Kids and
Energy
I’m not
sure why, maybe because it’s summer, I’m getting a lot of
questions and stories about kids and energy. I’ll put them
all under that broad category but there have been several
different subcategories discussed: kids and ADHD, kids and
anger management, and kids and computers.
Kids and
ADHD
Let’s start with kids and
ADHD. There seems to be a big trend here in the US of
drugging our children so they can “control” their behavior
in school. I am NOT in favor of this practice.
Why is there such an epidemic
of ADHD diagnoses in our children? I don’t want to
oversimplify but I believe one reason is that our children
don’t have the opportunities they had in previous
generations to run around and expend their
energy.
In years past, kids got to
play in the parks, in the streets and in their own yards.
Today, that happens less and less. Parents are too afraid
to allow their children to be outside unsupervised, and
rightly so! There are predators out there who would do your
children harm. However, kids still need to expend their
energy, somehow.
So, many times the activities
available to them at home are sedentary, such as playing
video games, watching television, talking on their cell
phones or using the home computer. None of this provides
opportunity to release energy, unless your children are
like my niece who paces vigorously while talking on the
phone.
Then we send them to school
and expect them to sit down and be quiet. In addition, many
schools are reducing the amount of physical education time
for our kids and I’ve even seen recently that some schools
forbid children to run at recess or use certain playground
equipment because they fear of physical injury lawsuit. Is
it any wonder our children are having
difficulty?
Now I know there are parents
and teachers out there who have stories of children who
have been helped immensely by the addition of Ritalin,
Adderall, Concerta or Dexedrine to their daily diet. If you
know a child who is being helped by his or her medication,
I’m not saying to discontinue it but for every child who is
being helped, I believe there are at least three others who
are still exhibiting all the ADHD behavior the medication
was designed to reduce.
There have been studies done
on placebo medications that show that in double blind
studies, when neither the patient nor the doctor knew
whether the patient was getting the actual drug or the
placebo, the ones getting the placebo actually did better.
Is it possible there is a placebo effect with some
children?
If your child displays what
you or the teachers believe is an excessive amount of
energy, do your best to create situations where that child
can expend energy. I have two boys who could both have been
diagnosed with ADHD as children. They were very physical.
Luckily, I lived in the country during a time when parents
sent their kids out the door to simply “play.” I also spent
a lot of my spare time running them around to different
athletic events—YMCA soccer, wrestling, flag football,
T-ball, basketball, you get the idea. This definitely
helps.
Kids and Anger
Management
I spoke with a woman over the
weekend whose son is 10 years-old and she says has anger
management issues. We didn’t really get into his specific
behaviors but it caused me to reflect on some inherent
differences between males and females.
I think that from very early
on, boys and girls deal with their anger differently. As a
general rule, girls need to talk about it to feel better,
while boys need to work it out physically.
So if you have daughters, you
want to teach them verbal skills to be able to work out
their frustrations but with boys, you will need to provide
opportunities for them to work out their anger
physically—maybe with a punching bag, racquetball, running,
or martial arts. The list of possibilities is truly endless
but don’t expect your boys to “talk about it,” at least not
until they’ve had the opportunity to release the anger in a
safe physical manner.
Kids and
Computers
This week, a mother contacted
me about her child disobeying her limits with the home
computer and sneaking time beyond her allowed
limit.
In this situation, the mother
had a need to protect and nurture her child. She wants to
be able to loosely supervise her daughter’s time on the
computer to possibly prevent her from falling prey to
adults who victimize children by finding their victims on
the Internet. She also wants to support her child’s need
for physical activity so she restricts her computer usage
and encourage outside physical activities instead. Is this
mother wrong? Absolutely not.
Her daughter, on the other
hand, has a desire to be on the computer. All her friends
are on there and want to know why she isn’t. They don’t
have limits while this girl does. This girl is quite
accomplished on the computer and can build website pages
for her friends. She also has a high need for freedom and
doesn’t like being restricted and the computer is plain fun
to her. She gets her love & belonging, power, freedom
and fun needs met with the computer. Is she wrong?
Absolutely not.
How does it get resolved? I
think the way to resolve this issue is for the mother and
daughter to sit down and talk about what each other needs
and wants in the situation. If the child can convince her
mother that she has the skills and knowledge necessary to
protect herself from predators and she agrees to engage in
other healthy activities each day, then her mother could
relax her restriction on the amount of time she has on the
computer.
In this case, and many others
like it, the daughter wouldn’t be able to meet her freedom
need with the computer if there wasn’t a rule to break.
Sometimes we create the very behavior we are trying to stop
with the rules we make. When a person has a high need for
freedom, they will inevitably break the rules, particularly
the ones they don’t like or that don’t make
sense.
Parenting is one of the
hardest jobs you’ll ever do and the stakes are incredibly
high. We all do the best we can and hope for good results.
Fortunately, when we have good intentions are kids
generally survive in even thrive.
About
the Author:
Kim has a graduate degree in
counseling and works with parents and children helping them
with their communication skills ultimately leading to an
improvement in their relationships. Sign up for her free
teleclass Empowerment Parenting at
http://www.therelationshipcenter.biz/EmpowerParenting.htm
Read more
articles by:
Kim
Olver
Article Source:
www.iSnare.com
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