Talking About the Facts of Life with Kids

When parents decide to talk to their kids about 'the facts of life' it usually leads into one of those embarrassing situations (from the children’s point of view) where parents feel it’s their duty to make sure their children know how a baby is made.

The true irony is that how babies are made is only a tiny part of the real 'facts of life'. We seem to forget that there are many more important facts that children need to know about life. The first of these is health.

Good health is the foundation for our quality of life. The healthier we are the better we function in all aspects of life. So how much education do young kids get about health from their family, their teachers or books? Usually they learn something about the human body and organs and how they function. They may learn about healthy behavior - diet, hygiene, exercise etc. They may be given information about what they should and shouldn’t do, especially in relation to sex, smoking, drinking alcohol and taking drugs.

However if you look at youth health statistics it seems that while children may learn the facts, these frequently do not translate into action. The increase in obesity in children shows that the facts of healthy eating are not real for young people. The levels of youth drinking, smoking and drug taking show that whatever information young people are provided with is not having the desired impact.

So what are the most critical facts of life that kids at home should be learning while they are still young?

There are two simple priorities which could transform every individual's life.

1. How to be healthy.

2. How to prevent disease.

We now know a lot about health and there is much we can do to prevent all the major diseases. However this is highly pragmatic knowledge which is only effective if it is put into practice. If we want to teach health to kids effectively, we must give them education that actually changes their behavior. If you want to prevent heart disease it is simply not enough to know about exercise in theory. You need to exercise on a regular basis.

If we want to deliver effective health education we need to change our approach to education so we measure changes in children’s behavior rather than what they can memorize or write down on a piece of paper. The most useful knowledge in relation to health can only be measured in behavior and action. Words and information don’t have any real meaning unless they translate into behavior.

We find it unacceptable that children come out of school unable to read and write. Every child is expected to be able to count and calculate. All young people learn the biological 'facts of life'. But health is more important than any of these. It should be viewed as more fundamental than numeracy and literacy. We need to make sure that children are unable to pass the subject of health until they are healthy. Health is a prerequisite for a high quality of life. We don’t give children the right to choose whether they learn to read or write. There should be no choice as to whether they are healthy or not.

If you want to start to make a difference to a child's health now it is simple. Take one aspect of health that you feel is important, for example eating more fruit and vegetables as part of their daily diet. First make sure you are setting a good example yourself. If not take some time to sort out your own behavior. Then start to talk with the children about eating more fruit and vegetables. Make sure that you always have fruit and vegetables available at mealtimes. Explain to them why it is good for them. Never lecture them or get angry or emotional. Just quietly and persistently let them get the message that it is healthy to eat lots of fruit and vegetables. Always let them know why. You may have to repeat this regularly for a few weeks. But after a while you will see that they take on the message for themselves. You may even see them teaching their friends (or their dolls and other toys) to eat more fruit and vegetables. This simple approach can be applied to all aspects of health and because it is experiential they will never forget.

Family and the Future of Love Relationships

If you look at the average 20 year old, the chances that they have had any real education about relationships and love are pretty slim. Growing up as kids, they probably learned a little biology about the male and female body; they’ve possibly read some love poetry by Shakespeare or some other great author; they’ve usually watched their parents relationship going through some significant ups and downs with little explanation about what’s going on. But in terms of understanding themselves and their needs and requirements for love and relationship the average 20 year old is pretty unprepared for the real world.

The main thing parents have the power to change in this area is to become more honest with children about relationships while they are still living at home. With marriage ending in divorce at the rate of about 50%, it is unfair to teach children that every relationship is supposed to last forever. It is not true that when you fall in love with somebody - or find the right person - you will live happily ever after. Having babies is not the be-all and end-all of relationships and cannot save an unhappy marriage. The form and function of the modern family has changed and children are not responsible for their parents getting divorced (many of them feel they are).

Many parents want to hide what goes on in their relationship from their children in the desperate hope that their children will do better than they have done. But it doesn’t work like that! It never has.

If you want to see your children have better relationships than you it is necessary to start by helping them learn more about the reality of love and relationship. You need to talk with them about how and why relationships work (and don't work). Make a commitment to being more honest about your own mistakes. You also need to realize that your children know far more than you may sometimes think. When you try to hide the truth it is only confusing to them - their senses tell them one thing while your words say something quite different.

This doesn’t mean you need to spill all the blood and guts to young children and disturb them. They don't need to know all the ups and downs in your relationship. But it does mean that you need to start to help your children have realistic expectations about relationships, and this includes the fact that every family relationship has problems. Kids need and want to learn how to face up to problems and solve them rather than run away or hide from them.

