Mothers are containers, like cookie jars!

Holding a child until painful feelings subside is critical mothering work.

Here is a wild idea. But it will start to make sense as you read -

Mothers are like Cookie Jars! Mothers are Containers!

Yes! When it comes to our children’s feelings and helping them manage them, we mother’s are like washing machines or tumble dryers or mixing bowls or cookie jars.

We are required to open ourselves up to our children and help them manage all sorts of feelings. When we allow ourselves to do this for them, we teach them a lifelong skill for dealing with their feelings. We prepare them for a life of managing their feelings rather than trying to avoid their feelings or become overwhelmed by them.

There are many ways that people avoid feelings. Feelings can be numbed with substances like alcohol, food, TV, video games, sugar, street drugs, prescription drugs, promiscuous sex. Feelings can become overwhelming to the point of depression (numbing sadness) and anxiety (intense worry and dread) that is incapacitating.

The ability to help our children with their feelings cannot be undervalued. It is a critical skill for emotional intelligence.

So how do act as containers for our children.
1. We show our children that their feelings are okay. That we accept all feelings including from joy and excitement and pride to sadness, anger, confusion and helplessness. We tell them it’s okay and normal to feel hurt, disappointed, angry, in love, excited, silly etc.

2. We also help them understand that feeling and acting are two very separate things. It’s okay to FEEL angry but it’s not okay to ACT OUT that anger by being mean or hitting or hurting oneself. It’s okay to FEEL good about yourself and proud of what you have done, but it’s not okay to make another child feel inferior or bad about himself.

3. We acknowledge our children’s feelings without trying to make them go away (because the best way to make difficult feelings go away is to just let them be). We ca say things like:

“I am sorry you feel so angry today. It must be so frustrating”.
Or “Sorry that you are so disappointed”.
Or “I can only imagine how hurtful it is when your best friend turns on you like that”.
Or, “I can understand how it feels like your heart is breaking today.”

We stop ourselves from saying things like:
“Oh! Never mind. You’ll be fine.”
“There is always someone worse off than you!”
“Pull yourself together and put a smile on your face.”
“I don’t have time for this!”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

REFLECTION: What are some of the things you say to yourself or your children about feelings that are unpleasant?

4. We offer to help them “contain” their feelings. There is that container word again! Think about your arms as being strong walls around your child who is full of feelings that he or she cannot manage. Sometimes the act of containing your child’s feelings looks like:
a. Sitting on the couch quietly and holding a young child while she cries or fusses.
b. It can be simply listening to an older child.
c. It can be respecting the space of an adolescent.

All in all, the message is: “I am not afraid or freaked out by your feelings. I am here to help you manage them, not to make you feel bad or ashamed about them.”

REFLECTION:
1. Think about the way your parent responded when you had feelings that were difficult to manage.

2. Did it help? Or not help you?

3. How do you handle your feelings now? Do you let them be, or do you make them go away?

4. How can you help your child learn good ways of handling painful or overwhelming feelings?

This blogpost was written by Kim Richardson, founder of the website: “The Mommy Blues – where Mothers Feelings Matter (and sharing helps)“. Kim Richardson is an advocate for mother’s mental health, a postpartum counselor and a mother’s coach. TINYURL for this post:http://tinyurl.com/yhqa7a3

If YOU  are curious about how a Mother’s Coach can enhance your life in all areas,
please contact Kim Richardson to schedule a session.
Visit  website:  www.themommyblues.com
Email Kim at: KimARichardson@aol.com
Subscribe to newsletter: Mothering the Mom
Request a consultation with Kim Richardson

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Identify your Top 5 Values and Watch your TRUE Self Emerge!

Yesterday (12/29/09) in my post “5 Steps to Smarter New Year’s Resolutions” I talked about making sure the goals you choose for next year are based on your values.

However, values are not always easy to determine because:

1. They are so much a part of who we are, that unless we have completed some kind of values-clarification exercise, we may struggle to articulate our values.
2. Values-labels are bandied about so often that they lose their meaning – “love”, “peace”, “kindness” etc. What do we even mean by these words?
3. We tend to choose the values we “should” have rather than those we truly do have – especially when presented with a list of values.

In this article, I will help you clarify and describe your top 5 values. I hope to leave you surprised and enlightened!

But first, what are values? Let’s be sure we are all on the same page.

