Empathic Parenting Blog

We got home late last night from a three-day music festival that we attend every year with my mom, a 60-something tie-dye making hippie that comes each year and camps with us, all the way to staying up until 2am in the rain to get the best spots the next day.

For the second year in a row, my son brought along a friend and they stayed in their own tent, which they pitched with reminders to me that I was NOT to help, they wanted to do it on their own (though as it began to rain they did let us help make it go a bit faster).  At the end of the festival, they took it down as well, albeit a bit sleep deprived, spacey, and with some grumbling and sighing.

Unfortunately, it was one of the rainiest festivals on record, so we were all cold and damp despite amazingly effective modern tent technology.  The boys did decide to go back with Dad to sleep in a real bed one night and get dry clothes as they had already blown through their extra sets.  (I think Dad was the one that wanted to go home the most).  Heck, most of the festival goers were doing the same thing.  But they came back the next day, grinning and ready to jump in the river.

As usual, my mom and I got into…well, not quite heated, but let’s just say animated, parenting conversations.  We concluded that we have different beliefs about the reasons behind behavior and the way children learn.  I don’t want to speak for her opinions, but I see much of behavior being need-based and development-based, with habit playing a much smaller part; I believe it is far less important to drill in proper behavior as I believe it will come with time, modeling, and relationship-building. We discussed the example of a small child whining for what they want, and I maintained that although I would talk about whining not being the best way to induce me to want to help, I wouldn’t have a strict policy of not giving things to a child that is whining, because I believe the whining is not nearly as much a product of habit as a product of not feeling heard.  As discussions with family go, this one was a fairly calm and relaxed one, and we went on to have a lovely weekend despite the rain.

Driving home, my mom commented on how “good” the boys had been.  “They were running around in wet clothes and not even complaining about the cold, and they hardly needed you or bugged you for things all weekend.”  (Of course she didn’t see the too-much-sugar, lack-of-sleep induced meltdown at the end where my son was demanding that I take him home instead of his father).

Well, let’s see…they were more self-sufficient than the previous year - my son’s anxiety is much improved and he is now happy to take lots of money and order his own food from the food booths.  They were more responsible than ever; they carefully followed the “stick together” rule and we only misplaced his friend once briefly due to parental error in not defining what “together” meant.  (They were browsing shops and got separated by the crowd).   My son was less-anxious and less rigid about his expectations.

But they are eleven!  They are growing up…they do that.  I didn’t drill in responsibility and self-sufficiency.  That is something they developed all on their own.  All I had to do was “hold the rope” and let out a little at a time as they were ready to handle more.  And as for the cold, my son was tolerating it not because I had carefully trained him not to complain, but because he doesn’t mind cold.  He never has.  If he had, he would have put on more layers.

Luckily for my sanity, this visit my mom was only seeing the positives, and I probably should have just taken the desperately desired credit toward my good parenting.  But most often, we look at the negatives.  Does the fact that the children didn’t pack well enough reflect on my lack of proper teaching, or more likely, on lack of making him do his own packing most of the time (since I often help or do much of it for him)?  Does the meltdown at the end of the weekend mean he is too attached to me and I should have set firmer boundaries?  My son accurately pointed out that I hadn’t spent any time with him all weekend…perhaps  (to someone that is not paying attention since usually it is the former I’m accused of, but just for the sake of argument) I’m too hands-off and selfish, and making dad do all the work.   And what horrible habits am I creating by letting him “give up” and go home, and then come back for the fun part?

Or maybe, he is just 11.  Self-sufficient some of the time, responsible some of the time, and also tired, sugar-sensitive, and demanding some of the time.  Heck, I’m 40, and I have to admit, I’m the exact same way.  And I don’t think it’s because my mother indulges me when I whine.

With summer in full swing, I thought it would be a good time for musing (ok, I won’t lie to you…a rant!) about our culture and the importance we place on water tolerance in our children. The topic of swimming lessons seems to appear on parenting lists annually at about the same time my roses are just starting to bud, and I remember all the angst I had around this issue. Now, I look back on my former self and wish I could say, “what’s the big deal?”

