Helping Children to Thrive Despite Early Struggles

Relationships serve as the active ingredient in our development, writes Sara Langworthy, author of Bridging the Relationship Gap.

“The beauty of being human is that we constantly evolve and change. We have experiences every day that can alter the course of our lives to help us rebuild what was broken and rediscover what was lost. We, as humans, are never irreparably broken because our brains and bodies are built to change and adapt. And young children are often able to change more easily than the rest of us, when makes the earliest years of life the most full of hope. The key to that hope is in relationships.”
- Sara E. Langworthy, Bridging the Relationship Gap: Connecting with Children Facing Adversity

Not every child has an easy start in life. Bad things can and do happen—and often despite the best intentions of those who care about that child.

The good news is that a warm relationship with a caring adult can make a world of difference for a child who has faced early struggles.

That’s a message that comes through loud and clear in Sara E. Langworthy’s practical and hope-filled book Bridging the Relationship Gap: Connecting with Children Facing Adversity (St. Paul, MN: Redleaf Press, 2015): a guide to fostering recovery and resilience in children who have experienced trauma or other adverse childhood experiences. 

Langworthy has a gift for choosing the perfect analogy to bring complicated and abstract concept to life. Consider, for example, the way she explains the transformative power of relationships on the life of a child. Just as baking powder is “the active ingredient in cake batter that is necessary for your cake to rise properly…relationships serve as that active ingredient in our development,” she writes. 

While this book is intended for early childhood educators and others who work with young children, many of the messages will resonate powerfully with parents as well, thanks to the tone of acceptance and compassion for parents and for children that permeates every page of this book. “Begin with the assumption that every family is doing the best they can given the context in which they live,” Langworthy tells her readers. Likewise, treat children who are struggling as “resilient, active creators of their own lives” rather than “passive, needy receivers of assistance.”

Langworthy has written a practical and compassionate guide that is deeply rooted in messages of hope and possibility: “Despite living in a world fraught with the pain and suffering of trauma and loss, we must cling to the hope of the possibility of change,” she tells us. The book then spells out the recipe for change -- one that is powered by the ultimate "active ingredient": relationships.

Q & A with Sara Langworthy

I recently had the opportunity to connect with Sara Langworthy by video conference. I found her to be every bit as warm, caring, and genuine in conversation as she is in her book. Our conversation inspired me to want to explore a couple of the issues raised in her book in greater depth, so I followed up with her by e-mail, asking her if she’d mind answering a couple of additional questions for me. What follows are my questions and her answers.

Your book really emphasizes the potential for early childhood educators and others working with young children to transform children’s lives through the power of relationship. What do you want these professionals to know about their impact and importance? 

I think this question raises such an important point about the hard work of early care providers: They are often forgotten. Because children are so young when they are in early childhood settings, they often don't remember their teachers in the same way that they'll go on to remember their teachers later in life. It's also tough because early care providers don't often get to see how their kiddos turn out when they grow older. Providers don't get to know if the children they cared for went off to college, got an awesome job, or had families of their own. They don't get to see the effect they had on those children blossom over time. 

But we know from the research on early relationships that those connections are some of the most formative and important for later health, achievement and wellness. The multitude of hours care providers spend working hard to connect with and teach young children - even and especially those children who are hard to work with - are hugely important for setting kids up for success later on. Even though children may not remember you, your care, attention, and teaching have long-lasting effects on who they grow to be. 

You also talk about the importance of self-care. What advice would you offer to professionals who are tempted to put self-care on the back burner?

Self-care can be so hard! I'm no expert in effective self-care myself, but one thing I hear over and over again is that it's impossible to care well for others if you are not caring for yourself first. But even if you agree with that sentiment, it can be really hard to operationalize self-care in your own life. It can feel selfish or indulgent to take that time to care for your own needs, be they physical, emotional, intellectual, or social when there are so many others in need your care and attention. But truly, you are only able to be your professional best when you give yourself the time and attention you need to be your personal best.

One important point about self-care: it looks different for everyone. The self-care activities might be different (time with friends, getting a massage, taking a night off, watching a movie, going for a run, seeing a therapist, etc.). But also the amount of time you spend on self-care to feel at your best might be different from other people. That's okay! I tend to think that I actually need more self-care time than a lot of people to remain balanced. I have a hard time not feeling guilty about that, but I'm learning that taking that time for myself makes me more effective in my work AND in my play. 