An Example of Stated Values: Tulane University Center for Public Service

Values are:

1. lenses through which we view ourselves and the world
2. the basis for our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
3. the basis by which we evaluate (judge) ourselves and others
4. standards we hold, and thus we experience them as “shoulds” and “oughts”
5. highly influential in the way we make decisions
6. satisfying when we take part in activities that express our values
7. varied, and so we must participate in many roles to satisfy all our values
8. potentially conflicting – if the demands of one of your valued roles (e.g. work) prevents you from participating fully in another valued role (e.g. creativity), you will experience conflict and dissatisfaction
9. motivating, when you are engaged in something related to them
10. important characteristic of success and leadership, when you know who you are, what you believe in and what you stand for.

Okay, by now you are convinced that clarifying your values is a very productive exercise!

There are many ways to do it. Here is one way that is both simple and very effective:

Write down the 3-5 people you have consistently admired most in the world (famous or not).

1. Next, spend some time writing down the actual qualities they have that is responsible for your admiration of each of these people.
2. Circle the qualities that you believe YOU also have
3. Define and elaborate what you mean by these qualities. Don’t be glib! These are your values.
4. Describe them in your life and how and when they are present or absent.
5. Now pick your top 5-7 values.

When picking your top 5-7 values, don’t worry about order. Just pick the ones that are most important to you. A good way to do this is to list all the values gleaned from the above exercise and then begin eliminating the ones you feel you could live without. Keep eliminating until you get left with 5 or 7.

Those are your top values.

To live a satisfying and fulfilling life you should find ways to express every one of them daily. If altruism and generosity are important, start giving every day. If creativity is important, start expressing yourself. If money and financial security are important, then get focused on accumulating money. If fun and laughter are important, why are you not having fun in your life? If children and family are important, how can you spend more time with yours and create the family you long for?

Bottom line, stop wasting time on activities that you do not value! Or perusing goals that are not based on your values.

I leave you with a quote by Mildred Newman:

“If you know what your values are –
If you know what your standards are –
If you know what is important to you –
If you have a point of view –
Then you have a sense of direction.
Then you know where you are going.”

This blogpost was written by Kim Richardson, founder of the website: “The Mommy Blues – where Mothers Feelings Matter (and sharing helps)“. Kim Richardson is an advocate for mother’s mental health, a postpartum counselor and a mother’s coach. TINYURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/yhqa7a3

If YOU  are curious about how a Mother’s Coach can enhance your life in all areas,
please contact Kim Richardson to schedule a session.
Visit  website:  www.themommyblues.com
Email Kim at: KimARichardson@aol.com
Subscribe to newsletter: Mothering the Mom
Request a consultation with Kim Richardson

Follow The Mommy Blues on Twitter
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5 Steps to SMARTER New Year’s Resolutions

5 Steps to SMARTER New Year's Resolutions

New Year’s Eve is upon us – a magical time for setting new goals and making changes.  Would you like to harness some of that magic for yourself?

Following these five steps will increase your chances of reaching your goals next year, and being successful at what you desire.

Traditionally, the end of the year is a time for making resolutions. Very often these are things we have struggled with all year, and not been able to achieve. And so, we think that by re-invoking them on New Year’s Eve they will be imbued with some kind of magic – and they will happen!

Now, I do think there is a bit of truth to that belief. There IS some mystery and magic in ritual and symbol that we don’t always fully understand. So choosing a special day when millions of other people are also deciding to make some kind of change is a good idea! But it’s not enough.

Here are 5 tips for more successful resolutions –  resolutions that have a very good chance of being followed through.

1.  Choose your New Year’s Resolutions Consciously and Seriously

Setting goals is part of all of our lives, but often it is done unconsciously and with very little purpose and direction. Many of us make choices by default. Today, right now, choose a goal consciously and purposefully. Give it due consideration.

Think about your understanding of goals. A goal is well-defined. Like a target, it gives you clarity, motivation and focus. Having goals gives you a better chance of being successful.

Do you want your goal to be about making a change, forming a new habit, developing a skill, learning something new, stopping something old? What is your goal? For mothers, does your goal have to do with better parenting, better self-care?

2. Align your Goal with your Values

When you goal is aligned with your values, it has a better chance of being realized.  Your values are what you esteem and give worth to. They determine where you spend your money, time and energy. So before, settling on a goal, spend a few moments deciding whether it is, in fact, part of YOUR value set. If it isn’t, it’s going to be very difficult to be consistent with it.

What are your top 5 values? Write them down..

3.  Be SMART about your Resolution or Goal.

You need to write it down. Clearly. Use the SMART method. In other words, make sure that it is specific (S), measurable (M), attainable (A), realistic (R) and has a time-frame (T). The more defined and specific, the better.  Then you will know for certain whether you are achieving it or not. Most goal experts advise you to read it morning and night, so write it down and keep it where you can see it daily.

