Blog Posts

Help: my 3 year old is aggressive

7/25/2014

Instrumental aggression is well known between the age of 2 and 4 years. This aggression isn’t meant to hurt, but to get hold of something like toys or space.

Between 2 and 4 children start to learn to say what they want and aggressive behaviour decreases as they develop more self-control. At the age of 6 to 7 most children are less aggressive, less self-centered and better communicators.

Some children though show hostile aggression (aggressive behaviour to hurt another person) and / or overt aggression (aggression openly directed at its target).

What can set off aggression?

violent fantasy play
exposure to aggressive adults and violence
inconsistent rules (rules that constantly change)
parents with rules that differs very much
parenting styles
aggressive peers.

Children who are punished frequently may:

have trouble to interpret other people’s actions and words,
“see” hostile intentions where none exist.

Children who are punished harshly may:

start to act with aggression as they can feel frustrated, hurt and humiliated,
hit back, even though a parent’s motivation was to stop aggressive behaviour.

At times punishment is necessary for example when a child hits another child or run out into traffic.

Important things to remember when punishing your child:

stay calm,
do it in private,
aim to gain compliance and not guilt,
be consistent, immediate and clearly tied to the offence (don’t punish him for other behaviour as well).

Children learn more when parents start to highlight and reinforce their positive behaviour in stead of just focusing on their negative behaviour.

Practical ways to reinforce good behaviour:

a smile
a hug
a word of praise
extra attention
a special privilege

Your child must see your reinforcement as rewarding. Give the reinforcement fairly consistently after your child showed the desired behaviour. Finally, the behaviour should eventually lead to a sense of pleasure in your child and he will feel good about himself.

(Source: A child’s world: infancy through adolescence. Papalia, Olds and Feldman)

Mental toughness

5/17/2014

What is mental toughness?
Clough and Strycharczyk (2012: 1) define mental toughness as “The quality which determines in large part how people deal effectively with challenge, stressors and pressure…irrespective of prevailing circumstances”. Mental toughness is therefore an indication of how well people cope with difficulties in their lives.

Why is mental toughness important?
Studies in the occupational, educational and sports worlds consistently show that mental toughness is directly related to:

Performance. Individuals with high mental toughness perform better in terms of volume and quality of work.
Behaviour. Individuals with higher mental toughness demonstrate positive behaviours.
Wellbeing. Individuals with higher mental toughness experience a greater sense of well being.
Aspirations. Mental toughness positively correlated with career and general aspirations.
Employability. There is a clear relationship between an individual's mental toughness and their ability to get a job, and to get the job they want.
Completion and Drop-Out rates. Individuals with higher mental toughness tend to stick with a programme and see it through to completion.

Read more about measuring mental toughness, and developing mental toughness here.

Trauma

1/29/2014

It is a shocking reality that trauma such as divorce, death, abuse, suicide, natural disasters, hi-jacking and housebreaking is part of our everyday lives.

How do I know whether my child or member of my family is traumatised?

Trauma causes stress. The human body deals with stress in the same way it deals with illness. Stress can for example cause a dry mouth, sweating or a rise in blood pressure and heart rate.

Stress can also influence a person's behaviour and can cause:

aggression
sleeping problems
change in eating habits
social withdrawal (etc.)

Things that are stressful and traumatic for one person might not be traumatic for another person. It might therefore be difficult for parents to know whether their children or family members are experiencing stress or not.

A few signs that can indicate that your child or family member is experiencing stress, or is traumatised are:

mood swings
anger outbursts
nightmares
difficulties in concentrating
fatigue
social withdrawal
anxiety
staying away from school / work
sensation seeking behaviour
stomach aches
headaches
restlessness.

One of the easiest solutions of dealing with trauma is to seek support. There is a lot of support around you and your family, though in tough times it is sometimes difficult to believe it, but VERY IMPORTANT, SEEK SUPPORT RATHER THAN TRY TO CARRY THE HEAVY LOAD OF STRESS all alone. It's never a shame to seek help, but it is indeed a sign of bravery!

The seasons of life

4/27/2013

Death and grief are often described as a path taking you through the four seasons. I've got this clip from a friend when I went through grieving. I hope you will also find it inspirational.

Seven hints for a grieving person

4/1/2013

Grieving people are usually concerned about their feelings and experiences. They wonder: Am I normal?; What is wrong with me?

As discussed in the previous post, a grieving person may experience a lot of changes and feelings throughout his body as well as in his relationships with other people. These physical-, social-, and emotional changes (see previous post) are normal. If you are going through the immense pain of the grieving process, print out the following seven hints for a grieving person and read and remember it many times during your days:

1. You are loveable even when you are a confused mess.
2. Crying is a gift.
3. Almost every thought, behaviour and feeling is normal.
4. You are not alone.
5. People are uncomfortable with grieving people.
6. No matter how bad you feel, you will survive.
7. It takes as long as it takes.

