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Parenting Press®Welcome to the May 2011
“News for Parents”
Dear Friends of Parenting Press:
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If you teach parenting education, conduct home visits or counsel parents and caregivers, click on through to our Parent Educator Corner and register for a complimentary information sheet. There’s one every month! Popular topics include how to get kids into bed, how to keep them there, and how to get them to sleep.
If you write for a newspaper or school, extension, or child care newsletter, you’re welcome to excerpt or reprint our information, as long as you credit us and send us a copy. Advance copies of selected stories from the next issue (see “Coming Attractions”) are available the last week of this month for excerpts in print publications. E-mail our media contact.
Looking for a conference speaker? Check our list of authors available for speeches and interviews, and the online media kits. Books, info sheets, teaching plans, kids’ activities: we’re always in a whirl at Parenting Press with dozens of ideas that we hope you’ll enjoy and find helpful. Many are described in this issue; others will be published in later issues (see Coming Attractions).
IN THIS ISSUE
- WHAT’S NEW?
- FEATURES
- POTPOURRI
- COMING ATTRACTIONS
- Summer Fun: Make It Together!
- Fun and Easy Family Reunions
I. WHAT’S NEW?
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Parenting After A Child Dies
Can you imagine anything worse than the death of a child? It’s especially devastating for those who have other children, because those children must be cared for, emotionally and physically: the parents have no time to grieve their loss by themselves.
In Parenting After the Death of a Child (Routledge), Jennifer L. Buckle and Stephen J. Fleming point out that parents with children still at home must at the same time deal with two extremes of life and loss. They, like others who contributed to this story, refer to the previous family life being shattered by the loss. Although a family may eventually thrive in a new configuration, it will never be completely restored to its original form and strength.
If you have friends who have lost children, or if you work with the bereaved, we hope this article will help you recognize the grieving that is done by both parents and the surviving siblings. It’s also important that we all recognize that grief can re-surface months or years after a death, and that children and teenagers need emotionally safe options for expressing their grief and having it validated.
The authors identify several levels of loss for the parents besides the physical loss, the permanent separation from a beloved child. Other issues include:
Transformation of the family. With the loss of a child, the family structure changes, and so do the roles of the siblings. In many cases today, the bereaved child is now an only child.
Loss of hopes and expectations. The parents grieve all the things the dead child will never do: the places never visited with the family, the extended family members never met, the graduations and wedding that will never occur. They are forced to abandon their expectations for the child, and for its relationships with the bereaved or any future children.
“There is a double anger,” explains Timothy Hartshorne, a psychology professor at Central Michigan University. “Anger that you have been cheated out of your child’s future, and anger that your child has been cheated out of his or her future.”
Violation of the natural order. Parents expect their children to survive them, and losing a child destroys the illusion that life is secure and that we are protected from tragedy. These assumptions are replaced by perceptions of the world as random, chaotic and cruel. As a result, the bereaved often lose confidence in the people in society who are expected to protect us: police officers, firefighters, medics, nurses, physicians.
Parents also lose confidence in their competence because they cannot fix this problem, writes Debbie Garber, a bereaved parent affiliated with the Miami Valley (Ohio) chapter of Compassionate Friends. “It is our job to make it all better,” she says, “and the fact that we cannot is devastating and counterintuitive for a parent.”
Hartshorne, another bereaved parent, says that although people are often expected “to get over” a death within six months or a year, the grieving process can be five years long, starting with the horrible year of first holidays, anniversaries, and birthdays without someone. In the second year: “It is harder to pretend it never happened.” By the third year, many people are better at handling special days, and adults at least can deal with insensitive people. By the fourth year, you are sometimes happy again—although that is when some people (especially parents) feel guilty, as if by enjoying themselves they are forgetting the lost child.
Don’t try to alleviate the pain for a bereaved friend or client, adds Richard Hazler, who runs counselor education programs at Penn State. “It’s a natural part of the process, and the more you try to alleviate it, the more people will resist your help.”
