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.
Source Fb