If you feel afraid of being honest with your kids about relationships, you are not alone. The majority of parents mistakenly feel that kids need to be protected from the truth because it is often painful or disappointing. But they may not be aware that children see and feel what is going on despite all the things that are covered up or lied about. And to a child, that dishonesty is more painful than the truth. To top it all off, that dishonesty becomes their pattern for their future relationships.

On a more positive note, children can handle much more than we realize if they are treated openly and with respect. Kids who grow up with a more realistic picture of love, relationships and family living are much better prepared for life than those who are kept in ignorance and then are left to make the same mistakes as their parents.

Relaxed Parents Are Stress Management Experts

Jimmy Allen: If you were to give parents a simple and quick piece of advice to help with stress management and improving their children's behavior, what would that be?

Sarah McCrum: Well, I once met a parenting consultant who showed me something I have never forgotten. He said to me 'Don't think about pink elephants'. Of course I immediately started to think about pink elephants.

Jimmy Allen: Ya, I just did.

Sarah McCrum: Exactly. If you say to anyone, including children, 'Don’t do that', the message they get is to do it. You focus all their attention on exactly the activity you want them to stop.

When you are tense and nervous as a parent your general language is 'Don’t do that'. 'Please don’t do that to me.' 'Please don’t do that any more'. You can find yourself begging, pleading, hoping or shouting but the fundamental message behind everything you say is 'Don’t'. So of course children do it more and more.

When you are relaxed and happy you naturally feel more open and positive and your message naturally becomes 'Do this' or 'Let’s do this together' and you transmit a positive message to the child. You focus his or her attention on what you want them to do, rather than what you don't want them to do. You effectively invite children to do something specific so they forget everything else, including the activity you don't want them to do any more. This is a very powerful change.

Jimmy Allen: There's a lot of books and parenting approaches that suggest to out smart their children and carefully choose more appropriate words, but I've watched many parents trying that and it only seems to work temporarily, or should I say superficially.

Sarah McCrum: It is possible to train yourself to talk the right way so children listen to you more. With practice it will have an effect. However this highly conscious approach is slow to affect the root of the problem. You talk negatively because you feel negative. It is this negative feeling that most directly affects the child. A negative feeling creates negative energy. When the energy is negative the message is confused. It becomes scrambled and children are literally unable to react.

The simpler way to turn the situation around is for the parents to learn to relax. When you are relaxed you are naturally positive, from the inside. I have seen parents who start to learn relaxation transforming their relationships with their children. They come back with shining eyes saying their children are completely different. In behavioral situations that were highly challenging before, for example eating candy, not going to bed, being too noisy, the problem seems to melt away and children become naturally willing to do whatever they want them to do.

It is amazing that something so small and simple as taking 10 or 20 minutes to sit and do nothing and clear your mind, can have such a powerful effect that can last all day. When you are positive your energy is positive. When you speak your message is clear and children react naturally to that.

Jimmy: That sounds so easy and it seems like doing that would save a lot of time and effort.

Sarah McCrum: Yes, and the irony is that the people who most need relaxation are the people who feel they have the least time. But if you invest a little time for relaxation you gain much more time in return. The principle is the same as investing money. If you put some money into a wise investment you get more money out. If you put it into the wrong investment you lose money. Similarly if you put time into the wrong investment, such as being nervous, angry and negative you will lose more and more time. However if you invest time into a wise activity, such as relaxation, you get much more time out of it.

When you have stress and are tense, time seems to go against you and there is never enough of it. When you relax time begins to stretch in your favor and it is surprising just how much can be achieved and how many people want to help you, including your children. So one simple and easy piece of advice for parents is to really learn how to improve their ability to relax. Relaxation is the best form of stress management.

Life's 4 Living - or is it?

A 19 year old German girl is traveling alone around Australia and New Zealand. She is very well educated and able to express intelligent opinions on a wide variety of topics. Her conversation ranges freely over politics, personal relationships, education, the environment crisis, her future and elsewhere. In all areas she is articulate, open-minded and confident in her view. One day she is asked to clean up the kitchen, but it turns out that she has no idea how to clean up a small space. She starts to fall in love with an American student but it turns out that she is not brave enough to let him know that she is interested in him. She talks about the career she knows she has to plan but it turns out that she is barely able to think about what she wants, locked by her fear of making a mistake and disappointing her parents. She is so ashamed and afraid of disturbing other people at the dinner table that she has to leave the room when she needs to cough.

A Chinese student marries his girlfriend because she is pregnant. He is studying a Master’s degree in commerce at university. His mother calls his new wife soon after the wedding and asks her not to put too much pressure on him because he hasn’t finished his studies yet. He has (presumably) self-educated himself how to conceive a baby, but not one person through all his 25 years has educated him on how to handle being a parent. Now that he is going to be a father his own parents still want him protected from real life so he can finish his academic studies.