Our son did swimming lessons as a baby but not enough that it made any difference. Not that I knew that; I vacillated between thinking that if we had persevered, he would have loved water, and thinking his fear must be my fault for dunking him a few times against his will or bringing him in the first place. He was a bit afraid of water for a while - mainly getting his head wet - and I thought I must have been totally neglectful to have a child that didn’t even like baths all that much. The truth was though there were several months between the end of swimming lessons and the beginning of this fear, and in hindsight, I believe his sensory sensitivities were just getting started then and it may not have had anything to do with my parenting.

We tried swimming lessons again when he was a little older but he had a lot of separation anxiety (still does sometimes - he’s 11 :). After I peeled him off me and assured him that he would be fine (as good moms were “supposed” to do), he dutifully and daringly jumped off the edge into the water, holding his nose and squeezing his eyes tightly shut (this was before we discovered goggles), to high praise and kudos from both us and the instructor. Of course, this was only in the baby pool so the water was about a foot deep and only came to the top of his legs. When we talked about the next swimming class level where you have to jump in and actually go under, he went into a panic.

Now don’t get me wrong - I think swimming lessons are a wonderful thing when they work for children! If your child happily splashes into the pool with only a few unsure protests and a quick backward glance, and you get to sit and page through a magazine, or better yet get a little exercise yoursef, it can be a great opportunity! What I have an issue with is the implication that it is the duty of the parent and that Dire Things may happen if your child is not in swimming lessons each summer. My experience is that it is just not true.

We have this culture that says children have to learn to swim “for safety” at a young age but truth be told, I don’t think we ever actually are able to “count” on that safety anyway - it’s not like we leave them alone in water, just like we don’t let them play in the front yard by the street even if we teach them not to run into it. So then the argument of “but their friends will be able to swim and it will be embarrassing” comes up. My experience though, is that it’s not the children that are embarrassed. Our son wore his “floatie” vest for about 3 years longer than similar aged children before he decided he didn’t need it anymore. No - his concern was the lack of water gun that “all the other kids had”. All concern and competition about who can swim and who can’t was coming from the sidelines of the pool.

He’s 11 now, and loves water and can swim just fine. Floaties are a thing of the past. He still carefully considers whether the wet feeling of the swimsuit, the annoyance of sunscreen, and the hassle of it all are worth the amount of time he will spend in the water. And, he rarely goes in water without a tightly fitted pair of goggles as he hates water in his eyes. Every once in a while the old feelings bubble up (shouldn’t he know how to dive by now? what will the other children think?) but overall, I’ve learned to trust that he will learn what he needs when he is ready. Yesterday, we went to a lake party, and he cautiously and then gracefully stood on top of a sail board (sans sail) and paddled himself around, announcing matter-of-factly afterwards, “I actually have quite good balance, mom.” I even saw him jump from the floating dock into water over his head - without his goggles. (It was probably too far back to be worth the effort of retrieving them).

(And since this is admittedly a rant, can I just comment on showers and baths? Often these same kids don’t like those either. We sometimes went months between hair washing. I kid you not. I eagerly latched onto philosophies that explained that if your child didn’t use shampoo, the scalp never became dependent on it and wouldn’t need it. I quietly panicked when friends would imply I was setting him up for failure as an adolescent, because puberty would necessitate hair washing frequently. And what has happened?  He recently discovered that he enjoys showers, though only in one shower in the house - the last holdout of the full-water usage shower heads era. Apparently, this too will resolve itself).

So what do I recommend for parents who have children with “water issues”? Trust, trust, trust. I do believe in exposure if possible; otherwise it is easy to fall into fear of the unknown. But any time you push a child past the point of discomfort and into actual fear, I believe the lesson is actually hurtful rather than helpful. So keep coming back to trust. Offer lots of opportunities but don’t be upset when they aren’t accepted. Keep encouraging them to try, but with an attitude of, “I know you’ll be able to when you are ready”. I know that they will.