Instead, he advises helping the grieving to find ways to work with the pain so their lives will “normalize.”Second, stay involved with the routine parts of the bereaved friend’s life, with school, play, work and social events.
What do bereaved parents need?
Acknowledgement of loss. Many couples experience miscarriage as death, and a stillborn baby or a child lost in infancy is still a loss, and should be acknowledged as such. Jeri Wilson’s experience is that the loss of an infant is very isolating, because so few people knew the child. “Friends and family thought that bringing up memories of her would cause us great pain, so they never spoke of her. It was devastating to go overnight from being a loving mother to having everyone act as if she never existed.”
Friendship. Some friends will disappear, explains Hartshorne, because they cannot deal with the tragedy, or can no longer relate to you. What’s valuable are friends who can listen, even if they cannot understand. Stay in touch, even if it’s hard, adds Garber. “Send a card, or place a phone call weeks after the funeral, after everyone else has resumed their lives. Knowing that someone remembers your child and is thinking of you is a great gift.”
Even very young children are aware when something is wrong in the family. Do not lie to them, emphasizes Diane Davis, a counselor and author.
Others advise that we give children concise, accurate and age-appropriate information. Allow them to ask questions, even possibly unsettling ones about the appearance of the body, whether they can touch it, and what will happen to it.
Bereaved kids also need:
To know they are not alone. Support groups and bereavement camps are settings where every child has experienced a significant loss. Lynette Moore of The Moyer Foundation said the most common comment at Camp Erin sessions, wherever in the U.S. the camps are located, is “I feel so alone.”
To know that every emotion is legitimate. When a sibling has died after an extended illness, some children feel guilty because they are glad to finally have their parents’ attention again, says Moore.
Reassurance that the death was not their fault and it is not their fault that others in the family are sad.
Acceptance of the fact that they will grieve at a different pace and in different stages than the adults and the other children in the family, and that transitions and anniversaries may cause renewed grief for years to come.
Recognition by parents, teachers and other adults that grief may trigger regression (a toilet-trained child may experience soiling or bed-wetting) or acting out and that these are signals that help is needed, not behavior problems that require discipline.
The freedom to live full lives, risky as some of their activities may seem. “Now you know that children can die: it’s not a hypothetical possibility,” points out Hartshorne, “and it’s hard not to worry about your remaining children.”
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How Old Are Marshmallows?
Yes, marshmallows, the real ones, not the dried up kind in breakfast cereal. And how about popcorn? The kind that comes from ears of corn, not out of microwave bags. Or hot chocolate, the original?
The history of food and how people first fed themselves, when they had no way to preserve what they caught, gathered or grew, is part of what you’ll find in Food: 25 Amazing Projects Investigate the History and Science of What We Eat (Nomad Press). Ideal for getting kids talking (and thinking) about where our food comes from, and for after-school activities, this book combines food facts and vocabulary in fast-paced text that takes you from nomads to the Nile, droughts to dehydrating in a page or two. It also takes us back more than 5,000 years, to when popcorn was used by Aztecs in dance ceremonies. Marshmallows, by the way, were first made in Egypt about 4,000 years ago, and the original cup of chocolate was cold, not hot, when created about 2,000 years ago.
Food projects include making your own hot chocolate with bittersweet chocolate and a vanilla bean, using gelatin and corn syrup to create marshmallows, dehydrating beef, baking Civil War-style hardtack and Indian pemmican, and “ants” on a “log.” Oh, and you won’t want to miss frying dandelion blossoms! (For real!)
Although these are presented as projects for kids, there’s no glossary of cooking terms such as “boil,” and some ingredients are very expensive (vanilla beans, for example). We’d like a little more detail in some recipes: “lean beef” doesn’t describe what cuts will make good jerky. (In fact, there are probably kids who don’t know what “lean” means in meat.)