Mary Kelly Perschy

Death: Reactions to a loss

2/25/2013

Grieving, death, loss, psychology, therapy

Death is well known as one of the top three traumas that a person can experience. When a person close to you dies, the impact of the shock affects you as a "person in total". "Person in total" means that it can affect every part of your life (or at least some parts). Examples of these parts are:

Emotional being
- anxiousness / aggressiveness / having a bad feeling in your stomach / dry mouth / hypersensitive for noises

Physical state
- without any feelings / alone / shocked / guilty

Social state
- irritated between people (even between friends) / withdraw into yourself / want to be left alone

Thoughts
- confused / forgetful / problems to concentrate / dreaming / feels the presence of your loved one

Behaviour
- sleeping problems / restless / change in eating patterns / tearful / avoid memories of your loved one.

How to handle a grieving person:

DONT'S
- talk too much (to hide your own uncertainties)
- say things like: * God has picked the most beautiful flower in the garden; *
- your'e parent was old, it's not so bad
- things will get better
- pull yourself together
- handle your friend different from what you did in the past (he has a need to be treated as normal)

DO'S
- Just be there: give a hug (don't say anything, because you are probably as stunned as the grieving person himself
- visit the grieving person again in future (he'll need you even more than now)
- let him know on special days, for example his loved one's birthday / Christmas, that you think of him (not just a once off)
- invite your friend for a coffee / nice outing (keep on asking - even if he refuses to go; tell him that you really want to have coffee with him)

Next time I'll talk about 7 ways to deal with your own grieving process.

Keep well!

I am online again

2/22/2013

My apologies for not being online for a time as I've moved back from Hong Kong to my home country South Africa. But here I'm back again and I'm looking forward to our biweekly chats.

Death and dying - a most ignored topic

11/9/2012

Death - a very taboo (ignored) topic both in the Western and Eastern countries. So, a topic not to talk about at all. As human beings most of us feel uncomfortable when a topic relating to death is mentioned and discussed. We also don't know what to say to people who lost a loved one and therefore we start to ignore these people (who actually needs our support) and think that other people will know what to do (while other people think that we will know what to do!). AND death hurts too much. It makes our whole world tumble down within an instance. It doesn't matter whether you are a psychologist or minister in church (who deals with death on a regular base), dealing with death has a threatening effect on all of us.

Lot's of research had been done by psychologists, counsellors, ministers in church, doctors and nurses in order to better support dying people and their families. There's also a lot of research about the trauma of unexpected deaths, for example due to an accident, a sudden illness, the death of a baby after birth, suicide, etcetera.

So, if you decide to face the topic of death and if you haven't closed this blog by now, look at the "word picture" below.

Question: Rotate the "word picture" one time clockwise and then one time anti-clockwise. What do you see?

Answer: In the "word picture" there's one picture, but two words, it is the words life and death. Yes, life and death are two parts of one reality. We can't understand the one without the other, because it is part of each other. At mother's knee we are taught (hopefully!) how to live, but not how to die! Corr says when you learn about death and the loss- and grief process, you learn important things of how to live (and the other way round as well). So, have you ever thought about death this way: If we see death as a topic not to discuss and think of at all, we make a contribution to our own as well as to other people's helplessness because we don't empower people to learn about dying and at the same time to learn how to live life to it's fullest. Why do I call it helplessness? Because by not knowing what possible emotions and feelings you may discover after the loss of a loved one, you will have less knowledge if death enters your life or the life of your friends. We are living in a world where knowledge increases daily by ten times more that it increased fifty years ago, per year! We all want to be informed. We all want to have knowledge and we all want to be empowered.

Read more in the next issue about the emotions and feelings that people may experience when losing a loved one and how to support people who have lost a loved one.

Dealing with change

9/18/2012

If you are reading here, you are a human being and if you are a human being you certainly had experienced and will experience a lot of changes in your life.
I meet a lot of people every day who struggle to deal with change and who wants to know how to teach their children to deal with change.
Adults, children as well as old people are all fighting a huge battle to cope with the changes that life brings us. AND we get scared and overwhelmed in trying to cope with these changes BUT most of us have to hold the pose in order to cope with the peer pressure and other people's remarks about whether we do cope/or don't cope with change. In this process, we even experience more pressure in order to cope with our changes.

I've read a wonderful practical book (including pictures - one of my favorites) "Who moved my cheese?" by Spencer (dad) and Christian (son) Johnson. It's about dealing with the change of new circumstances. The book compare things that are changing in your life with a heap of cheese that is suddenly moved, leaving some mice confused. The story then tells the tale of how the mice deal with this situation.

Every person has different parts in his personality, for example:
- noticing change early
- scrambling into action
- denying fear
- withstanding fear
- adapt in time
- see that change can lead to better things.