Recent events have had me wondering about the nature of fear and how we tend to either judge or affirm fear, but rarely to just accept it or use it productively.

For a few months, my son has had a strong fear of wind; in particularly, he has been afraid of a tornado looming. No amount of reassurance would help. Even if it were just ordinary wind, he would start to panic. He would explain, in what we viewed as a paranoid way, that it didn’t matter if it was sunny out - if we were getting wind, there could be a tornado right behind it, and we were not as protected as we thought by the mountains. Although (or perhaps because) he had watched Storm Chasers, it felt like he was taking things a bit over the top.

It got to the point that he requested we find him help with this fear, as it felt out of control even to him. (His words were that it was ruining 20% of his life). Finally, appealing to his scientist side, we pulled up a national tornado database, and showed him that in 56 years, out of more than 49,000 tornadoes recorded in the US, there had been only one that was quite close, and it was an F0 in 2000. There had also been an F2 (capable of significant damage but not severe) out on the plains, but we explained again that tornadoes generally just don’t come into the foothills. And we got him the requested therapy as well.

So today is the day I turned 40 and it dawned as a drizzly but ordinary day. (And I mean this fairly literally, as I actually was up around dawn walking in prep for the Bolder Boulder). The sun even came out for quite a while before noon. And then, a friend called and said, “There is a tornado watch in effect; you might want to go down to the basement and keep the TV off so he doesn’t get scared.” When my husband reported that all of his large company had been herded into the middle of the buildings, I realized I couldn’t keep it secret. Our son, rather calmly, collected up his guinea pigs, Web kin z, and trading cards, and we went to the basement. Every time we came up it would get scary again and we would go back down. We kept hearing of a huge, 1 mile wide tornado that might be coming our way (it ended up traveling 35 miles). The clouds were moving as if in timelapse and the sound when we opened a door was almost screeching. We weren’t even all that close to any of the tornadoes, but no thanks to the mountains. The largest inflicted damage in towns around us (primarily Windsor, about 15 miles southeast) and even touched down in the northern part of our own, then continued north into WY. A second, even larger but not as strong, touched down in the town 10 miles south. There ended up being 6 tornadoes reported, the largest causing horrible damage and one fatality. Tentative reports guess it as an F3. It was reported on CNN and declared a disaster. My friend has almost baseball-sized hail in her freezer as a keepsake.

Given my relief that we weren’t in the path, I have no problem saying we were wrong and our son was right. A tornado could hit anywhere, and did. It could be a strong one, and was.

I’m a strong believer in fear as a valuable indicator that we shouldn’t ignore or dismiss, though that is exactly what we told him to do, and I’m not sure how we got away from that or what we might have done instead. However, in one fell swoop (so to speak) a missing part of my faith (in children) was restored and yet my bedrock of knowing what is real and what is not was severely shaken.

It was eery having it happen on my birthday. I’ll never know if our son was paranoid, or precognitive. Some things you just can’t know, I guess. Like when a tornado might hit.

My son and I have a bet going right now as to who will be able to go the longest without eating sweets. I went into this knowing he would win, but I’m alright with that.

It was his idea; he had just come back from a birthday party during which he had eaten 3 huge cookies, 2 slices of pizza, 3 small glasses of soda, and a slice of cake. I had just confiscated his 4th cookie, which I knew was the right choice by how quickly the objections - always loud and angry - tapered off. (I just had to get him separated from that “next-bite” craving for a few minutes while it subsided and then he realized how yucky he actually felt. I know this well, because I myself go through it frequently).

Of course, I then started in on the lectures….how he would crash tomorrow and to expect it (yes, despite my best intentions I had an “Look what you’ve done/I told you so” tone). How he would be craving sugar all day. I admitted that I shouldn’t have had the proffered piece of cake either, and certainly not the large cookie I grabbed off the tray after that (let’s not mention the Starbucks bar in the morning), and that I too would be craving sugar all day the next day. (Check.) Continuing the lecture, I told him how it was OK to indulge once in a while, which was why I hadn’t tried to get him to restrict his sweets before the party. (Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. I figured if I told him to restrict his sweets, he probably would have eaten more in response. I knew it was pointless in any case). However, I continued, it’s important to then eat healthily for a while, and because I had indulged so much, I would be trying not to eat sweets for a while.

