EmpoweringParents.com

Here we are, the start of the new year and a chance for all of us to take stock of how far we’ve come in the past 12 months — and to think about where we’d like to see ourselves headed in 2009. My friend Brooke calls this a “Top of the Ladder Moment”:  When one of her young children accomplishes something (like climbing the ladder of the biggest slide at the park for the first time) she  says it’s important to take a minute and tell her kids, “Hey, look and see how far you’ve come! You did it!”  The truth is, those little moments of validation are important for all of us.

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In the midst of a manic shopping spree last week, I found myself panicking. You see, this year I failed in my holiday duties miserably.

All my five year old son asked Santa for was a dinosaur tent. As tradition dictates, I frantically raced from store to store looking for it –  to no avail. (When I finally checked online back at home, they said it had been discontinued. Argh.) I found myself shouting like a rabid chipmunk over the phone to my cool-as-a-cucumber husband, who was unmoved by the lack of dino tents in North America.

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I’ve been saddened by all the reporting that’s been done on the Nebraska Safe Haven Law, which allows parents to abandon children without fear of consequence. The reason I’ve been saddened is because all the news reporting has been focusing on the parents’ irresponsibility and the weird way the law was written and passed. None of it focuses on the real problem, which is the amount of desperation parents feel.

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The cycle of insanity in my family looked like this: parents responding the same, ineffective way, yielding to the erroneous belief that somehow THIS time the response would be different. With my son, we went down a boundary-less road of second chances and manipulation that handed over way too much power and landed him in a therapeutic wilderness program after he was court-ordered out of our home due to marijuana abuse.

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