The moral of the story is that change doesn't mean bad things. Change in this book brought a better life, better cheese that the mice could have ever imagined themselves to have and they got ten times more cheese and more variety than before.

What can your magical cheese be?
Some important lessons that the mice teach us are:
- Know the different parts of your personality. Know your own strong and weak points.
- When you stop being afraid, you will start to feel good.
- Don't cling to the old cheese (your job, school, city). The sooner you will let go of the old cheese, the sooner you will be able to find new cheese.
- See a picture of your new cheese in your head. This picture will help you to find the new cheese.
- Smell the cheese often, so that you will know when it is getting old. This means to be able to stand aside and take a look at yourself and your situation, so that you could make changes if needed and not get stuck in your own old ways of thinking and doing.
- Move with your cheese and enjoy it, which means that life changes daily and you also change daily. So, move out of your safe zone and start to enjoy the new things (there's a big chance that it could be better than your old life!).

Fun activity (make your own collage)

- Cut out at least ten pictures (use old magazines) that you've got in your head of your new cheese (example if I have to move to a new city I will cut out pictures of a smile; a second picture of me reaching out and talk to new people, a third picture of myself (writing next to it "You can do it!" or "I am proud of myself!").
- Glue the pictures on a carton and make your own collage (it means using a lot of pictures to make your own personal story).
- Write words and/or sentences of motivation next to your pictures.
- Put it on a wall/place where you could see it every day.
- Take at least three minutes every day to look at your picture and imagine yourself doing the actions.
- Make it part of your day to think and re-think your new cheese.
- It will soon become part of your thinking and it will help you to start living these new positive ideas.
- Enjoy your new cheese journey!
- If you want to teach your children how to deal with change, talk to the them about change, what change means, what feelings both they, you and the rest of the family are having. Every family member needs to put his own feelings into words. If your child is still young (under six), use a story to explain to him what's going to happen (for example when you move).
- Teach your child to enjoy new cheese and not to get stuck with the old cheese.

School readiness (continues): How to prepare your child to learn to write.

8/9/2012

Educational psychology, school readiness

Writing is a movement that entails rhythm. Yes, the same as the rhythm that you need when you dance. Before you even think to start teaching your child to write the alphabet and words on paper: remember the golden rule for writing, namely rhythm.

Rhythmical movement should become part of your child's real inner body and inner world. In other words rhythm should become part of him. So, do you need to dance in order to teach your child to write? Well, yes! Good news hey, as dance is a lot of fun and it's relaxing for both you and your child.

What to do when you do the "writing dance"?
- Clap your hands / click your fingers / tap your feet on the rhythm of the music while for example moving in a circle with your child.
- If your child mastered the clapping and clicking, start to combine more rhythmical movements, for example clap your hands, click your fingers and clap hands on your legs (all on the rhythm of the music).
- More dancing "activities": gallop like a horse on the rhythm of music, play skipping games, for example while skipping rhythmically give your child some "learn to listen" activities, like telling him "We are going to shop, let's skip to the market place". "Look out for the cars" (keep on skipping). "Let's look to our right / left to see if the road is clear". "Now we are at he market" (stop skipping). Take out your grocery list (the child who can't read yet, may use a list with some pictures of e.g. apples, bananas, etc). Ask your child what's on his list. Now you can practice some mathematics (counting skills). Your child "reads" his shopping list: We need, three bananas, five apples, ten small yoghurts, etc.
- Use musical instruments to further develop your child's rhythm. If you don't have any instruments, make your own (e.g. for the drum use an empty tin and two sticks; put some small stones in a plastic bottle to have a rattle, use kitchen utensils and just enjoy the orchestra).
- The next step will be to make rhythmical patterns in the sand / mud, while for example singing a song.
- Let your child also draw rhythmical patterns in the air (with both his hands and feet).
- Play hop scotch.
- Jump on one leg on the rhythm of the music.
- Rhythmically hop / throw a ball (start with a big size ball first and later use a tennis ball). You can also add a tennis racket as a very advanced activity.

Midline crossing and writing
Midline crossing (or middle line crossing) is one of the most important skills that a child has to master in order to learn to read and to write.

What does midline crossing mean?
Our bodies have a left side and a right side. If you could draw a line from head to toes (or from top to bottom), that is your midline or your centre line. Most children who have problems with writing and reading, can't cross their midline. To cross your midline, means that you should be able to move with your left side of your body into the area of the right side and visa versa.

See examples of midline crossing on the photo's below. Do these exercises to the rhythm of music as a dance.

Cross-crawl

Knee-foot-heel

Backward-heel touch

Lazy 8 (∞ laying on its side)

Resources Midline crossing exercises
Dr Melody de Jager
Neurolink South Africa

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