An American young man is traveling around New Zealand after graduating from high school. When asked what his life goal is he smiles and says he is interested in martial arts, and wants to explore and learn the mysteries of life. He plans to go to university to study anthropology after he completes his travels. When questioned about his choice he is not really sure but thinks it is probably necessary to go to college and says that "Anthropology looks interesting". It has no connection whatsoever with his life goal, and will not in any way help him to reach what he wants. Realistically the closest he is likely to come to exploring the mysteries of life is through alcohol, drugs and late-night philosophical discussions.

These young people are real and they are not unusual. They are well educated, intelligent and still hopeful that they have a bright future. They all have excellent potential for success and satisfaction if they find the right direction. They will all be able to work well in any career they choose but they all suffer from one simple problem. They have no idea about life.

I like to picture how they might be if they had had as much life education as they received academic education. I imagine the German girl already enjoying success in her first career - a strong young woman with no need for a man to provide her with emotional support. She is disciplined in her lifestyle (and tidy), full of confidence in action rather than words, and a lot quieter in her opinions. Relationship comes to her much later and she is much happier for it. The Chinese student is happy and not so serious. If his girlfriend gets pregnant (which she probably doesn't) he quickly comes up with a creative idea for providing for the baby financially without disturbing his studies - probably an internet based business. He is healthy and strong enough to handle the pressure, sleepless nights and additional responsibility. In fact he sees it as a chance to increase his ability to handle life and takes it as a challenge rather than a problem. He has no need whatsoever for interference from his parents. The American man is undergoing a highly disciplined martial arts training and already developing some extraordinary abilities. He is inspired by the possibility of being able to use his training in the future to take on bigger challenges, perhaps learning how to heal incurable diseases or train top athletes in elite performance.

Life's 4 Living, or at least it should be, but it appears that is only true if you know how to live.

Relaxation cures information overload

We are increasingly overloaded with information as the information era gains pace. The amount of information we have to deal with everyday is growing at a phenomenal rate.

I looked at a website yesterday, for example, which was teaching people how to deal with email. The first point was that you simply don’t have to read all your emails. Some people are getting so many emails that they just can’t handle it anymore. You could literally sit all day long writing answers - and as soon as you send an answer you are likely to get another email coming in - answering your answer. You even hear about people getting up in the middle of the night going to check their emails, and first thing in the morning, and in the gym, at the dentist, during meetings - the only place that is email free is where there is no connection.

Nowadays you can get lost in all these words in the way that previously you might get lost in the forest. If there’s anything you want to find out, you go to the internet and have instant access to millions of pages of information on any given topic - and then you can lose an hour or two trying to find exactly what you want. On the way you find so much interesting information, and you save some of it for future use, but in the end you wonder where the time went.

We are totally overloaded with information and it is not sustainable, so where are we headed? In the nature of yin and yang we can expect to swing the other way, and it has already started. You can predict the future by looking at what is reaching a peak at the moment; what is becoming too much for human beings, and then you know what people will want next. And if you’re fast and want to get ahead of the trend you can start to do the new trend now.

When your mind becomes too full you reach a point where you just want it to be empty - totally empty. You feel a deep need for a massive spring cleaning to clear all the junk out of your head. That is the reason why people are beginning to turn to meditation and relaxation. They are methods for emptying your mind.

If you find you’re checking emails in the middle of the night; or dependent on checking your inbox every half hour; or you feel that new emails are like food to a hungry body; this may be an early warning sign of a new sickness - we can call it information sickness. The cause - information overload. And the healing for that sickness is relaxation; emptying your mind… doing nothing.

Improving your child's happiness in a fast-changing society

Jimmy Allen: What can parents do to improve their children's happiness and overall behavior?

Sarah McCrum: Many parents are facing a big problem these days. It seems that whatever they do their children don’t react in the way that they expect them to. This is especially clear in the area of respect. I have met many parents who were genuinely surprised and confused at the lack of respect children have for them and other adults. And the irony is that the more they try to understand their children and give them what they want the less the children respect them.

Jimmy Allen: I have found that most parents are confused about when to be strong with their children and when to listen more to them.

Sarah McCrum: On the one hand a lot of advice is now available for parents about how to bring up children and at the same time the children’s rights movement has encouraged people to consult children much more about what they want. But we live in a fast moving, and fast changing, society where it is difficult to be sure that what you want now is going to be useful in the future. This has left parents in a vacuum - trying to prepare their children for a world about which they feel they know almost nothing. In this case the usual response is simply to do what you know. But now, more than ever before, doing what we know seems not to be working as well as it should.