Other projects include using potting soil and a rimmed cookie sheet to create a miniature Nile River basin, packaging eggs to protect them in a drop, and growing tomatoes in a bale of straw. The most interesting to us? The potato maze, which demonstrates how a potato in a closed box will send sprouts toward the sun.
Snatches of history—about how you opened tin cans before the can opener was invented, wartime food rationing, the introduction of plastic packaging, Upton Sinclair and the meat-packing scandals—are here and there, but with no detail. Kids will probably enjoy the brief stories about what lumberjacks, cowboys and Civil War troops ate and what they called their food (Want some Texas butter with your hot rocks?).
This book also introduces dozens of other concepts, many most appropriate for older elementary or middle school kids: unit pricing, water cycle, greenhouse effect, hyroponics, food additives, herbivores, and macronutrients. All in all, it’s a good source of conversation-starters for the dinner table (although we’ll be skipping the description of Upton Sinclair the next time we have hamburgers).
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Treasures? Or Clutter?
As the end of the school year approaches for many of us, there is the issue of which painting, sculptures, trophies and concert programs to save. The News for Parents crew occasionally polls readers for suggestions, and here are some you may find helpful.
“The best method for handling school memorabilia is time,” reports Kim Pond, a University of Massachusetts Extension educator, who kept her favorites from school projects in a box throughout the year. During the summer she sorted out the things she still wanted to keep. When her older child finished elementary school, she sorted again, discarding three-quarters of the accumulation.
Seattle preschool teacher Sandi Dexter suggests a portfolio where you tuck away the special art, written assignments, award certificates and newspaper clippings (after you’ve dated each one, of course). Three-dimensional projects can be photographed for the portfolio. Shari Steelsmith, author of several Parenting Press books, three-hole punches her children’s drawings and paintings and put them in a binder that the kids browse often. Another possibility for small items from the early years: add them to the baby book (as our newsletter editor did with her daughter’s notes to the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy). Such important larger items as the high school graduation program go in the family photo album or scrapbook.
For other things so precious they must be kept, Dexter suggests a frame. Either hang the painting in your own home or make a gift of it. “Imagine the delight of grandparents who receive a framed piece, signed on the back, ‘With love from your grandchild,’” she says.
Or, adds Dexter, take a beloved piece and either photograph or scan it. Use the image on a pack of note cards (what a nice teacher gift!) or as a birthday card. The images or the artwork itself can be mounted on calendars. (Or include one by each child in your Christmas newsletter.) A large painting can become gift wrap or writing paper and an envelope.
As for the trophies that often crowd kids’ shelves, several mothers reminded that after an appropriate period, children can be encouraged to donate all but the most cherished awards to youth programs or school coaches. Many trophies are combinations of components that can easily be dismantled and reassembled into new awards.
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The Way I Act Recognized with Gold Medal
Our newest children’s book, The Way I Act, has received a gold medal in the Publishers Association of the West Book Design Awards. A companion to The Way I Feel, which also received awards for its design and illustrations, The Way I Act was written by Steve Metzger, and illustrated and designed by Janan Cain, who did The Way I Feel and Así me siento yo.
All three books and their accompanying teacher guides have now also been approved for classroom use by the Department of Education in California, one of the states that has a formal, centralized review process for books to be used in schools.
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SIDS Author Recognized by Wall Street Journal
“There should be nothing in the crib but the baby,” Rachel Moon was quoted in “When A Cuddly Crib Puts the Baby in Danger,” a recent “Health and Wellness” story in the Wall Street Journal by Melinda Beck.
Moon, a Washington, D.C., physician and SIDS researcher, is the co-author of our new 14 Ways to Protect Your Baby from SIDS: Safe Sleep Advice from the Experts. She also heads the American Academy of Pediatrics task force on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Moon was quoted extensively in the story, which concluded with her comment about not all parents or caregivers heeding warnings about where babies should sleep. “They make this risk-benefit decision on their own, but they underestimate the risk.”
