ON TURNING 65 PART I

Most of my life (before I sort of figured life out) I looked forward to 65 as the age where one would retire. Now I'm here and enjoying every day too much to retire. Some days are tiring at this age and I really need week-ends to recover, but each day brings new excitement, more incite and even new light bulbs still going on in my mind. Until you get there you can't imagine how cool it is to get to see every new day in grandchildren's eyes, and I get to see it double "up close and personal" every day at my house.

So on this day when I conclude the 65th year of being on this earth, I decided to recount where I was and little things about the "5" years. It all started at Newman Hospital in Emporia, Kansas at 6:38 p.m. on April 18, 1944.

The first 5 found me in Columbus and as always my birthday fell around Easter. It was probably about 5 that I was riding my bike one day when a bigger boy decided to try to take it away from me. I went riding down the street in Buckeye Village as fast as I could go and ran smack into a milk truck. I think the boy  was so frightened by the accident that he ran away, and I obviously recovered and went on with childhood. Another memory of this time is playing baseball in the "quad". I was the batter and I swung back so hard that I hit the catcher in the forehead and knocked him out. Maybe that's why I'm not a huge baseball fan (that and the fact that later mom didn't want me to play catcher, which was my favorite position, because I might get him in the mouth and not be able to play trombone).

I have to mention my 10th birthday because it is the only one that I remember exactly what I did. My family went to Oklahoma City to Herman's Seafood restaurant and I took my best friend Billy McGrew. I had fried shrimp which was my favorite food at the time. Billy McGrew is drawing near to the end of his career as a world expert in the social habits of apes and chimps.

http://www.in-cites.com/scientists/WilliamMcGrew.html

By 15 my trombone was a huge part of my life and we had been living in Norman, Oklahoma for almost 10 years. Trombone stories include riding my bicycle to school across town from our second Norman home at 1212 Cruce to Norman Junior High on the East side of town. One cold morning as I was tooling along on my bike  with my trombone case on top of the bar and the handle bars I went around a corner close to home and skidded on ice and everything went down. It seems like I had a lot of crashes growing up but  such is the saga of those who are not "looking where they are going". Maybe perfect firsts spend too much time "looking ahead" to try to figure out what they want us to be when we grow up.

By 15 I had achieved a 1++ rating on my trombone solo at the District Elimination music contest in Oklahoma  City and the judge said "I have never heard a better junior high trombonist". This was when I was 12. By 13 I had finished my Eagle Scout rank. (Not much time for baseball)

Needless to say, a ton of stuff went down between 15 and 25, the most significant of which was  finding and marrying the love of my life, the Lituanian bombshell!! I was lucky that she didn't have any brothers and thus didn't know how weird I was. I met her while doing medical school at Northwestern. I turned 25 9 months after our

wedding at the old Lithuanian church in Chicago. It was the biggest event of my life to that point and was the largest wedding I had ever attended.

By 35 I had done residency at CHLA and Michael A. had been born in 1972. 

I started Saddleback Pediatrics with Norm Zeller in Mission Viejo, Ca. in July of 1973 and Vanessa was born 2 days after my Easter birthday in 1976. 

 

Age 35 found the family living in Lake Forest and we soon became immersed in school and soccer for the kids, running for me and our annual trips to Snowmass and Alisal. Traditions seemed important

and we continued to go to Snowmass to ski in February with the John Fowle family for ten years.  August 2009 will be our 31st week at the Alisal Ranch.

At 45 my family was still in Lake Forest and we had added another doctor to the family. Vera attained her law degree from Western State Law School in 1988.

YOUR "PERFECT FIRST"

After reading some special books (hard for me), which helped change my life and what I believe about parenting, I came to realize that it is very important that we change the "recordings" we made while listening to and watching our parents parent us. This is called creating a narrative in one's mind about what happened in our childhood, and doing this is very important in helping us to parent in a different way. (Our parents did the very best that they could with the information that they had at the time and with how their lives had been set up in their own early years of childhood.)

 Two important premises must be prominent in our thoughts about parenting: 

     First, children must be able to act their age.

     Second, children must say what they think. 

     

A first child most often has two people watching her all the time, i.e. she is over- attended. (It is interesting that this over-attending seldom if ever occurs in twins or multiples.) Our first child is an experiment, and they see in our eyes the excitement and pride that we have about everything that they do. It's the first time this child that we made has ever done each of these things. (A second or any other child never receives so much attention and praise.) By the time our "perfect first" is one year old, she has figured out that she has the ability to cause things to happen and to create certain responses in us, her adoring parents. Herein lies the potential for creating what for me was an "emotional waste of time" for almost 50 years of my life. I spent hours and days trying to please others, because I thought if they were happy then they would like me and then I would valuable to them. This is referred to as deriving one's power from an outside source or being other-powered. In truth, each of us has great value (self power) and none of us is responsible for any other person's happiness. Self-value, self-power and happiness all come from within. (First child parents will likely understand this concept better than others.)