You're also never going to get it right all the time. That's okay too! Give yourself permission to fall down and mess up sometimes. Despite feeling like I was pretty good at maintaining balance and taking care of myself, I learned in a really big way recently that I needed some recalibration of my own. I wrote about it over on my blog on Medium, but essentially it took falling into a pit to realize that everything was not okay. I'm still working my way out of that pit, but I'm learning so much about myself and what I need in terms of self-care because of that experience. Know that just because you mess up (and you will mess up), it doesn't mean you're a permanent failure, or that you're not worthy of the care you need to feel better in your own life. Take that time in the ways you need. That is MORE than just okay. It's essential. 

Reviewed by Ann Douglas, author, Parenting Through the Storm.

Because How You Tell a Story Matters

How you tell a story matters -- a lot.

When I made the decision to tell my family's story in my book Parenting Through the Storm, I knew I needed to do so in a way that was rooted in love and respect.

I also felt the same way about sharing the stories that other families entrusted me with during the researching of my book: that I had a responsibility to honour their experiences by treating their stories with every bit as much care and respect. This is something I wrote about in a recent post for the Images + Voices of Hope (IVOH) blog: a post that talks about how restorative narrative made it possible for me to tell my family's story.

About restorative narrative

Not familiar with the concept of restorative narrative? It is all about finding strength in the midst of struggle; on seeing resilience rather than brokenness. And it doesn't do so in some superficial, Pollyanna way. "[Restorative narratives] don’t ignore the difficult situation that a person or a community has endured. They explore the rough emotional terrain of the situation, but instead of focusing on what’s broken, they focus on what’s being rebuilt. They reveal hope and possibilities," IVOH explains. 

I am sharing this information with you for a couple of reasons.

1. I'm hoping you'll be inspired to look for the strength in your own struggles (because we all have struggles) and that you'll adopt a similarly generous perspective when considering the experiences of other families and communities. 
2. I want to spread the word about the very important work that IVOH is doing with regard to restorative narrative and to encourage you to find out more about what they're doing to reframe the stories our media are telling us about ourselves. And if you happen to be a journalist who is intrigued by the entire idea of restorative narrative (it stole my heart the moment I learned about it!), then you'll also want to know about IVOH's call for applications for its restorative narrative fellowship (which provides you with funding to pursue a story that matters to you and support in telling that story in the context of restorative narrative); and IVOH's annual media summit (which brings together people who are passionate about storytelling approaches aimed at strengthening people, communities, and the media as a whole). I plan to attend that summit and I'll be encouraging other writers, artists, filmmakers, and change-makers to do likewise. So you can expect to hear a lot more about this from me during the months ahead.

Helping Kids to Thrive Online: Q&A with Devorah Heitner, author of Screenwise

“Kids may be tech savvy, but you have wisdom. You hold the most powerful piece of the puzzle.” 
-    Devorah Heitner, Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World

That’s a powerful and reassuring message for parents who find themselves grappling with the challenges of raising the first generation of so-called digital natives. 

As Heitner notes in this practical and supportive guide for parents, you don’t have to understand the ins and outs of every conceivable social media platform or app in order to help your child thrive online. What matters more than your own technical savvy is the life experience you bring to the table—that and your willingness to mentor and guide your child as she begins to explore the online world.

And, of course, that means accepting the fact that kids will make mistakes online, just as they make mistakes in real life. “Start from the assumption that your children want to do the right thing; they just don’t always know how,” Heitner advises. Instead of hitting the panic button when kids commits a digital faux pas, help them to figure out a better way of handling this particular situation the next time. 

The upside of going this route can be huge because your kids will be willing (and not afraid) to come to you if they encounter a situation that is too big or scary for them to handle on their own. This can be life-changing for parents and kids alike. As Heitner explains, “Even if they have done something they regret, they need to feel that they can talk to you about it. If kids don’t feel isolated, they are far less at risk.”

Having this kind of frank and open dialogue about technology (one that allows for missteps and u-turns) will also allow you to mentor your child through the process of setting limits on her digital life—an all-important skill for the next generation of digital citizens, starting in childhood. “Making the right choices about how and where to spend time is harder than ever,” Heitner explains. “Without mentorship and guidance, rabbit-hole distractions could claim large chunks of precious childhood.” 

Here’s so helping our kids to sidestep at least some of those rabbit holes. 

Q&A with Devorah Heitner, author of Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World.

Q: You spend a lot of time in your book reassuring parents that they do, in fact, have the skills they need to raise digital natives. Do you think parents feel a lot of anxiety about this — including pressure to master every conceivable platform/app? Where does that anxiety stem from?

Devorah Heitner: "The anxiety stems first from guilt. We have all been sold the idea that minimal tech for kids is 'better' parenting and that 'letting' our kids use technology 'too much' is a sign of bad parenting. That guilt is a barrier to honest conversations with other parents that could serve us well and help us encourage and support our kids in their tech pursuits rather than simply 'let' them use technology. The anxiety also comes from a feeling that things are moving faster than we can keep up with. Rather than try to keep abreast or get ahead of your child, let them teach you about the things the love, or investigate requested apps together."