4.  Make a PLAN of Action.

If you don’t plan, you plan to fail. It’s really as simple as that. Not creating an action plan is defaulting to not following through. So step 4 is to create the action plan. All you need to do is write down the steps required to achieve the goal. You can start from the end (the final product) and work backwards or you can start from the present, and write down the very next step. Keep going and keep asking yourself, “What is my next step?” Write down each tiny step – that will be your action plan.

5. Create a BACKUP Plan

In the final step, you are going to think through all the obstacles that could get in the way of following through on your resolution. Think of what you have tried in the past and what has stopped you. List them all, and then write down in advance what you will do to overcome them this time. How youwill not let them become excuses for abandoning your goal. Be proactive and prepared. We’re all human, after all, and prone to distraction and fatigue and inconsistency!

So what structure could you create to help you stay on track? Be creative and serious about it. This is your life you are planning – not just a goal!

My very best wishes to you for a wonderful New Year full of realized goals and dreams!

Kim Richardson

This blogpost was written by Kim Richardson, founder of the website: “The Mommy Blues – where Mothers Feelings Matter (and sharing helps)“. Kim Richardson is an advocate for mother’s mental health, a postpartum counselor and a mother’s coach.

If YOU  are curious about how a Mother’s Coach can enhance your life in all areas,
please contact Kim Richardson to schedule a session.
Visit  website:  www.themommyblues.com
Email Kim at: KimARichardson@aol.com
Subscribe to newsletter: Mothering the Mom
Request a consultation with Kim Richardson

Follow The Mommy Blues on Twitter
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A Lesson in Self Love – Lindy Bruce

Today, I will share a blog post by Lindy Bruce, author of Motherhood and Me.  It was originally posted on her website on July 20th, 2009:

Lindy Bruce – A Lesson in Self Love:

Motherhood and Me, by Lindy Bruce

“Yesterday, I had one of those “overwhelmed” mother moments!

I was having a great morning until my husband mentioned that he thought the vegetable potjie I was serving to some friends for supper was not going to be enough… and that perhaps we should do some meat too!!!! It is always the smallest piece of straw that seems to break the camel’s back… and for me it was the MEAT!!!!

I was immediately engulfed by a thousand thoughts:

The house is in a mess.

I have so much work to catch up on.

I need to walk and feed the dogs!

I haven’t done photographs for five years.

I have no winter clothes to wear and when will I ever get to the shops.

The kids need new school shoes.

Damn… I need to pay the school fees.

Oh no… the meat!!!!!!!!!!!

I was in a downward spiral! There was a little voice in my head that said, “choose something different Lindy, you don’t need to spiral, just walk away from it all for a while”.

With that I stood up, announced I was going to shower and asked that Cam motivate the kids to make their beds and clean-up. I gave myself an extra long shower (sorry, to the environment); washed my hair; pondered over creams and smellies for a while; dried my hair and then got dressed. I was feeling a little better.

As I was walking out of my bedroom my eye caught a glimpse of a picture of me on our wall, age two. I took the picture off the wall and gazed at this beautiful little girl. I immediately saw traces of my own mother, and parts of me that resembled each one of my children. I became intimately aware of the strength of my blood and genetic connection to all these people that I love. I looked at myself a little longer and allowed the memory or association to my family to fade a little and all of a sudden I saw the face of me… just ME.

An unexpected thing happened… my heart filled to the size of the universe. I was floating in the most mesmerizing sensation of love. For whom? For ME!

My mind was flooded with new thoughts:

I love you.

You are doing a wonderful job with your children.

You have created a warm and happy home. Well done.

I am so proud of you for all the painful experiences you have come through and all the valuable lessons you have learned.

I admire the way you have embraced change.

You have grown up into a wonderful woman.

I love you.

I felt incredible, no longer over-whelmed, but just… incredible. I realized in that moment that there is nothing more powerful than the love and approval of one’s self.

In the modern world we can confuse this with arrogance. It is not arrogance. Self-love has the ability to celebrate all of you that deserves celebrating, but it also has the wisdom and humility to acknowledge where change and growth needs to happen, but even in this observation, love is present.

The problem is that we do not separate from our responsibilities as mothers and wives long enough, to see and experience ourselves simply as women: as that little girl who grew into a teenager and then into a young women with dreams and passions. We are still that person, but she so easily becomes lost and forgotten.

My wish for all mothers is that in the midst of the love and thanks and approval your loved ones will shower on you, you take the time to gaze at your own face and allow your heart to swell with love and approval for yourself and the amazing woman you are!”

