than living in fear of illness, there are natural ways we can support our
children to recovery from illness quickly and efficiently: good nutrition,
hydration, probiotics,
rest and exercise. But the most important? Rather than focusing on how often
your child gets sick, celebrate how often she gets better.
8.
Healing takes time.
The
most alternative medicine I practice these days is taking time. As a society,
we're addicted to quick fixes because we have no time to be sick anymore. As a
doctor, I was trained as a kind of glorified fireman, looking to put out
emergencies quickly and efficiently.
In
emergencies, strong medicine is often necessary to save lives but most health
problems in childhood are not emergencies. In those instances it takes more
than strong medicine to get better; it takes time. I realize that taking
another day off from work because a child has been sent home from school with a
runny nose can add real stress to our already stressful lives. But children
have taught me that healing is a kind of developmental process that has its own
stages too.
When
we don’t take time to recover, we rob our children of the necessary stages they
need to learn from if they are to develop long-lasting health. When we take
time to recover, illness becomes a journey of discovery, not just a
destination; we begin to see our health and illness as two sides of the same
coin.
9.
The secret of life is letting go.
Life
is a process of constantly giving way. Things pushed past their prime transform
into something else. Just as spring gives way to summer, so is each stage of
development a process of letting go.
Crawling gives way to walking. Babbling gives way to speaking. Childhood gives
way to adolescence. By breathing in, you breathe out. By eating, you
poop.
Each
season, each stage, each little rhythm of our life is a matter of letting
go. This allows us to get rid of what we don't need to make room in our
lives for new information. Learning to let go is not always easy and each child
has his own adaptive style and timing. Nature favors diversity. Remember to
honor your child’s unique nature. This is what my book Fire Child Water Child is all about.
Perhaps
the most important way children teach me how to let go is in the way they play.
Playing means letting go of our inhibitions; it frees us up and allows us not
to take ourselves too seriously.
10.
Trust yourself: You're the expert on your child.
One
of the most important things I teach new parents is how to trust themselves.
Nowhere is this more daunting than when a new baby comes into our life. We’re
expected to know everything and yet we feel like we know nothing. But children
have taught me that this knowing-nothing can be a real opportunity to open our
powers of intuition.
Mindful
parenting begins by listening with an open heart to your child’s life without
fear or panic. Studies have shown that a mother’s intuition is more powerful
than any lab test in picking up problems. Unfortunately today we are flooded
with so much scary information that it interferes with our ability to listen to
our own intuition. (Just think of the arrogance of a doctor who acts like he knows
your child better than you do!)
Take
a tip from your baby. Look into your baby’s eyes. Imagine what it feels like to
be conscious of the world before you have language, before all those labels
that scare us and divide things into good and bad, right and wrong. Babies have
no enemies. This is seeing from the source. It is what Zen Buddhists call
“beginner’s mind.” Watch closely how your baby breathes with his belly. This is
Qigong breathing. Stop thinking for a moment and try breathing this way. You
may just find the answers you need waiting for you there.
11.
Take the long view. (Because it’s easy to get caught in the immediacy of a
problem, especially at 2am.)
Having
watched thousands of children grow into adulthood, what sometimes seems like a
big deal at four-months old or 14-years old may be no more than a small bump in
the road. Children have taught me how to take the long view of life. When we
step back and see the big picture of our lives, we discover wisdom and
compassion.
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