Q: How can we, as parents, avoid black-and-white thinking when it comes to technology: either thinking of technology as all good or all bad? Where is the sensible middle ground?

Devorah Heitner: "You can do unwise or mean things in any social space—from Google docs to group texts to a game. You can also do lovely things and innocuous harmless things in most places. We need to recognize that reality and respond accordingly. Apps and games and search engines can all be tricky territory and kids do need mentorship. Rather than look at tech as good or bad, look at its role in your life or in a particular relationship and evaluate if something needs to change. Our kids learn a lot about how to use tech from us as their models, so we also need to be reflective about that!"

Parenting Through the Storm (American + International Edition) Has Just Been Published by Guilford Press

The US and International edition of Parenting Through the Storm by Ann Douglas has just been published by Guilford Press.

Over the past year, I've heard from a lot of parents in countries outside of Canada, wondering how they could get their hands on a copy of my book Parenting Through the Storm.

One American parent who really wanted to read the book went so far as to have a Canadian friend purchase and mail her a copy of the Canadian edition. Now that's persistence and dedication!

Well, as of this week, parents outside of Canada will no longer have to resort to such extreme measures to get their hands on a copy of the book.

The US and International Edition of Parenting Through the Storm has just been published by Guilford Press, a respected publisher of books about mental health, education, and parenting.

About the book

This is easily the most personal book I’ve ever written.

I talk about my children’s struggles, my family’s struggles, and my own struggles.

But this book is so much more than a book about struggle.

It is also a book about hope and healing and resilience—about practical things you can to do to make life better for your child and your family, starting right now, even before you have a definitive diagnosis or treatment plan in place.

A lot of that wisdom is based on the best advice of the 60 other parents I interviewed for the book—parents who bravely opened up about their families’ struggles in an effort to make things better for other parents and kids. These parents offered practical advice on everything from making sense of a child’s diagnosis to dealing with bullying to advocating for a child at school. And they offered messages of encouragement and support, like the fact that having a child who is struggling doesn’t make you a bad parent, just as being a child who is struggling doesn’t make your child a bad kid. It’s just the particular challenge your family is dealing with.

What people are saying about the book

The book attracted some very positive pre-publication reviews and it has already been featured in a few media stories, too:

• Kinstantly talked to me about what it is like to be the parent of a child who is struggling (from the vantage point of a mom of four and parenting expert who has lived through it).
• Psychology Today blogger Susan Newman (who is also a parent, author, and psychologist) wrote about the book in a post entitled 12 Warning Signs That Your Child May Have a Mental Health Issue: How's Your Parent Radar?
• Images & Visions of Hope (IVOH) invited me to write this post about the writing process -- what it was like to write about my own family's experiences as well as the experiences of other families.
• Jennifer S. Smith of the Confident Parents, Confident Kids blog invited me to contribute this guest post about teaching kids about emotions.
• The TILT Parenting podcast interviewed me about stigma: how stigma makes it harder for parents to reach out for the help and support their families need. 
• Bestselling parenting author Michele Borba interviewed me about my reasons for writing the book.

How the American edition is different from the Canadian edition (and vice versa)

I've had a few people ask me how the Canadian and American/International editions of the book are different, so I figured I should answer that question here, too. The Canadian edition of the book is, well, very Canadian. It talked a lot about the mental health and education systems in Canada, featured Canadian experts, spotlighted Canadian research and resources, and suggested some uniquely Canadian solutions to our uniquely Canadian challenges. (Hey, I told you it was very Canadian.) That book wouldn't have been particularly helpful for an American parent who was trying to make sense of American laws (think ADA, IDEA, and 504) or to figure out what supports were available to their family and their child -- and what supports should be available to their family and their child (the advocacy piece of the puzzle). That's why I had to research and rewrite large sections of the American and International edition of the book from scratch. I figure that about 75% of the content is the same for the two editions of the book and about 25% is different. 

The good news is that I didn't have to tackle these far-reaching book revisions on my own. 