Lindy Bruce,  originally posted on her websiteon July 20th, 2009.

This blogpost was inserted by Kim Richardson, founder of the website: “The Mommy Blues – where Mothers Feelings Matter (and sharing helps)“. Kim Richardson is an advocate for mother’s mental health, a postpartum counselor and a mother’s coach.

If YOU  are curious about how a Mother’s Coach can enhance your life in all areas,
please contact Kim Richardson to schedule a session.
Visit  website:  www.themommyblues.com
Email Kim at: KimARichardson@aol.com
Subscribe to newsletter: Mothering the Mom
Request a consultation with Kim Richardson

Follow The Mommy Blues on Twitter
Join The Mommy Blues on Facebook

Follow the Mommy Blues on Facebook

For a daily dose of support for your mothering self – please consider joining The Mommy Blues, now new on Facebook.
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Here are a couple of dailies:

December 11, 2009: LIVE A LIFE OF EXTREME SELF-CARE – We treat ourselves the way we want others to treat us. Our children learn how to care for themselves by watching the way we care for ourselves. If we abuse ourselves – rushing, overeating, drinking, being in toxic relationships – our children will mirror these behaviors in their own lack of self-care (Carey Sipp).”

How can you take GREAT care of yourself tomorrow?

December 12, 2009 DAILY THOUGHT: Can you define your parenting philosophy, and even your ultimate goals for parenting? Parenting can be so REACTIVE! New parents are dropped into a slew of problems to solve and choices to make, with no shortage of books and opinions on how to do it. As kids grow there are questions, unexpected discoveries, BIG surprises and lots of second-guessing of ourselves.

SO what is YOUR big picture? What do you want ultimately for your motherself and your kids?
Can you describe it in words?

Join the conversation (or just read quietly) by clicking here: The Mommy Blues on Facebook

This blogpost was written by Kim Richardson, founder of the website: “The Mommy Blues – where Mothers Feelings Matter“. Kim Richardson is an advocate for mother’s mental health, a postpartum counselor and a mother’s coach.

If YOU you are curious about how a Mother’s Coach can enhance your life in all areas,
please contact Kim Richardson to schedule a session.
Visit  website:  www.themommyblues.com
Email Kim at: KimARichardson@aol.com
Subscribe to newsletter: Mothering the Mom
Request a consultation with Kim Richardson

Follow The Mommy Blues on Twitter
Join The Mommy Blues on Facebook

The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting

The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting

From TIME CNN – Friday, Nov. 20, 2009

By Nancy Gibbs

The insanity crept up on us slowly; we just wanted what was best for our kids. We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year-old’s “pencil-holding deficiency,” hooked up broadband connections in the treehouse but took down the swing set after the second skinned knee. We hovered over every school, playground and practice field — “helicopter parents,” teachers christened us, a phenomenon that spread to parents of all ages, races and regions. Stores began marketing stove-knob covers and “Kinderkords” (also known as leashes; they allow “three full feet of freedom for both you and your child”) and Baby Kneepads (as if babies don’t come prepadded). The mayor of a Connecticut town agreed to chop down three hickory trees on one block after a woman worried that a stray nut might drop into her new swimming pool, where her nut-allergic grandson occasionally swam. A Texas school required parents wanting to help with the second-grade holiday party to have a background check first. Schools auctioned off the right to cut the carpool line and drop a child directly in front of the building — a spot that in other settings is known as handicapped parking.

We were so obsessed with our kids’ success that parenting turned into a form of product development. Parents demanded that nursery schools offer Mandarin, since it’s never too soon to prepare for the competition of a global economy. High school teachers received irate text messages from parents protesting an exam grade before class was even over; college deans described freshmen as “crispies,” who arrived at college already burned out, and “teacups,” who seemed ready to break at the tiniest stress. (See pictures of the college dorm’s evolution.)

This is what parenting had come to look like at the dawn of the 21st century — just one more extravagance, the Bubble Wrap waiting to burst.

All great rebellions are born of private acts of civil disobedience that inspire rebel bands to plot together. And so there is now a new revolution under way, one aimed at rolling back the almost comical overprotectiveness and overinvestment of moms and dads. The insurgency goes by many names — slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting — but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they’ll fly higher. We’re often the ones who hold them down.