Jimmy Allen: That's pretty hard for parents. It leaves them somewhere between a rock and a hard place.

Sarah McCrum: It’s not parents' fault that the children don’t behave in the way that they expect. And it’s not the teachers' fault or anybody else's fault. It’s just we’re in a society that is changing extremely fast and we’re not figuring out what society will be like in 10 or 20 years. I believe we need to start a debate among parents and educators about what the future may look like. Even if we can't be very sure about it at least it would start people thinking about it rather than relying on the present or the past, as we do at the moment. Even some sense of the future starts us thinking about what kinds of qualities children will need to handle the challenges they are likely to face and become successful. This would make a better foundation for decisions about upbringing and education than anything we know about the present.

Jimmy Allen: How can we start that debate?

Sarah McCrum: On the internet is a good starting point because it is relatively democratic. A lot of people have access to the internet and it is an easy forum for expressing opinions. But discussion has little value without action. I would like to see families and schools emerge from the discussion with the courage and vision to create new kinds of upbringing and education specifically geared to the future. It is beginning to happen in a few pockets. A lot of experimentation is needed, which is frightening for parents and teachers but great experience for the children. When the world is changing fast we need to change fast too.

Has wellness been hijacked?

Wellness is a great concept. It brings happiness into health and encourages a truly holistic approach to life. Wikipedia defines wellness as a healthy balance of the mind-body and spirit that results in an overall feeling of well-being. It sounds like exactly what every one is looking for. But when you start to talk about corporate wellness, or workplace wellness, all life goes out of the concept. Total solutions, disease management and health screening do not inspire visions of enjoying life and living it to the full. They start from the assumption that sickness is here to stay and needs to be discovered, managed and controlled but can never be healed.

The wellness industry is growing phenomenally fast. Wellness guru, Paul Zane Pilzer, has labelled it the next trillion dollar industry. But wellness has two different faces. On the one hand there are the small businesses – people working from home or in small centres selling all kinds of wellness products and services at a speed of growth that is escalating rapidly. On the other hand corporate wellness is also exploding but in a very different direction.

The baby boomers who are driving the popular wellness revolution have been described as the first generation to refuse to accept the inevitability of death. They are actively looking for ways to prevent aging, stay healthy into old age and enjoy themselves more than ever before after retirement. This is a radical departure from current notions of old age, which are often dominated by pictures of sickness, frailty and suffering.

The corporations have been largely forced to take on wellness. This is partly through legislative pressure, with many countries introducing laws to make companies liable for stress-related sickness in their employees. It is also financially motivated, as research has repeatedly shown the enormous costs of absenteeism (and increasingly of presenteeism as well).

Whereas the baby boomers are actively looking for new solutions and new lifestyles the companies are struggling to organise largely traditional and mainstream health systems, such as doctors, nurses, insurance and screening systems. The problem is that the traditional health system does not have solutions for the problems that people are handling.

Nobody ever went to see a doctor to get happy, because a doctor doesn’t have any clue how to make people happy. And many stress-related health problems are described as chronic diseases, which means that they last for a very long time - or maybe for the rest of your life - because there is no medical cure. Counselling is a common offering in companies for emotional problems, but whilst it may provide a useful pressure valve it is not a powerful treatment for stress, unhappiness or depression.

Imagine walking into a company where the employees are happy, healthy, full of inspiration, fit, love working, have meaningful family lives, active social lives, and enjoyable relationships at work and in their community. That kind of company would be a pleasure to work in and bound to be successful because people would be working to their optimum capacity.

So can we create a system of true wellness that will serve the development of the companies and their employees and will pay for itself because of the benefits that both sides will gain?

First of all we have to face the fact that we can’t place all the responsibility into the hands of the current health system. Absenteeism, stress, depression, the very roots of the wellness revolution, have not been solved by the current system. If they had been we wouldn’t have this revolution, we would all be much more well. So we need to look elsewhere for solutions.

We also cannot rely on makeshift feel-good wellness offerings, such as the on-site massage team which visits the office once a month or the wellness day that raises awareness for a little while but leaves most people unaffected. They are easy to organise but have little or no real effect on employee wellness.

Corporate needs are different than individual needs and many of the new small wellness businesses that are springing up simply don’t have the capacity to serve the corporate market. However it is in the best interest of both companies and employees to find and develop systems of health and wellness that really work – that benefit people to be happy, handle stress, love working, and to have enough energy to go home at the end of the day and enjoy their family and social life. So far the corporate world has hijacked the concept of wellness and turned it into a modern version of occupational health. It is time to raise the vision and find out how to make truly healthy, happy workplaces where people thrive.