And so started our bet - $1 from whoever ate sweets first (or in his case, 20 minutes of extra work, as I pay him $3/hour for helping with whatever I want done - though I do tip a bit for cleaning bathrooms!).

This time, I know he’ll win. When he was little, we always let him win because we figured he gets plenty of losing just through life itself and we didn’t need to add any. But, he has grown out of the need to win all the time. No, the reason I know he’ll win is that when he makes up his mind to do something, he does it, and I am horrible at resisting sweets. (I don’t know why I have this expectation that he should be able to do it naturally). Hopefully, I’ll be able to do so long enough that we will at least both be through the cravings and then he will have at least one example of *choosing* to avoid sweets for a while, rather than having it imposed on him.

So far, it is going well. He came up this morning with ribbon tied on each index finger. “No sugar!” he announced. He has been verifying that nothing I offer has sugar in it. And yesterday, he said, to my joy as a mother and dismay as a chocolate lover, “We should do this every week. Then allow ourselves a treat once a week, but not eat sugar the rest of the time.” I’m not sure I can last that long but it’s a wonderful flip of positions from a parenting standpoint!

We hear a lot about having expectations for our children - not long term aspirations or dreams, but expectations that they will be kind and responsible; that they will pick up their toys and sit quietly at the dinner table. I’ve heard Alfie Kohn mention the importance of having expectations several times, and I strongly agree with the sentiment as he has described it.

Yet, somehow I always get stuck on the word “expectations”. Someone asked me what my problem with the word “expectations” is, and I wasn’t quite sure myself. I just had a niggling disconnect that I couldn’t identify whenever I heard it used, kind of like when you are searching for a word and everyone gives you one that is close, but just not quite what you are looking for; almost as if the energy around the word felt wrong to me. So, I looked it up.

(http://thesaurus.reference.com/)

Several of these definitions have connotations which don’t feel right to me in the context of parenting, and they are the ones that make the word bother me - apprehension, assumption, presumption, and fear. Yet these are exactly where I often see myself and other parents go when we hold expectations of children.

When the child doesn’t meet our expectations - doesn’t cooperate with toy cleanup efforts or doesn’t sit quietly at dinner (or worse, plays with food or runs around yelling like a banshee), we sometimes assume there is something wrong with them or with us as parents. Then the fear sets in, and often our expectations turn into doubts and resentments rather than something that empowers our children to reach for their best. To be effective, expectations have to be in the present, not in the past or future.

Furthermore, expectations tend to be interpreted as static, whereas I see them as fluid and situational. Which expectations a child will be able to meet depend on the child’s age, state of mind and health, etc.

Lastly, often expectations have a societal meaning that carries an assumption of “right and wrong” rather than what is effective for a given family. There are even expectations placed on the parent’s expectations.

However, the positives are in this definition too - belief, confidence, hope, intention, and trust. How can we combine these with a strong view of what we want from children? Aspirations comes close for me, but seem too far in the future.

I also found quite a few quotes about expectation:

“Anger always comes from frustrated expectations” - Elliott Larson

“Keep high aspirations, moderate expectations, and small needs”- William Howard Stein

“We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.” - Samuel Johnson

“High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.” - Charles F. Kettering

“It is generally known, that he who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any effect other than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation” - Samuel Johnson

“The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.” - Seneca (Roman philosopher, mid-1st century AD)

“Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation” - Charlotte Bronte

“Hope is a desire with an expectation of accomplishment.” - Unknown

And then of course, my long-time and oft-quoted favorite:

“Expectations are resentments under construction.”

In short, expectations can generate fear, doubt, and guilt if they are incorrectly used (like any other parenting concept, I suppose). Personally, I would rather choose something that empowers both myself and my child.