A backlash against overparenting had been building for years, but now it reflects a new reality. Since the onset of the Great Recession, according to a CBS News poll, a third of parents have cut their kids’ extracurricular activities. They downsized, downshifted and simplified because they had to — and often found, much to their surprise, that they liked it. When a TIME poll last spring asked how the recession had affected people’s relationships with their kids, nearly four times as many people said relationships had gotten better as said they’d gotten worse. “This is one of those moments when everything is on the table, up for grabs,” says Carl Honoré, whose book Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting is a gospel of the slow-parenting movement. He likens the sudden awareness to the feeling you get when you wake up after a long night carousing, the lights go on, and you realize you’re a mess. “That horrible moment of self-recognition is where we are culturally. I wanted parents to realize they are not alone in thinking this is insanity, and show there’s another way.” (See the 25 best back-to-school gadgets.)

How We Got Here
Overparenting had been around long before Douglas MacArthur’s mom Pinky moved with him to West Point in 1899 and took an apartment near the campus, supposedly so she could watch him with a telescope to be sure he was studying. But in the 1990s something dramatic happened, and the needle went way past the red line. From peace and prosperity, there arose fear and anxiety; crime went down, yet parents stopped letting kids out of their sight; the percentage of kids walking or biking to school dropped from 41% in 1969 to 13% in 2001. Death by injury has dropped more than 50% since 1980, yet parents lobbied to take the jungle gyms out of playgrounds, and strollers suddenly needed the warning label “Remove Child Before Folding.” Among 6-to-8-year-olds, free playtime dropped 25% from 1981 to ’97, and homework more than doubled. Bookstores offered Brain Foods for Kids: Over 100 Recipes to Boost Your Child’s Intelligence. The state of Georgia sent every newborn home with the CD Build Your Baby’s Brain Through the Power of Music, after researchers claimed to have discovered that listening to Mozart could temporarily help raise IQ scores by as many as 9 points. By the time the frenzy had reached its peak, colleges were installing “Hi, Mom!” webcams in common areas, and employers like Ernst & Young were creating “parent packs” for recruits to give Mom and Dad, since they were involved in negotiating salary and benefits.

Once obsessing about kids’ safety and success became the norm, a kind of orthodoxy took hold, and heaven help the heretics — the ones who were brave enough to let their kids venture outside without Secret Service protection. Just ask Lenore Skenazy, who to this day, when you Google “America’s Worst Mom,” fills the first few pages of results — all because one day last year she let her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone. A newspaper column she wrote about it somehow ignited a global firestorm over what constitutes reasonable risk. She had reporters calling from China, Israel, Australia, Malta. (“Malta! An island!” she marvels. “Who’s stalking the kids there? Pirates?”) Skenazy decided to fight back, arguing that we have lost our ability to assess risk. By worrying about the wrong things, we do actual damage to our children, raising them to be anxious and unadventurous or, as she puts it, “hothouse, mama-tied, danger-hallucinating joy extinguishers.”

Skenazy, a Yale-educated mom who with her husband is raising two boys in New York City, had ingested all the same messages as the rest of us. Her sons’ school once held a pre-field-trip assembly explaining exactly how close to a hospital the children would be at all times. She confesses to being “at least part Sikorsky,” hiring a football coach for a son’s birthday and handing out mouth guards as party favors. But when the Today show had her on the air to discuss her subway decision, interviewer Ann Curry turned to the camera and asked, “Is she an enlightened mom or a really bad one?” (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)

From that day and the food fight that followed, she launched her Free Range Kids blog, which eventually turned into her own Dangerous Book for Parents: Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. There is no rational reason, she argues, that a generation of parents who grew up walking alone to school, riding mass transit, trick-or-treating, teeter-tottering and selling Girl Scout cookies door to door should be forbidding their kids to do the same. But somehow, she says, “10 is the new 2. We’re infantilizing our kids into incompetence.” She celebrates seat belts and car seats and bike helmets and all the rational advances in child safety. It’s the irrational responses that make her crazy, like when Dear Abby endorses the idea, as she did in August, that each morning before their kids leave the house, parents take a picture of them. That way, if they are kidnapped, the police will have a fresh photo showing what clothes they were wearing. Once the kids make it home safe and sound, you can delete the picture and take a new one the next morning.

That advice may seem perfectly sensible to parents bombarded by heartbreaking news stories about missing little girls and the predator next door. But too many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with “How can you let him go to the store alone?,” she suggests countering with “How can you let him visit your relatives?” (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) “I’m not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn’t be prepared,” she says. “But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources.” Besides, she says with a smile, “a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It’s nowhere you’d want to be.” (See pictures of eighth-graders being recruited for college basketball.)

