After 25 years practicing pediatrics,
and caring for thousands of children, I've noticed some patterns
that offer me a deeper vision of health. Here are some of those
invaluable lessons:
1. Growth and development are not a race.
These days we�re in such a rush to grow up. In our
mechanized, post-industrialized world of speed and efficiency,
we've forgotten that life is a process of ripening. To get good
fruit, you need to nourish strong roots. Pay attention to the
ground that supports your child�s life: Go for a walk with your
child, eat with your child, play together, tell him a story
about your experience as a child.
2. Creating family traditions encourages strong roots and
a healthy life.
This takes time and practice. Personal traditions are sacred
because they promote exchanges that strengthen bonds of love and
intimacy and build the kind of confidence that will carry your
child through this world.
3. We grow in cycles.
There is a rhythm and pulse to each child�s life � sometimes
fast and intense, sometimes slow and quiet. Just as each spring
brings a renewed sense of appreciation for life, each stage of a
child�s life is a time of new discovery and wonder. After all,
learning is not just a process of accruing information. It's the
process of transforming our ideas, and sometimes this requires
forgetting in order to see with fresh eyes. Some children will
take a step backward before making a giant leap forward.
Growing in cycles means that we don�t get just one chance to
learn something. The same lesson will offer itself up to us
again and again as we pass through the seasons of our life.
There is deep
forgiveness
in this way of understanding childhood, which I find takes the
pressure off parents to �get it right� the first time.
4. Encouragement is not the same as indulgence.
We are not in the business of raising little kings and
queens. Kings don�t do well in our society. Recent studies have
shown that indulgence actually weakens your child�s powers to
survive, deflating motivation and diminishing feelings of
success.
Encouragement means putting courage in your child, not doing
things for him. Create a supportive context that will open up a
path without pushing your child down it. Unconditional love is
the scaffolding that encourages your child to take chances, to
experiment, and to fail without judgment. Sometimes being an
encouraging presence in your child�s life means standing a
little off in the background, there to offer a compassionate
hand when circumstances call for it, but trusting in his innate
ingenuity.
There is spaciousness in encouragement. Indulgence, on the
other hand, limits freedom by inflating a child�s sense of
entitlement and reducing the patience needed to work through
obstacles when he doesn't instantly get his way. Indulgence
leads to small-minded thinking.
5. Pushing your buttons is a spiritual practice, and
children are our spiritual teachers.
You don�t need an expensive spiritual retreat to become
enlightened. Your little sage-teacher is right in front of you,
offering you true wisdom free of charge!
Children watch our every move when they're little, studying
our inconsistencies as they try to figure out this crazy world.
And they will call you on it. When a child pushes your buttons,
remember: they are your buttons, not hers. Take the time
to listen to what your child is trying to teach you. One of the
secrets of parenthood is our willingness to transform ourselves
out of love for our child. When you're willing to look at your
buttons, you open up a deeper self-awareness that is
transformative for both you and your child.
6. A symptom is the body�s way of letting us know
something has to change.
Good medicine asks what is the symptom trying to
accomplish? rather than simply suppressing it. Our body
has its own intelligence and yet so much of pharmaceutical
advertising tries to convince us that there is something wrong
with feeling symptoms. Much of my medical training was focused
on stopping symptoms as if they were the problem. (This is like
telling the body to shut up. It�s rude!) We don't trust the
body�s intelligence. We think too much and tend to be afraid of
feelings in our body.
But children have taught me that a symptom like fever is
actually not the problem. Whatever is causing the fever may be a
problem, but the temperature is simply the body�s way of trying
to deal with what�s happening.
Take, for example, the child with a fever. What other
symptoms does the child have? If he is playful, you may not need
to suppress the fever. It means the body is trying to make
metabolic heat to mobilize the immune system. To help it do
this, you can give warm (not cold) fluids so it doesn�t dry out
and nourishing foods like soups to fuel the fire.