What I am looking for is a word that conveys a concept that Wayne Dyer talks about a lot (perhaps he uses a word that I’ve not ‘caught’ yet?), where one can simultaneously hold a view and expectation of what is wanted while also trusting and believing that it is on it’s way and that the current moment is exactly as it is supposed to be. If anyone comes up with such a word, please let me know!

Until then, I’ll continue to have expectations, but I’m going to make sure they are helpful ones. There are enough “should’s” in life without having to heap on some more.

I’ve realized there is a subtle but ubiquitous set of best practices that tends to circulate around most positive discipline communities that many of us take for granted and become judgmental about despite our best intentions. Recently I’ve been breaking something I’ve always taken as one of these truisms of positive parenting.

In my work, two primary goals are non judgment and respect, for both parents and children. This means that my basic assumption is that I don’t know the “right” answer for anyone else. (I often am not sure I know it even for myself, but that’s another post!) I find this to be very effective in coaching, because so frequently the presenting issue (potty training, sleep issues, tantrums) is not the core concern (pressure to grow up too fast, lack of quality time between mom & dad, sensory issues). When I jump directly to brainstorming the answer to the problem that is presented, I will miss the core concern.

However, some practices I take for granted as more…well, effective (that’s a good thing), respectful (no problems with that) and sometimes, I must admit, more enlightened (a judgment - breaking primary principle #1). We all have these opinions, to some extent or another, and most do have very sound reasoning behind them.

Here are a few you might recognize:

• Give young children limited choices; with no choice they will not be able to feel influential nor practice good judgment; but with too many or too large of choices, they will be overwhelmed.
• Praise and rewards, particularly the ever present, “Good job!” don’t lead to intrinsic motivation, and should be be replaced with acknowledgment and appreciation.
• Don’t threaten, especially things you can never follow up on, such as “we are never going out to eat again.”

Recently I’ve noticed that as much as I try to be open-minded towards other people’s differing solutions to parenting dilemmas, I often hold myself in judgment against this unquestioned moral standard. So what is the golden rule that I’m now breaking, you might ask? It’s this - “Children should have basic responsibilities around the house, but should not be paid for basic chores (allowance should be either separate and unconditional or paid for “extra” chores), because otherwise they will not learn that they are expected to contribute to the household regardless. ” Even worse, I’ve crossed the line on the “don’t bribe your child for ordinary good behavior” rule a fair number of times recently as well.

Ok, I admit, until recently, whenever this topic has come up on emails lists, I’ve respectfully and non judgmentally thrown out these ‘PD truisms’, and yet at the same time held a small reserve of judgment toward parents that threaten their kids with loss of allowance for not doing the mundane and boring tasks that have been unilaterally assigned, much in the same way many of us look down on someone screaming at a child in the grocery store (as if to subtly imply that that has never, ever been us in that situation. Yeah, right.)

So imagine my inner conflict when I find myself pragmatically paying my child, albeit 20 cents here, 40 cents there, to cooperate with expected outings, or to do small tasks.

The reason and the details of my breaking of this rule would get us sidetracked, and would sound like an excuse and thereby dilute my point. Which is this. We simply cannot know the right answer for another family. (Although, I will admit we can know some very wrong answers - but I’m not talking about those - I’m talking about the more subtle stuff).

This isn’t a change in philosophy. I still believe that in many cases it doesn’t make sense to pay children for things we want them to do habitually and routinely. Rather, this is a yet another spiral on the attitude that I’m trying to reach, and can only come closer and closer to - non judgment.

So the next time you are faced with listening to a parent describe a solution that you don’t agree with, stay open minded. Truly accept that they are the best equipped to make their own best decisions, and then get curious about why this works for them. They will appreciate the nonjudgmental listening, and you may even surprise yourself by agreeing with them in the end. And if not, you will most likely have more conviction about the rightness of your own solution for your family, and the reasons why you chose it.

I had to let some angels go today.  It was hard to see them go.

About 3 months ago,my son made a beautiful safety-pin beaded angel for our tree, and decided he wanted to make many of them - 18 more, once he counted, recounted, and adjusted all the people he would give them to for Christmas.