If a child does things which cause his parents to be happy and this behavior is often rewarded with praise and quite often with gifts, then it follows that the child will do these things more often. And if these are "good" behaviors, then this works very well for us as parents and we tend to say things like, "You are such a good girl" or "Daddy is so proud of you". The downside of this situation is that each child will eventually start to do thing which do not make us happy, and it then becomes possible for our first child to begin to care too much about what we think about what she does based on what will make us happy.

First children are frequently described as being perfectionist or self-driven and are quite often pleasers or performers or both. Pleasing others is nice and being able to perform in front of others is a talent. Doing either, not because one feels good inside but to make parents or others happy, can easily lead to measuring one's value, not as self-value, but as other-value. We have been working on self with our children since birth, as in self-calming, being self-entertained, and encouraging self-control. The difficult part of parenting in the first three years is helping our first to know that he is wonderful and unique and loved without causing him to think that he is this way because it is his job to do this for us (so we will be happy and proud).

The neurobiology and neuropsychology studies from UCLA and elsewhere in the last ten years have been able to identify very specifically how babies and toddlers lay down in their brain their "perception" of "Am I Wonderful" and "Do I Matter". It is not about what we say and do as parents, it is about how each child perceives what is seen and heard. The look on our face and the tone of our voice can say a lot more than any words. It is in these first three years that we lay down in our mind our original interpretation (and the associated feelings) of what has happened to us. A child can either perceive that she is a wonderful valuable person or that being "herself" is not working, in which case she may decide in the early years to be someone else. 

This leads to what I refer to as "wearing a costume". I believe that I decided to wear the doctor costume by the time I was five years old. I had many allergy and illness problems as a young child, and my parents always thought the doctors were wonderful. Since the things they said and they way they responded to my "misbehavior" (acting my age) were perceived by me as being me wasn't working, it was an easy choice to decide to wear the doctor costume. Many people will tell you that they knew early in life what they were going to "do when they grew up". And many people around us continue to wear those costumes, and it makes it very hard to get close to them and know the real person inside.

I continually reexamine this issue, and have developed a few suggestions through reflection, reading and watching children and families "grow up": 

1. Asking a first child a question about what he did is always better than telling him what we think. "Aren't you excited you can do that?" is better than "You make me so happy when you put on your shirt." "Didn't we have a fun time at the store today?" is better than "You were such a good boy at the store today." 

2. A smile or a hand on the shoulder when you child is doing a "good" self thing is better than spoken words. "I love you!" is always appropriate.

3. IF WE DON'T SET IT UP, WE SET THEM UP!

Setting life up is everything. In order for your toddler to be able to act her age, her world must be set up with proper fences (boundaries) which prevent her from getting to places where acting her age will be dangerous to her or cause a problem for us. If we set things up properly, we won't have to spend most of her day asking her to not act her age, (In toddler world, anything that is visible is doable. She is not trying to drive us crazy, just acting her age. Most, if not all, of what our parents referred to as "misbehavior" was in fact us acting our age when they didn't have it set up correctly.) I think there is a very real possibility, that if we spend much of every day say "Stop that!", "Get out of there!", "Don't do that!" or "I told you not to go in there", that our child may well decide that we don't like who she is and decide to be someone else, for example, "the perfect first child".

4. Whenever possible, avoid labeling your child. Words like good, big, pretty, and smart are all value judgments and can give a child the impression that we are in change of his value. When we measure children with words, they learn to come to us to find out if they have value. "Do you like my clothes?", "What do you think about my report card?", "Do you like this picture I drew?", or "Are you happy that I poop in the potty?" are all requests for measurement by someone other than self. It conditions our child to be "too concerned" about what other people think and to expect to be measured by others. Thus they may spend much or all of their time making others happy without realizing that happiness comes from within. (And the other they choose to be measured by, such as a boss or job, may not be those that really matter most, i.e. wife or children.) 

5. Listening to what our toddlers have to say, even if it's a strong irrational opinion which is the definition of a tantrum, will go a long way toward helping them to develop a strong self and good boundaries. Too many of us first children have struggled much of our life with saying "no" or saying what we really think. Another reason to learn to listen to them early in their lives is the adage that "if we listen to them at 3, they might listen to us at 13".

 

The four books:

1. John Bradshaw On the Family

2. William Sammons The Self-Calmed Baby

3. Wayne Dyer What Do You Really Want for Your Children

4. Daniel Siegel Parenting From the Inside Out