Dispatches from the Front Lines
Eleven parents are sitting in a circle in an airy, glass-walled living room in south Austin, Texas, eating organic, gluten-free, nondairy coconut ice cream. This is a Slow Family Living class, taught by perinatal psychologist Carrie Contey and Bernadette Noll. “Our whole culture,” says Contey, 38, “is geared around ‘Is your kid making the benchmarks?’ There’s this fear of ‘Is my kid’s head the right size?’ People think there’s some mythical Good Mother out there that they aren’t living up to and that it’s hurting their child. I just want to pull the plug on that.”

The parents seem relieved to hear it. Matt, a textbook editor, reports that he and his wife quit a book club because it caused too much stress on book-club nights, and stopped fussing about how the house looks, which brings nods all around the room: let go of perfectionism in all its tyranny. Margaret, a publishing executive, tells her own near-miss story of how she stepped back from the brink of insanity. On her son’s fourth birthday, she says, “I’m like ‘Oh, my God, he’s eligible for Suzuki!’ I literally got on the phone and called 12 Suzuki teachers,” she says, before realizing the nightmare she was creating for herself and her child. Shutting down your inner helicopter isn’t easy. “This is not a shift in perspective that occurs overnight,” Matt admits after class. “And it’s not every day that I consciously sit down and ask myself hard questions about how I want family life to be slower or better.”

Fear is a kind of parenting fungus: invisible, insidious, perfectly designed to decompose your peace of mind. Fear of physical danger is at least subject to rational argument; fear of failure is harder to hose down. What could be more natural than worrying that your child might be trampled by the great, scary, globally competitive world into which she will one day be launched? It is this fear that inspires parents to demand homework in preschool, produce the snazzy bilingual campaign video for the third-grader’s race for class rep, continue to provide the morning wake-up call long after he’s headed off to college.

Some of the hovering is driven by memory and demography. This generation of parents, born after 1964, waited longer to marry and had fewer children. Families are among the smallest in history, which means our genetic eggs are in fewer baskets and we guard them all the more zealously. Helicopter parents can be found across all income levels, all races and ethnicities, says Patricia Somers of the University of Texas at Austin, who spent more than a year studying the species at the college level. “There are even helicopter grandparents,” she notes, who turn up with their elementary-school grandchildren for college-information sessions aimed at juniors and seniors. (See pictures of Barack Obama’s college years.)

Nor is this phenomenon limited to ZIP codes where every Volvo wagon just has to have a University of Chicago sticker on it. “I’m having exactly the same conversations with coaches, teachers, parents, counselors, whether I’m in Wichita or northern Canada or South America,” says Honoré. His own revelation came while listening to the feedback about his son in kindergarten. It was fine, but nothing stellar — until he got to the art room and the teacher began raving about how creative his son was, pointing out his sketches that she’d displayed as models for other students. Then, Honoré recalls, “she dropped the G-bomb: ‘He’s a gifted artist,’ she told us, and it was one of those moments when you don’t hear anything else. I just saw the word gifted in neon with my son’s name …” So he hurried home and Googled the names of art tutors and eagerly told his son all about the special person who would help him draw even better. “He looks at me like I’m from outer space,” Honoré says. “‘I just wanna draw,’ he tells me. ‘Why do grownups have to take over everything?’ “

“That was a searing epiphany,” Honoré concludes. “I didn’t like what I saw.” He now writes and lectures about the many fruits of slowing down, citing research that suggests the brain in its relaxed state is more creative, makes more nuanced connections and is ripe for eureka moments. “With children,” he argues, “they need that space not to be entertained or distracted. What boredom does is take away the noise … and leave them with space to think deeply, invent their own game, create their own distraction. It’s a useful trampoline for children to learn how to get by.” (See pictures of college mascots.)

Other studies reinforce the importance of play as an essential protein in a child’s emotional diet; were it not, argue some scientists, it would not have persisted across species and millenniums, perhaps as a way to practice for adulthood, to build leadership, sociability, flexibility, resilience — even as a means of literally shaping the brain and its pathways. Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist and the founder of the National Institute for Play — who has a treehouse above his office — recalls in a recent book how managers at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noticed the younger engineers lacked problem-solving skills, though they had top grades and test scores. Realizing the older engineers had more play experience as kids — they’d taken apart clocks, built stereos, made models — JPL eventually incorporated questions about job applicants’ play backgrounds into interviews. “If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being” in life, Brown has argued, “play is as fundamental as any other aspect.” The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that the decrease in free playtime could carry health risks: “For some children, this hurried lifestyle is a source of stress and anxiety and may even contribute to depression.” Not to mention the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation of kids who never just go out and play.