Of course, the store didn’t have 18 angel kits, and cost would have been too high anyway.  On the other hand, they would need to be exactly the same or it wouldn’t be “proper” in his eyes.  I carefully went around to different hobby stores and found almost all of the parts - proud of myself for using coupons and only spending $30-40 when it could have been much more (and not noticing the almost-manic way I was wasting time on them).  In typical fashion, by the time I had all the materials ready, and had modified the pattern to account for the missing pieces, he had lost interest in something he was starting to believe was no longer his project, anyway.

For the last couple weeks, as I have increasingly reminded (well, bugged) him to make the angels and he has been similarly increasing in his unwillingness to work on them, thoughts of following through with one’s plans, using the materials one has bought, etc have danced in my head, taunting me.   It seems this is a skill I must teach my son.  Not, of course, that I have learned it - just look at my crafting stash!

Today I realized the silliness of holding on to this idea.  If I look at the $35 in the scheme of things, it really isn’t a big deal (let’s not compare to all the supplements we are currently throwing money at, shall we?) Maybe we will make angels another year.  Maybe not.  But, I have to stop blaming him for the time I spent running around, gathering materials; it was my choice.   And more importantly, I need to have empathy for a trait that I myself have in spades.

My undone projects give me the magic of possibility waiting at my fingertips.  I love my yarn stash, my stamps and glitters, my bits and pieces of fabric.  Anyway, they will make a lovely home for the angels to play in, now that I have set them free.

The Straw Trick

My son takes quite a few supplements despite having a very strong gag reflex. Here is a trick that he figured out that makes taking pills so much easier, as well as some other ways of getting in supplements.

Find a big, fat straw - I got them from Amazon (here’s a direct link) but my MIL has straws that were used to hold up flower stems and they work OK - check a florist. (I don’t know what kind of plastic they are, and they crack quickly, so if the trick works, it’s worth a pack of straws). Sometimes you can get fat straws from a quick-mart type place in a drink. We wash and reuse ours for quite a while.

Put the straw in juice (we use a tall, skinny glass), and put a capsule into the straw. Try it yourself first. Put the pill all the way down the straw - most pills float but keep the straw firmly touching the glass. The child can practice with small candies, but they must be slippery - no chewables or tablets, even if they taste good! (This is important at first, because if the pill gets stuck at the back of the throat, it feels strange and the child may not want to try anything else for a while.

Now, simply suck up juice and pill together. The straw puts it right on the perfect place of the tongue for swallowing. Some people are concerned the child might choke, but our mouths are trained from an early age to swallow whatever the straw puts there.

Why must it be a capsule to start? These are so much more slippery than tablets plus they don’t have any flavor. Softgels work well too, but do often have flavor, so try these after capsules. There are three ways to deal with tablets:

• If the child takes other large capsules (for example 1g Vit C) we open it up, and stuff a small tablet inside it. Because the capsule has powder in it, there is a little extra space, plus there is more overlap between the two halves of the capsule than is truly needed so the capsule just gets a bit longer. This works well for many medications, as the pills are fairly small, and often have a “split line” so you can easily break them into halves.
• If a larger pill is not a capsule, I cut it in half if needed (as long as it isn’t time release), and I put it into an empty capsule (you can dump out one of a less-expensive supplement to to see if the trick works). Empty capsules can be saved from when you make fruit smoothies, or can be purchased in different sizes from most health food stores and vitamin shops.
• Lastly, some children, especially after using this method a while, can take capsules straight into the straw. (We have a B complex that doesn’t fit in a capsule that my son now takes this way). What I do with most tablets is go to a health food / vitamin store and look for empty capsules. put the straw in juice, the pill down the straw, and suck it up into the mouth. Find a capsule that will fit your pill.

I’ve started buying everything I can in capsules, but for those that I can’t I have mastered the art of squeezing in lots of different things into capsules.

