It goes against the grain not just because it seems like such a grim and pessimistic judgment, but because it violates a prevailing social belief that people have a nearly limitless potential for change and self-improvement. After all, we are the culture of Baby Einstein, the video product that promised — and spectacularly failed — to make geniuses of all our infants.
Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant — any more than everyone will turn out nice and loving. And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.
“The central pitch of any child psychiatrist now is that the illness is often in the child and that the family responses may aggravate the scene but not wholly create it,” said my colleague Dr. Theodore Shapiro, a child psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The era of ‘there are no bad children, only bad parents’ is gone.”
I recall one patient who told me that she had given up trying to have a relationship with her 24-year-old daughter, whose relentless criticism she could no longer bear. “I still love and miss her,” she said sadly. “But I really don’t like her.”
For better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children. That is why they should not be so fast to take all the blame — or credit — for everything that their children become.
Ms. Cyrus’s appeal among those age 13 to 17 has dropped, too, according to E-Poll Market Research, a brand and celebrity research firm. Of those surveyed online recently, only 24 percent said they liked or liked her a lot, compared with 45 percent in 2008. Those who track preteens are noticing the shift. Tina Wells, a market research executive who consults with Fortune 500 companies, said Ms. Cyrus ranked No. 7 in April on its list of celebrities considered cool by children 8 to 12 years old. Two years ago she was No. 1....
It is tricky for any teenage star to navigate the path to adulthood. (Britney Spears? Lindsay Lohan?) But Ms. Cyrus, it seems, is alienating her fans faster than she is gaining new ones. Partly to blame is last year’s pole dance at the Teen Choice Awards, and the recent video posted on TMZ of her giving a lap dance to a 44-year-old film director.
For some mothers of Ms. Cyrus’s fans, her wrenching transition from teen idol to sexual icon has become a teachable moment.
“I’m just impressed with kids picking up on the change and saying it’s not that interesting and they don’t relate,” said Megan Calhoun of Ross, Calif., the founder of TwitterMoms, a blog for mothers that has 26,000 members. Some have expressed dismay at the shift in Ms. Cyrus’s persona. “It’s almost as if these young stars don’t realize it is a turnoff,” Ms. Calhoun said.
Some parents chalk up her behavior to teenage angst. “It doesn’t surprise me what she is going through,” said Wendy Ellis, a mother of two from Odenton, Md. “The raging hormones. She is testing the limits of the box and what is appropriate.”
It is estimated that one in six children suffer from developmental disorders, including mental retardation, autism spectrum disorders, learning disorders, attentional disorders, genetic disorders, sleep disorders. However, despite the fact that all these disorders originate in the brain, most of them are diagnosed solely by looking at behavioural symptoms without ever looking at the brain! That is, they are diagnosed behaviourally rather than neurologically. This often results in an incomplete or inaccurate diagnosis....
Almost 50% of the children previously diagnosed with autism are found to be suffering from some degree of brain seizure activity that is undetectable to the eye. In some cases, these seizures are the cause of the child's autism-like symptoms. In other cases, these seizures are not causal, but comorbid (coexistent) to autism and are exacerbating the child's symptoms. And in a few cases, the seizures are mild and possibly unrelated to, or a consequence of, the child's symptoms. In the cases where these seizures are the cause of the symptoms, once the seizures have been detected and treated, the level and speed of recovery in the children has been remarkable.
“To me the most important part of Rockwell’s work is that it illustrates compassion and caring about other people,” the filmmaker George Lucas, who lives in Marin County, Calif., said recently. “You could almost say he was a Buddhist painter.”
Steven Spielberg, speaking from Los Angeles, had similar praise. “Anything for Norman,” he said, when asked to discuss his work. “He was always on my mind because I had a great deal of respect for how he could tell stories in a single frozen image. Entire stories.”...
Mr. Lucas and Mr. Spielberg trace their Rockwell love to their childhoods, when they pored over the covers of The Saturday Evening Post, a weekly magazine (and misnomer) that arrived in mailboxes on Thursdays. They started collecting his work before it was validated by the art world. According to his records Mr. Lucas bought his first Rockwell, a calendar illustration, on May 16, 1980. A year and a half later Mr. Spielberg bought his first Rockwell, a stirring painting that was commissioned in 1923 as an advertisement for Underwood typewriters. It shows a young writer hunched at his cluttered desk as Daniel Boone floats above on puffy clouds, a figure of glamorous virility who provides the boy with both a subject for his literary efforts and a painful reminder of his limitations.
“I hung the painting over my desk,” Mr. Spielberg recalled. “It was my deblocker. Whenever I hit a wall or couldn’t figure out where a story was going, I just looked up at that painting.”
"One interesting practical suggestion is to keep a "gratitude journal," in which you routinely list experiences and circumstances for which you are grateful."- Ben Bernanke
Spirituality: Those who regularly attend religious services and engage in religious activities such as prayer reading religious material score are more likely to be grateful. Grateful people are more likely to acknowledge a belief in the interconnectedness of all life and a commitment to and responsibility to others (McCullough et. al., 2002). Gratitude does not require religious faith, but faith enhances the ability to be grateful.
A related benefit was observed in the realm of personal goal attainment: Participants who kept gratitude lists were more likely to have made progress toward important personal goals (academic, interpersonal and health-based) over a two-month period compared to subjects in the other experimental conditions.
Three year olds: first, the sympathy. My grandfather always said about my brother at this age that he could wear out an iron horse and aggravate a fly to death.
I have a stubborn kid, too, still stubborn at 7 although better than he was at 3. Your daughter does sound like an extra handful though. First of all, see if you can get a book (from your local library) called "Your Three Year Old." This is part of a series written some years ago by a couple of psychologists and I have found it very useful in dealing with the psychological changes that happen as children grow older.
In the case of my son I am a single parent with no other support, so I really had to choose my battles to avoid getting totally flattened. If my son wanted to eat cereal every night for dinner for two months, that's what he ate. When we got into a fight in the morning about getting dressed warmly enough, I took him outside to feel the cool air, then he was usually good about dressing warmly enough.
The only advice I can offer you is to try to give your daughter a choice as much as possible, but not an unlimited choice. And as much as possible you make her decide, in a timely manner. So when you are fixing her hair, ask her how many ponytails she wants. When it is time to get dressed (and don't, by the way, say "Time to get dressed.") ask her to choose between pants and a dress. For dinner, you might offer her what the family is eating, or give her one other easy to fix option, such as cereal, make her decide, then stick with it.