More than a dozen risks are outlined in 14 Ways to Protect Your Baby from SIDS: Safe Sleep Advice from the Experts, available as a PDF at www.parentingpress.com. Regular price is $9.95. Use “WSJ” as a promotion code until June 1, 2011, and you’ll pay only $5.
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Enter Drawing for Gift Certificate for Books
If you could select any two Parenting Press publications, what would they be? E-mail your choices to marketing@parentingpress.com and you’ll be entered in a drawing for a $25 gift certificate that can be used on any purchase at parentingpress.com.
Be sure to include the complete titles of the books and the authors’ names, and your complete contact information, including name, preferred e-mail address, and postal address. If you have time to tell us why you’d choose these publications, and how you’d use them, we’d be delighted!
Important: put “Drawing” in your subject line and make sure we receive your e-mail before June 21, 2011. We’ll celebrate the start of summer by selecting an entry at random! If your name is drawn, you’ll have 10 days after notification to claim your gift certificate.
By entering this drawing, participants agree that their names and the cities of their residence can be publicized in an announcement if they are the winner. (Street addresses and e-mail addresses will remain confidential, seen only by the Parenting Press staff.)
Parenting Press gift certificates have no expiration date. They can be applied to the purchase of any materials published by the Press: books, card decks, posters, QWIK Books and Sheets, teacher guides, subscriptions and back issues of Parenting Education Practitioners Talk. They can also be applied to the purchase of the How Much is Enough? Leader’s Guide. They cannot be redeemed in whole or part for cash, or applied to the purchase of books not published by the Press or to previous purchases. They are valid only at ParentingPress.com, or with orders placed at (800) 992-6657.
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STAR Parenting Books Available at Special Price
If you work with families in crisis—or with parents unsure how to change children’s behavior, you may be interested in Elizabeth Crary’s STAR Parenting Tales and Tools.
Based on decades of work with hundreds of families, the techniques in this book help parents and caregivers develop realistic expectations and figure out how to solve problems of all kinds.
Full of situations we can all identify with, STAR Parenting Tales and Tools is easy to read and remember. The problem solving process is easy to remember because the first letter of each step spells STAR — Stop and focus, Think of ideas, Act effectively, and Review and revise. The five points of the star represent five areas of healthy parenting — Avoid problems, Set Limits, Teach new skills, Acknowledge feelings, and Respond to cooperation. The points are also easy to remember as the first letter of each point spells A STAR. On each point are three parent-tested tools or techniques. Every single technique is adaptable to an individual family’s situation and values; they work with the toddler of a teenage single parent, with tweens and teens grieving losses like death, divorce or foreclosure, and with kids who simply have never been disciplined.
Here’s the bonus: copies are available right now for $10 each. That’s $10 total: we’ll pay Media Rate postage to U.S. addresses, and for those in Washington state, we’ll pay the sales tax, too. This 256-page book retails for $23.95 in bookstores. The special offer is due to a blooper that you may not even notice—a tiny typo on the spine. (We’re pretty sure the contents are perfect, but if you’re the first customer to find any given typo in the text of your copy, you are eligible for a $10 Parenting Press gift certificate.) Copies of these “blooper books” are limited, so we encourage you to order immediately. Be sure to use Promotion Code “April Star” where the shopping cart asks for “Gift Certificates or promotional codes.” Please note that these copies are sold on a nonreturnable basis and are not for retail sale in any store or web site.
II. FEATURES
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Tips for the month
Each Saturday, Parenting Press posts a new parenting tip and the previous week’s tip is moved to the archive.
Loss takes many forms, especially for children. The transitions necessary when a school year ends, a friend moves away, a pet is lost, the family changes neighborhoods—all these can cause as much grief for a young person as a death. This month our parenting tips cover losses that your children may suffer. These can be reprinted in your publications as long as you credit Parenting Press and provide our URL, ParentingPress.com.