7. Be prepared.
The one phrase from the Eagle Scout motto that stuck with me
since I was a boy was Be prepared. This is a state of
readiness that can be fueled by confidence or fear.
These days I practice what I call �preparatory medicine�
rather than preventive medicine, so that getting sick is not
seen as a failure. Being healthy does not mean never getting
sick. Life is a journey of ups and downs and the growing child
lives in a constant state of flux. A resilient immune system is
one that learns how to get sick and get better. Living too clean
a life robs us of the information necessary to be fully prepared
to recover.
Rather than living in fear of illness, there are natural ways
we can support our children to recovery from illness quickly and
efficiently: good nutrition, hydration,
probiotics, rest and exercise.
But the most important? Rather than focusing on how often your
child gets sick, celebrate how often she gets better.
8. Healing takes time.
The most alternative medicine I practice these days is taking
time. As a society, we're addicted to quick fixes because we
have no time to be sick anymore. As a doctor, I was trained as a
kind of glorified fireman, looking to put out emergencies
quickly and efficiently.
In emergencies, strong medicine is often necessary to save
lives but most health problems in childhood are not emergencies.
In those instances it takes more than strong medicine to get
better; it takes time. I realize that taking another day off
from work because a child has been sent home from school with a
runny nose can add real stress to our already stressful lives.
But children have taught me that healing is a kind of
developmental process that has its own stages too.
When we don�t take time to recover, we rob our children of
the necessary stages they need to learn from if they are to
develop long-lasting health. When we take time to recover,
illness becomes a journey of discovery, not just a destination;
we begin to see our health and illness as two sides of the same
coin.
9. The secret of life is letting go.
Life is a process of constantly giving way. Things pushed
past their prime transform into something else. Just as spring
gives way to summer, so is each stage of development a process
of
letting go. Crawling
gives way to walking. Babbling gives way to speaking. Childhood
gives way to adolescence. By breathing in, you breathe out. By
eating, you poop.
Each season, each stage, each little rhythm of our life is a
matter of letting go. This allows us to get rid of what we don't
need to make room in our lives for new information. Learning to
let go is not always easy and each child has his own adaptive
style and timing. Nature favors diversity. Remember to honor
your child�s unique nature. This is what my book
Fire Child Water Child is all about.
Perhaps the most important way children teach me how to let
go is in the way they play. Playing means letting go of our
inhibitions; it frees us up and allows us not to take ourselves
too seriously.
10. Trust yourself: You're the expert on your child.
One of the most important things I teach new parents is how
to trust themselves. Nowhere is this more daunting than when a
new baby comes into our life. We�re expected to know everything
and yet we feel like we know nothing. But children have taught
me that this knowing-nothing can be a real opportunity to open
our powers of intuition.
Mindful parenting begins by listening with an open heart to
your child�s life without fear or panic. Studies have shown that
a mother�s intuition is more powerful than any lab test in
picking up problems. Unfortunately today we are flooded with so
much scary information that it interferes with our ability to
listen to our own intuition. (Just think of the arrogance of a
doctor who acts like he knows your child better than you do!)
Take a tip from your baby. Look into your baby�s eyes.
Imagine what it feels like to be conscious of the world before
you have language, before all those labels that scare us and
divide things into good and bad, right and wrong. Babies have no
enemies. This is seeing from the source. It is what Zen
Buddhists call �beginner�s mind.� Watch closely how your baby
breathes with his belly. This is Qigong breathing. Stop thinking
for a moment and try breathing this way. You may just find the
answers you need waiting for you there.
11. Take the long view. (Because it�s easy to get caught
in the immediacy of a problem, especially at 2am.)
Having watched thousands of children grow into adulthood,
what sometimes seems like a big deal at four-months old or
14-years old may be no more than a small bump in the road.
Children have taught me how to take the long view of life. When
we step back and see the big picture of our lives, we discover
wisdom and compassion.