Loan Shoes For Love

You know what life is like for your daughter, don’t you? Maybe not. And that’s part of the problem in creating a respectful, loving relationship with her.

We often assume we know what life is like for someone else. We look at what they own, what they do, and believe we can piece together a sense of who they are. But our assumptions are very often way off target. We  don’t always know or understand how life is impacting others.

The best way to understand our daughters  is to do our best to walk in her shoes.  How do we do that? Two things come to mind.

1. Literally ask her to loan you one of her shoes. Ask her to write down three things that she wishes  you understand more about her. Ask her to tuck the note in the shoe. Read the note and use your best listening skills to open your heart to her message. Learn what she needs from you and do your best to respond to her needs in a timely, loving fashion.

2. As you read her note,  practice kenosis. It’s an unusual word, but don’t let it put you off. It simply means to “empty yourself of yourself.” That means you empty yourself of any agenda you have for your daughter. Empty yourself of your own self interests and truly open your heart to her. Do you very best to see her life through her eyes, to walk through life in her shoes.

Ask your daughter to loan a shoe to you so you can learn how to understand and love her in a way so she feels it.

When you find ways to walk in your daughters shoes and be there for her, you are answering her big brain question with a YES!  Social Neuroscientist Dr. Mark Brady  writes that all of our brains are hardwired to ask the people we care about, “Are you there for me?” When the answer is “Yes!” our brains grow more neural networks. We create better lives.

Find out what life is really like for your daughter, and how you can best support her.

Ask her to loan you a shoe.

Hold onto it for a few days. Keep it where you can see it. And do your very best, to try to walk in her shoes for a bit.

When you return her shoe, I encourage you to have a conversation with her about what you have learned. It may be helpful to remember the two important questions, “What do you need?” and “How can I help.”

Let’s all learn to try to walk in others shoes so we can understand them and love them more.

All best,

Dr. Jenn

Four Neuro-Annihilators

Few teens today will reach early adulthood with instruction or practice in managing what Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has identified as the four primary destroyers of optimal neural growth. When the brain doesn’t grow in an optimal way, people grow up with what is known as a “disorganized brain.”

( I have taken many of the words from this post from my colleague  social neuroscientist Dr. Mark Brady. He writes how parents can increase brain growth in their children. His blog is worth your time to read. )

Parents, Teachers and Teens Don’t Know!

The majority of parents, teachers and teens don’t know what the four horsemen of Neuro-Annihilation are. Without proper neural growth, teens grow up less healthy, happy and successful. That means some will lead marginal lives, recreating the cycle of disorganized brains in their children. Some will even be incarcerated or institutionalized.

Neuro-Annihilator One: Lack of Control

The first neuro-annihilator for kids (and adults as well) is the experience of having little control in their lives. Teaching kids from an early age, how to recognize what they can and they can’t control in developmentally appropriate ways, and then taking steps to help facilitate them in doing so, goes a long way towards connecting up parts of the brain in the prefrontal cortex where executive function will come to reside. The prefrontal connections allow us to make plans, keep track of time, reflect on our actions and engage productively with groups, as well as make rational, logical life and love affirming decisions.

Questions to ponder: How might you allow your daughter to have more control over her life? How might you teach her to cope with that which she can not control?

Neuro-Annihilator Two: Living with Little Predictability

The healthy brain is an anticipation-prediction machine. When we operate in environments where there is little predictability and we have little idea what to anticipate from one moment to the next, chronic stress results. This stress triggers the release of high levels of glucocorticoids like adrenaline, cortisol and glutamate. Glucocorticoids circulating at high levels in the blood eventually end up destroying neurons, particularly in the hippocampus, the center of memory and learning. Things like worrying if your private life has been exposed on campus, being bullied,   relationship violence, are examples of unpredictability that become stressors making it literally difficult to think straight.

Questions to Ponder: How might you work with your daughter to create the type of predictability needed for optimal brain growth for your daughter?

Neuro-Annihilator Three: Little Emotional Support

Relationships, when you strip away all their complexity, have a single, primary purpose – to help us feel calm and safe. There’s ONE question that all brains want answered, and they want it answered, “Yes.” Parent’s brains, children’s brains, all brains. And they don’t want a lukewarm “Yes,” or a “Maybe Yes” or a “Getting-to-Yes Yes.” They want a substantial, resounding, unequivocal, “YES!” Yes.

Here is what happens in the brain when the answer is something other than “Yes.”  If the answer is “Maybe,” or “I’m not sure,” a confusion and uncertainty begins to take shape in our children’s brains. How this looks under a brain imaging device is a significantly reduced number of grooves in the brain together with fewer connections between neurons. Reduced connections result, not unexpectedly, in reduced abilities in different areas – for example, motor areas or immune function – resulting in greatly diminished capacities, e.g. lower social or emotional intelligence or reduced impulse control.