Remember, Mistakes Are Good
Many educators have been searching for ways to tell parents when to back off. It’s a tricky line to walk, since studies link parents’ engagement in a child’s education to better grades, higher test scores, less substance abuse and better college outcomes. Given a choice, teachers say, overinvolved parents are preferable to invisible ones. The challenge is helping parents know when they are crossing a line.

Every teacher can tell the story of a student who needed to fail in order to be reassured that the world wouldn’t come to an end. Yet teachers now face a climate in which parents ghostwrite students’ homework, airbrush their lab reports — then lobby like a K Street hired gun for their child to be assigned to certain classes. Principal Karen Faucher instituted a “no rescue” policy at Belinder Elementary in Prairie Village, Kans., when she noticed the front-office table covered each day with forgotten lunch boxes and notebooks, all brought in by parents. The tipping point was the day a mom rushed in with a necklace meant to complete her daughter’s coordinated outfit. “I’m lucky — I deal with intelligent parents here,” Faucher says. “But you saw very intelligent parents doing very stupid things. It was almost like a virus. The parents knew that was not what they intended to do, but they couldn’t help themselves.” A guidance counselor at a Washington prep school urges parents to find a mentor of a certain disposition. “Make friends with parents,” she advises, “who don’t think their kids are perfect.” Or with parents who are willing to exert some peer pressure of their own: when schools debate whether to drop recess to free up more test-prep time, parents need to let a school know if they think that’s a trade-off worth making.

Read “To Help the Kids, Parents Go Back to School.”

See pictures of teens and how they would vote.

A certain amount of hovering is understandable when it comes to young children, but many educators are concerned when it persists through middle school and high school. Some teachers talk of “Stealth Fighter Parents,” who no longer hover constantly but can be counted on for a surgical strike just when the high school musical is being cast or the starting lineup chosen. And senior year is the witching hour: “I think for a lot of parents, college admissions is like their grade report on how they did as a parent,” observes Madeleine Rhyneer, dean of students at Willamette University in Oregon. Many colleges have had to invent a “director of parent programs” to run regional groups so moms and dads can meet fellow college parents or attend special classes where they can learn all the school cheers. The Ithaca College website offers a checklist of advice: “Visit (but not too often)”; “Communicate (but not too often)”; “Don’t worry (too much)”; “Expect change”; “Trust them.”

Teresa Meyer, a former PTA president at Hickman High in Columbia, Mo., has just sent the youngest of her three daughters to college. “They made it very clear: You are not invited to the registration part where they’re requesting classes. That’s their job.” She’s come to appreciate the please-back-off vibe she’s encountered. “I hope that we’re getting away from the helicopter parenting,” Meyer says. “Our philosophy is ‘Give ‘em the morals, give ‘em the right start, but you’ve got to let them go.’ They deserve to live their own lives.” (See the 10 best iPhone apps for dads.)

What You Can Do
Among the most powerful weapons in the war against the helicopter brigade is the explosion of websites where parents can confide, confess and affirm their sense that lowering expectations is not the same as letting your children down. So you gave up trying to keep your 2-year-old from eating the dog’s food? You banged your son’s head on the doorway while giving him a piggyback ride? Your daughter hates school and is so scared of failure she won’t even try to ride a bike? “I just want to throw in the towel and give up on her,” one mom posts on Truuconfessions.com. “This is NOT what I thought I was signing up for.” Honestbaby.com sells baby T-shirts that say “I’ll walk when I’m good and ready.” Given how many books and websites drove a generation of parents mad with anxiety, a certain balance is restored to the universe when it becomes conventional for people to brag about what bad parents they are.

The revolutionary leaders are careful about offering too much advice. Parents have gotten plenty of that, and one of the goals of this new movement is to give parents permission to disagree or at least follow different roads. “People feel there’s somehow a secret formula for parenting, and if we just read enough books and spend enough money and drive ourselves hard enough, we’ll find it, and all will be O.K.,” Honoré observes. “Can you think of anything more sinister, since every child is so different, every family is different? Parents need to block out the sound and fury from the media and other parents, find that formula that fits your family best.”

Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting, teaches seminars on how to peel back the layers of cultural pressure that weigh down families. He and his coaches will even go into your home, weed out your kids’ stuff, sort out their schedule, turn off the screens and help your family find space you didn’t know you had, like a master closet reorganizer for the soul. But any parent can do it just as well. “We need to quit bombarding them with choices way before their ability to handle them,” Payne says. The average child has 150 toys. “When you cut the toys and clothes back … the kids really like it.” He aims for a cut of roughly 75%: he tosses out the broken toys and gives away the outgrown ones and the busy, noisy, blinking ones that do the playing for you. Pare down to the classics that leave the most to the child’s imagination and create a kind of toy library kids can visit and swap from. Then build breaks of calm into their schedule so they can actually enjoy the toys. (See how to plan for retirement at any age.)

