Parenting Style: Are you a good Boss?
If you were a manager would you want to work for you? Well if you are a parent you are a manager in many ways. The difference is that your kids have to work for you, there is no quitting. With that said maybe ask yourself what you do and do not like in a manager and apply that to your parenting.
Traps: It’s pretty easy to fall into patterns of making requests to your children with no rewards for completion or even reasoning. Sure you know why you are asking a child to do something, but do they know? Of course you are busy and need things to get done. Again, would you like a boss that seemingly randomly popped into your office and demand you do something immediately with no reason that you can think of? Sure that boss knows why he or she asked for the task to be completed, but no one likes working in a vacuum. Teenagers love reasoning, well they love to test it at least. It’s part of their brain development. They are learning to think in abstract ways, which means they have their own ideas and reasoning to back it up. One way to circumvent that is not to let them ponder the reasoning by themselves. Guide them with the why’s and how’s. Younger children might just need some encouragement and maybe even a reward post task completion.
D-cycloserine
D-cycloserine is being touted as an anxiety learning aid, or rather a an aid to help the many suffering from anxiety re-learn to control their unfounded fears, phobias, and panics. Research has always been pretty clear that anxiety responds well to behavioral treatment with or without the assistance of drugs. The interesting feature of this approach is the drug does not treat the symptoms of anxiety like most psychiatric medications rather it is said to assist in the re-learning process making behavioral therapy more effective. Seems to be a bit of a learning steroid if you will. One issue noted is that people build tolerance fairly quickly.