As I noted in the acknowledgments for the book, it's impossible to write a book of this kind without the help of a great many people:

• the parents who trusted me with their families' stories in an effort to make things better for other families and
• the many experts I interviewed while conducting my research: Darcy Gruttadaro, director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Child and Adolescent Action Center in Arlington, Virginia; Ellen Leibenluft, chief of the Section on Bipolar Spectrum Disorders at the Emotion and Development Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health; Liza Long, mental health advocate and author of The Price of Silence; Alison Malman, executive director and founder of the campus mental health advocacy group Active Minds, Inc.; Megan McClelland, Oregon State University developmental psychologist and coauthor of Stop, Think, Act: Integrating Self-Regulation in the Early Childhood Classroom; Marilyn Price-Mitchell, developmental psychologist and author of Tomorrow’s Change Makers: Reclaiming the Power of Citizenship for a New Generation; Andrew Solomon, mental health advocate and author of The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree; Joshua Weller, assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University; and last, but certainly not least, Nancy L. Wolf, mental health advocate and founder of Your Bridge Forward, whose input into the U.S. edition of this book was truly invaluable. 

So there you have it -- the book publishing news from here! 

If you know someone who would benefit from this book (perhaps the parent of a child who is struggling, a teacher who wants to learn how to better support parents and kids who are going through a difficult time, or a clinician who would like to have a book of this kind to recommend to parents), it would be great if you would tell them about it. 

Any questions? Ask away! I'd love to hear from you.

Three Simple Yet Powerful School-Year Resolutions for Parents

The beginning of September can feel a lot like New Year’s when you’re a parent. After all, it marks the start of a whole new year — a whole new school year, in this case. So what could be fitting than taking this opportunity to make a few school-year resolutions as a family?

Not quite sure what types of resolutions to make?

Here are three simple yet powerful school-year resolutions you might want to consider making this year.

Eat together 

There’s a solid body of research to support the benefits of eating together as a family. Kids who eat dinner with their parents on a regular basis eat more vegetables, are less likely to become overweight, are less likely to smoke, take drugs, or drink alcohol; do better in school; and have stronger communication skills. In other words, family mealtimes lead to happier, healthier kids.

The challenge, of course, is to find a way to have dinner together as a family when you’re busy juggling work, school, and extra-curricular activities. This is easier to pull off if you keep your definition of what constitutes family dinnertime fluid and flexible. Nora Spinks, CEO of The Vanier Institute of the Family, explains: “September is a great time to resolve to eat dinner more often together as families. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s around your dining room table or around your kitchen table. You can have high-quality conversations and interactions at family meal time, even if it’s in the food court.”

So it’s less a matter of where you connect and more a matter of how you connect. In order to make room for the kind of high-quality conversations and interactions that truly make a difference for kids, family members need to be ready to truly connect with one another without being lured away by the distraction of an electronic device.

Read together

Books aren’t just good for your brain. They’re also good for your relationships and your health. So why wouldn’t you want to make reading together as a family part of your regular routine?

Consider the evidence in support of reading. Kids who are exposed to books on a regular basis benefit both academically and socially. They have richer vocabularies and they’re more empathetic (because being immersed in the lives of characters we care about gives us practice in seeing the world through another person’s eyes).  And it’s not just kids who benefit from getting deeply immersed in a story, by the way. There’s brand new research to show that reading regularly boosts longevity (by helping to ward off cognitive decline). So you’ll definitely want to commit to hitting the books yourself!

Walk together

There are far-reaching benefits to taking family walks. It’s an opportunity to talk and connect with your kids while you’re getting some exercise and enjoying the mental/physical health benefits of being physically active. It can take a while for a child to open up to a parent — or for a conversation to move beyond a superficial exchange. Walking together ensures that you find that time. 

Just don’t expect these family walks (or any time you spend together as a family, for that matter) to be all magic, all the time. That’s not realistic. And, as it turns out, the not-so-perfect times are the stuff of which great stories and hilarious family memories are made. Jessica Anderson, a mother of three who is also the CEO of North Hastings Child and Family Centre in Bancroft, Ontario, had this to say about sidestepping the “everything has to be perfect” trap: “I think that the most important thing to remember with spending quality time and connecting is that it might not look like the perfect scenario. It might be where they’re complaining about how hot it is or how cold it is, if you go for a walk, or they’re saying the bugs are bothering them, but I think at the end of the day, those are the memories that they’ll have and I think that’s really important.”

Some final advice

Don’t just expect these changes to happen, just because you’d like them to happen. Understand that you have to take action to turn these resolutions into the new normal for your family. Nora Spinks offers this very practical suggestion: “Plan it. Don’t add it to your to do list. Add it to your calendar. If you don’t plan it, it’s not going to happen automatically.”

Of course, as important as it is to plan and schedule, you don’t want your life to feel like an endless list of obligations. It’s important to leave room in your family’s schedule for some spontaneous, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants fun. It’s amazing what a difference just an hour or two of unanticipated joy can make in your kids’ lives and your life. So be sure to leave some room in your life for the unscheduled and the unexpected, too.

You might also enjoy:

• Ann and Kim's amazing back-to-school adventure
• A shockingly sensible guide to back-to-school sleep