Other Tricks

Splitting capsules: If you have two capsules the same size (one might be empty), you can split them into 2 doses fairly easily by opening the capsule and distributing the powder between the two halves, and then putting an empty half capsule on each end. You can repeat for smaller splits, though you will use a lot of empties. It’s not exact, of course, but many things absorb better in multiple doses.

Distraction: I find my son takes his supplements more easily if he is watching TV and I put the straw under his mouth (once he knows the trick of course) because he is not thinking about it or tensing up his body. (Ditto with not-so-great tasting fruit shakes).

Fruit smoothies are a great way to hide supplements. If your supplements taste bad, you’ll want to use frozen fruit because it numbs the taste buds. (However, an interesting note is that our taste buds often don’t object to supplements we really need - e.g., one way my practitioner tests if I need zinc is to put some on my tongue (a special formulation) - if it tastes horrible you don’t need zinc!). I can’t stand the taste of fish oil in smoothies, but my son doesn’t hardly notice.Overripe bananas are great for sweetening smoothies - slice them into a freezer bag whenever they are spotted brown and no-one wants to eat them.

It’s possible to make smoothies in a blender, of course, but if you have a hand (immersion) blender they make fabulous smoothies. My basic recipe is:

• 1/2 cup whole yogurt on the bottom
• a few chunks frozen banana
• a handful of frozen berries, peaches, or other fruit
• supplements (e.g., powders or opened capsules, liquid fish oil, whey protein powder, magnesium drink mix, Vitamin C, etc)
• Other foods you want to hide (raw tofu, raw egg yolk, frozen cubes of vegies)
• Enough milk (if supplements are too sour) or juice (if it is too bland) to make it blend well

Blend thoroughly, stopping every few seconds to get the air bubble out and adding a little more liquid if needed. I’ll add a little sweetener sometimes at the end after taste testing (or more banana). Sometimes a bit of lemon juice is helpful to make it more “intense” - though it will require more sweetener, it will cover more other tastes as well.

When I use an immersion blender, the consistency is almost like soft-serve ice cream and can be eaten with a spoon.

If fruit shakes are used for “dosed” supplements, it can get tricky if you make too much fruit shake. In this case you might make the fruit shake for the family, and add the child’s supplements after most has been poured out. For non “dosed” amounts, where you just want to get some nutrition in, you can freeze extra fruit shake into cubes, and re-blend them later.

Enzymes: Enzymes shouldn’t be put in fruit shakes because they quickly get activated by the liquid and make the whole thing taste awful. But, they can be mixed into anything fatty such as nut butter or chocolate as fat doesn’t activate them. Or you can use the Straw Trick. There are more tricks on enzymestuff.com for enzymes as well as lots of information.

One of the biggest concepts I’ve been pondering on lately and would love discussion on, is the idea that children are great just as they are, and how to integrate this idea with helping them grow at the same time.

Some of us went to a talk by Jonathan Mooney recently (a fabulous speaker) and he emphasized how normal is an illusion based on a “norm” that often doesn’t make sense, and how children should be celebrated for who they are rather than pushed to be otherwise. It very much hit home for me. So what if my 5th grader is not ready to stay overnight at a camp? It doesn’t mean he won’t be able to when he is ready. Heck, this speaker stretched my understanding even further. As parents we often console ourselves with the thought that “well, he won’t be needing this by the time he goes off to college”. That argument, I find, is starting to get a little stretched as the teen years loom. But as Mooney points out, we don’t all have to be good at everything. His mother helped him spell check his papers in college and now his wife spell-checks his books (as he is dyslexic). Even as a Honors graduate in English Lit from an Ivy League school, he doesn’t really need to know how to spell.

But I especially find this concept difficult with a child that struggles with a lot of anxiety and depression. I don’t think accepting him for who he is means watching him suffer, yet how can you help a child through this without sending the message that something needs fixing, something is broken? And what if the child *says* something needs fixing? “You are great just as you are” only goes so far when one is never invited to birthday parties and one’s best friend goes to them almost weekly.

Perhaps there is no clear answer on this - perhaps it is just one of those lines that requires constant balance.