When the answer to the Big Brain Question (coined by Dr. Brady) is, “No,” children are placed into an untenable position: the place where they live, and the people they need to take care of them are not performing that fundamental function very well. Because they are unable to take care of themselves, our children are now stuck. Feeling, or actually being helplessly stuck with no ready resolution in sight, has been found to be the primary experience that results in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in adults and children alike.

“Recovering neurologist,” Dr. Bob Scaer, says: “The cumulative experiences of ‘life’s little traumas’ shape virtually every single aspect of existence. This accumulation of negative life experiences molds one’s personality, choices of mate, profession, clothes, appetite, pet peeves, social behaviors, posture, and most specifically, our state of physical and mental health.”

All that might not be so bad. Given the great plasticity and regenerative capacity of the brain, it might be something children could work with.

However, Gabor Maté, a Canadian physician, sees the damage caused by the answer “No” to the Big Brain Question as even more serious. Here’s what he has to say: “The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviors toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall.”

Teens need friendships that answer their BBQ with a “Yes!.” Teens can and do learn how to respond others with a “yes!” when you teach teens how to create safe tribes, and you teach them how to respect themselves and others and avoid creating enemy images of others.

Questions to ponder: How might you ensure you answer your daughter’s Big Brain Question with a resounding “Yes!” How might you gently teach her to avoid creating enemy images of others?

Neuro-Annihilator Four: Having Few Outlets for Managing Stress

How do you know when eustress (good stress) turns into allostatic load (bad stress).  Most people don’t know when that transition has been made until long afterwards. They have allergic reactions, make mistakes, get sick, get into accidents, obsess, sleep poorly and displace hostility onto those closest to them, often without the slightest awareness that allostatic load might be the root cause of the difficulties.

When teens (adults) are under stress, their HPA axis turns on. (The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) It bathes the body and brain in neurotoxins which damage the brain. It also suppresses the release of “trophic factors.” (Trophe comes from the Greek word meaning “nourishment.” What sunlight and water do for tomatoes and roses, trophic factors do for brain cells).

Learning to preemptively predict and effectively address such stress shifts might be the greatest nourishing gifts we can offer our children, and ourselves as well. Allostatic load significantly damages the brain.  If we don’t help one another learn to effectively manage it, then unwittingly, we risk damaging all our brains.

One way to manage stress is to understand how the brain functions. Teens who learn that their brain is still growing, and learn the reason why they often make lousy decisions, (they use the limbic system to make decisions) can work to reduce their stress. Education about the brain is vital.

Questions to ponder: How might you work to reduce bad stress in your life? How might you help your daughter reduce stress in her life?

When you create your family life, and polish your parenting skills with the four horsemen of neuro-annihilation in mind, you help raise teen daughters that thrive. You raise Dandelion Daughters. They are emotionally sturdy, hardy, resilient young women who bloom in any environment, even in adverse conditions. We all want our daughters to be able to bloom no matter what life throws at them.

All best,

Dr. Jenn

Trends of 20’s

This just landed on my desk. I think it is important to share.

OYW: Ten Trends of 20-somethings
Opinions from 1600 global young leaders coming together for a week of learning in London Feb 7th at
www.oneyoungworld.com

Ten Trends
1. Real-time expectations

Anyone in his or her 20s living in an economically developed community has never known life without instant communication everywhere. Twenty-somethings communicate with friends on the go, in real time—no waiting for snail mail. They get the latest news as it happens, with a live feed from where it’s happening—no waiting for the scheduled news on TV or radio. Whenever they need to dig out information about virtually anything, it’s there, in abundance; there’s no need to dig around in books.

Twenty-somethings are riding the wave of real-time living. If it’s not real time, 20-somethings switch their focus to something that is.

2. Living more intense local lives

One of the great paradoxes of borderless, global real-time technology is the way it reinforces local connections.

As adept users of real-time technology, 20-somethings are able to live locally more intensely. With mobile devices they make social arrangements on the fly. With location-based services through Google and others, they can locate friends who happen to be nearby; they can also get alerts from whichever companies in the vicinity are offering interesting deals.

Facebook typifies the paradox. Now with 350 million users worldwide, it was started by 20-somethings at Harvard for local users. It grew by extending its services to other local groups (e.g. other Ivy League universities). Like many big cities, Facebook is just an amalgam of discrete localities.

3. Radically transparent

Twenty-somethings have grown up with reality TV and radical celebrity culture—media poking into every corner of people’s lives, from Hollywood A-listers right down to the lowliest got-lucky types who copped their 15 minutes of fame by accident. They’ve grown up in a culture of the highest-level confidential information “leaks,” a world where even the great and the good confess mistakes and show emotion to millions.

In their personal lives they are constantly using technologies with which they can bare all—sometimes literally—to their friends. They are more or less aware that online nothing can be considered confidential, but they go ahead anyway.

Right or wrong, this is a generation that’s on a clear trend toward being more transparent about its thoughts, feelings and actions than has any previous generation.