May 7 — Responding To Your Child’s Grief About Moving
May 14 — Helping Children Understand Death
May 21 — When a Grandparent Dies
May 28 — How Grieving Children Behave
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Family Fun Ideas — Wrecks: Planes, Boats, Even Trains
How many stories start with a wreck! An airplane goes down in a forest or a field, or behind enemy lines. A shipwreck strands someone—and an entire family—on an island. A caboose uncouples from the last train car and coasts back down the mountain. Introduce your kids to some real vehicles and vessels and how they started, and ended, life with museum trips, books, movies and such online resources as these:
The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, in Michigan, has new educational programs this season; see their web site for general information or specifics on what to look for at the museum if you’re heading toward Lake Superior.
The Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum, established to honor those who died in some 700 wrecks near this Massachusetts island, also has information on lifesaving, Coast Guard and lighthouse dogs.
Hatchet, a young adult novel by Gary Paulsen, describes how a young boy lands a small plane after the pilot suffers a heart attack. Popular in school, this book details how the boy survives in the wilderness.
The Little Prince, which tells of a pilot struggling to stay alive after his plane crashes in the desert, was inspired by author Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s experience in the mid-1930s. He was flying from Paris to Saigon when his plane went down in the North African wilderness.
Milwaukee Terminal No. 6, available at dcsfilms.com, tells the story of a side-wheel steamer that carried trains across the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon for 24 years. It was built in Delaware but disassembled, boxed and shipped to Oregon in 57,179 pieces in the summer of 1883.
In The General, a much-lauded 1926 silent film staring Buster Keaton, the story starts with a wrecked relationship, and the train wreck comes along later. This comedy, set during the Civil War, was partly filmed in Oregon.
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Community Service — Soldiers, Sailors, Pilots, Teachers, Nurses—and Moms!
Our goal with this column is to suggest ways that you can model the concept of sharing and giving back to your community. There are practical advantages to community service, too. Kids can use these projects to meet school or youth group requirements for community service and to start building resumes that they’ll use when applying for first jobs or college.
This month, using its holidays and special observances as a guide, let’s consider how we can honor people in several different roles.
To observe National Teachers Day on May 3, those of you in the household who are out of school might talk about your most memorable teachers, and those whose advice has been the most helpful in life at home and at work. Help your children brainstorm how to honor the teachers they appreciate most: a little basket of homemade muffins for the classroom teacher, maybe, or a thank you note to a previous teacher.
National Nurses Week starts May 6 and ends on the 12th, the birth date of Florence Nightingale, recognized as the founder of modern nursing. You’ll find the history of this special week on the web site of the American Nurses Association along with suggestions for tie-in projects. Here’s one: create a display at your local library, community center or bookstore with pictures of nurses in different roles in your neighborhood (at a medical clinic, public health office and school, perhaps), pictures of early-day nurses in your community, wartime recruiting posters for nurses and maybe even the covers of old teen novels about nurses (Sue Barton and Cherry Ames, anyone?)
Mother’s Day comes on May 8, a day when children can honor their mothers, grandmothers and other women in their family and circle of friends. A group of older children might ask local retirement facilities, senior citizen centers and ministers about women who seem to be alone and forgotten by family members. Imagine how delighted these women might be with cards or simple bouquets!
Armed Forces Day, celebrated this year on the 21st, was created in 1949 to honor Americans serving in the five U.S. military branches — the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard — following the consolidation of the military services in the Department of Defense. If your community doesn’t have an Armed Forces Day parade to attend, kids can get together and create patriotic cards to be distributed at USO branches and in Veterans Administrator hospitals. (For locations, start at the USO or Veterans Administration web sites.)
Keep on celebrating through the 22nd, which is National Maritime Day. It was designated as such by Congress in 1933 to recognize the contribution of the Savannah in the advancement of ocean transportation as the first steam-propelled vessel to successfully cross the Atlantic (way back in 1819). Maybe that’s the day to take a boat ride, tour a maritime museum, or sail a toy boat.
III. POTPOURRI
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Special of the month — Happy Birthday, Mrs. Crary!
This special has expired.
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