Katherine Gordy Levine

Parents are people too by Katherine Gordy Levine
(Author of when good kids do bad things)

The author, Katherine and her husband David first published this book in 1997. They fostered over 400 adopted children and now enjoy their grand children in their early retirement. This book provides tools that will help Parents and others to better control the negative feelings that accompany caring for a child.
As a parent we are to provide for our children, give them shelter and make them feel safe. It's sad to say that often times I see in the public arena the physical and emotional turmoil on today’s young children left by parents.
The secret to raising happy kids is to be a happy adult. Katherine teaches us how to build our emotional fitness/intelligence. The topics she includes;
• feeling awareness
• self soothing
• distracting
• focusing on what is important
• disputing
• giving feedback
• proper expression of feelings
• acceptance
• radical acceptance

Katherine shares her true stories of how she really felt when she stayed up all night with her sick baby. She explains in detail, and as hard as it may sound, most parents I think go though rough patches with their children making it harder on ourselves which in turn makes it harder on the child. In her first lesson Katherine teaches us the emotional fitness skills are as follows;
• recognizing the start of a feeling
• measuring the growth of the feelings
• calming the body when a feeling threatens to overwhelm
• changing the flow of negative feelings when that is possible
• Deciding what needs acting on
• Accepting and living with negative feelings when changing them is not possible
This is one novel to keep and pass along to your family. I could not read it in one sitting. At 178 pages I realized that working the exercises are the keep to keeping emotions under constant and consistent control. She teaches us how to properly breathe to release tensing in our bodies. I tried the exercise and to my surprise, it works! So this tension releasing can be used daily for many individuals who suffer from anxious thoughts as well as parents with testing children.
One thing I learned that I want to share with each reader today is that feelings begin when something arouses your interest. They are caused by external events like thunder or lightening. Then there are Physiological arousals, like being tired or hungry which form inside our body because of our body’s physical state. Then we have thoughts which are caused by both internal and external events that arouse a person. Katherine teaches us how to understand each of these to manage our feelings before they lost control or have control over us. Wow, this is not so hard to absorb and maintain.
If you are a parent to be this is a Must Buy book to help you with your future as a parent. If you are a parent of children Katherine is the founder of Emotional Fitness training, Inc. She has 12 years experience as a foster parent, and over 30 years experience in social work and counseling. I am glad I pick up a copy of her book for when I become a grandparent. I wish I had this book when my own daughter was a baby as it would of helped me stay calm and be a better parent.
© 2012 written by Jackie Paulson… (más)

Mott Haven is this mental health facility for kids in the South Bronx which was early to implement several progressive practices, including family-driven care and "appreciative alliances"; a move from the idea of mental disturbance to that of mental distress (crucially, traumatic stress); a mobile community support model; hiring staff who are parents of kids who are mentally ill or have other grounding in these issues or in the community; etc. There seems to be a certain irreducible cultishness in all this, for reasons we can all understand (the history of the discpline, the need to make certain types of truth-claims to funding bodies, human psychology), but some of the practices here that I would be inclined to accept as just "whatever works" types of solutions--Santeria/espiritismo "spiritual cleansing" (you can also get a Catholic priest in, not that that's necessarily preferable, but Levine seems to hope you'll go the Santeria route), or the STOP method, which is this really regimented way of telling your kid "no"--they seem to embrace with a sort of alternative positivism, or positivist alternativism. (Although, in fairness ot the STOP method, it's designed for people who are having trouble controlling their kids in normal ways, and in that sense is a bit analogous to joining the army to get some discipline, and I've seen that do wonders.)

The positivism--well, here's an example cited in this paper from James Garbarino, whom I interacted with once as a young sprout working in the international office at my school, and who seemed to busy for anyone who didn't come with a TV spot: "Trauma threatens meaning by shattering core beliefs and by destroying faith in the goodness of self and others as well as in the possibility of living a good and meaningful life." Great! But then: "There is a third voice I would call soul searching. This voice begins from the realization that human beings are not best understood as animals with complicated brains but as spiritual beings who have a physical experience in the world. Once this is recognized, we can see that the world of violent trauma is not so much an injury, but a spiritual challenge that has diverted us from the path of enlightenment." Is it now? What happened to helping suffering people find their own meaning? Read Bessel van der Kolk on trauma instead.

Nevertheless, I think the core of the approach is very sound, and it's sort of in the nature of community-based anything that some people in the community will be weird and culty and you'll have to deal. Where possible, sick children do better at home. A major goal for the child is to instill “absolute faith in his or her positive abilities.” A key process is "naming to tame," as when one boy called his brother's death "the day the family died" and that was when his parents could start to see his suffering.

But the stories are inspiring, and the mindfulness principles that they use--"Be with Beauty, Move Your Body, Laugh, Indulge in a Healthy Pleasure, Remember What Is Important, Practice Kindness, Remember Someone Who Cared, Practice Forgiveness of Others, Practice Forgiveness of Self"--are sound despite all the capital letters, and hey if it works who am I to judge. Handbook of Community-Based Clinical Practice.… (más)