4. Expecting cheap or free everything

Globalization has made many essentials of life very cheap. Twenty-somethings are used to a world where value and discounted offerings are everywhere. They can fill their stomachs and clothe themselves at unbelievably low cost. Budget airline travel is normal for them. The Internet has accustomed them to getting music, software and services for free, either legally or illegally. After all, one of the biggest, most powerful brands on the planet (Google) offers a huge range of powerful services at no cost to the user.

The trend of cheap or free expectations among 20-somethings will increasingly shape business models.

5. Entertainment must be part of the deal

In some parts of the world—particularly the West—fun and entertainment have long become an essential part of education. Twenty-somethings have grown up with Sesame Street and animated, interactive, fun graphics in the classroom and in museums. Hence the notion of Edutainment.

All over the world, even in places where older, more dutiful approaches to education prevail, fun and games have become a staple activity of young people. These have been promoted by corporations and endorsed by researchers as beneficial.

In an extensive 38-country online survey of 15,844 young adults aged 23-28 fielded by SurveyShack in association with YouGovStone between July 2008 and December 2009, 59 percent of respondents said they regularly play video or computer games in their spare time; this makes gaming the second-most popular activity after socializing (61 percent).

6. Worrying about the planet

Twenty-somethings are certainly keen on play and entertainment, but there’s a more serious undertone affecting their lives. Every day they are exposed to more and more worrying reports about what’s going wrong with the planet: climate change, disappearing species, habitat destruction and water shortages have been daily fare for 20-somethings through all their adult life.

In the survey, 64 percent of respondents saw climate change affecting them seriously in their lifetime and 82 percent saw it affecting future generations seriously; 64 percent thought that only immediate radical changes can prevent the most serious impacts of climate change.

Going forward, assuming the planetary news doesn’t improve, the worrying trend of 20-somethings will become the norm.

7. Seeing luxuries as standard

Twenty-somethings now think nothing of paying significant amounts for key products and services that are actually luxuries by historical standards. Whether they’re paid for by parents or out of their own money, normal life for 20-somethings now includes:
· A mobile device of some sort (e.g. smart phone, iPod Touch) with a camera, costing well above $100, plus monthly fees
· A computer costing at least $300, with monthly broadband fees on top
· A wide-screen TV, costing at least $300, with cable and satellite fees on top
· Higher education as far as they can go—bachelor’s degree, postgraduate studies

8. Pro-business, anti-multinational

Today’s 20-somethings are far removed from the left-wing and countercultural ideologies that fired up young people in the late 1960s and early 1970s. All around the world they’ve been raised in an environment in which free markets were regarded as the solution to everything and which certainly delivered plenty of consumer goodies to make life more fun. Twenty-somethings aren’t anti-business. After all, some of their favorite brands were founded by 20-somethings. Their lives are filled with the things that business has produced.

However, they’re not so keen on multinational corporations. In the survey, two-thirds of respondents (66 percent) think global corporations have too much power, and 81 percent think global corporations must behave responsibly and ethically.

Multinational corporations have long been the object of concern for a few; now, as Generation Real-Time shares information fast, they’re becoming the concern of many young people. This time around, the young people don’t aspire to bring those big corporations down by force; instead, they aspire to out-business them.

9. Regulate the heck out of media bias

Media 2010 is a lot bigger field than it was in 2000 or 1990. Titles in traditional formats (TV, radio and print) are now available through the Internet, along with others that only exist on the Internet. Increasingly diverse media titles and news sources are available to anyone with the curiosity to click on a link. No wonder a substantial 70 percent of respondents in the survey get their news via the Internet.

The broader choice of media, plus increasing educational levels and media savvy, makes 20-somethings more aware than ever of media bias; they can compare versions of the same story and read commentary from different angles. This is probably why 70 percent of respondents think all news media should be regulated so that it’s clearly independent of state and corporate bias.

At the same time, they don’t want government to regulate social media. It’s called MySpace, after all.

10. Naturally Me but aspiring to We

Self, personal and personalized have been abiding themes throughout lives of today’s 20-somethings: self-expression, self-esteem, personal computers, personal profiles, personalized settings, personal development and personal branding—also known as A Brand Called Me. Whether the national culture is highly individualistic (e.g. United States) or more collectivist (e.g. China), technology and business have thrived by enabling people to express themselves: to be more Me.

Culturally and commercially, 20-somethings have been indulged and encouraged to be more selfish than were previous generations. Yet they are also now acutely aware that everyone pursuing selfish interests creates the planetary problems that are worrying them.

Hence the trend of 20-somethings caught between the impulse to do their own thing and the desire to do the right thing together. Or as the pithy observation has it, “Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help mom do the dishes.”

More TRENDS @ www.oneyoungworld.com
@oneyoungworld Twitter
Oneyoungworld UTUBE

Available for interviews
Social Trend Expert Marian Salzman www.mariansalzman.com
President and leader of trend live polling/opinion research at OYW
Euro RSCG Worldwide PR
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Donnetta Campbell
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