Finally, there is the gift of humility, which parents need to offer one another. We can fuss and fret and shuttle and shelter, but in the end, what we do may not matter as much as we think. Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt analyzed a Department of Education study tracking the progress of kids through fifth grade and found that things like how much parents read to their kids, how much TV kids watch and whether Mom works make little difference. “Frequent museum visits would seem to be no more productive than trips to the grocery store,” they argued in USA Today. “By the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it’s too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided long ago — what kind of education a parent got, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children.”

If you embrace this rather humbling reality, it will be easier to follow the advice D.H. Lawrence offered back in 1918: “How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.”

Of course, that was easy for him to say. He had no kids.

— With reporting by Karen Ball / Kansas City, Mo.; Alexandra Silver / New York City; and Elizabeth Dias and Sophia Yan / Washington

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1940395,00.html

IF you are curious about how a Mother’s Coach can enhance your life in all areas, please contact Kim Richardson to schedule a free trial session. Visit her websites:  www.themommyblues.com or www.kimarichardson.com orEmail:KimARichardson@aol.com to contact her.

This article appeared on Time CNN on Nov 20, 2009. It has been reposted by Kim Richardson, Certified Professional Mother’s Coach and  experienced Clinical Psychologist and Counselor. She offers life coaching to Mothers by telephone and Skype, and training, workshops and seminars to mental health professionals and consultants who wish to add coaching to their professional repertoire.

30 holiday cookie recipes in one!

It’s not like me at all to get excited over  baking or cooking. I am incredibly fortunate (as are my children) to be married to someone who loves cooking. In fact, truth be told, preparing food is the thing that I least like doing in the world. But this caught my eye and I thought I would put it on the blog!

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the USA. I, for one, am grateful for my inkling of interest in a food recipe. And I’m going to bake them with my young children and take them to my step-daughter’s Thanksgiving – for her adorable children.

Enjoy!!! I know your children will!
(PS. We need a gluten free option here too! Anyone?)

30 cookie recipes all in one

A Month of Cookies

One basic cookies dough makes the building blocks for 30 different kinds of cookies — just in time for the holidays. Grab the kids and get rolling.

by Sandy Gluck / Photo by Getty RF

Inspired to bake? Make cookies for a cause. Visit glad.com/gladtogive to see how some lovin’ from your oven can help out Cookies for Kids’ Cancer.

Basic Cookie Dough
Makes about 3 1/2 dozen cookies

1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, room temperature
1-cup sugar
1 large egg
3/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1. In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. In a separate bowl, with an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla until well combined.

2. With the mixer on low speed, beat in the flour mixture until just combined. Tear off 2 sheets of waxed paper, each about 12-inches. Spoon half the dough lengthwise down the center of each sheet of paper forming a strip about 8 inches long.  With your hands, roll each strip into a log about 2 inches wide, and 1 inch thick. Wrap the logs up in the paper.

3. Freeze several hours until firm or freeze up to 3 months

4. To bake: preheat oven to 400. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Unwrap frozen dough and with a sharp knife, slice 1/4-inch thick. Bake until golden around the edges, rotating baking sheets from top to bottom and front to back. With a wide, thin metal spatula, remove from baking sheets to wire rack to cool completely.

1. Ginger Cookies: Add 3/4 teaspoon ground ginger and 1/8 teaspoon dry mustard powder to flour mixture. Beat 2 tablespoons finely chopped crystallized ginger in to mixture when adding egg.

2. Peanut Cookies: Grind enough peanuts to make 1/3 cup finely ground. Reduce flour to 1 1/3 cups and stir ground peanuts into remaining flour mixture. Add 2 tablespoons finely chopped peanuts when adding egg.

3. Espresso-Almond Cookies: Add 2 teaspoons instant espresso powder to flour mixture. Reduce sugar to 2/3 cup and add 1/3 cup packed light brown sugar. Add 1/8 teaspoon almond extract when adding vanilla. Fold in 1/3 cup sliced almonds after adding flour.

4. Molasses Cookies: Increase flour to 1 3/4 cups, swap in 1/4 cup packed dark brown sugar for 1/4 cup granulated, and add 3 tablespoons molasses when beating butter and sugar.

5. Citrus Cookies: Beat 2 tablespoons grated lemon, lime or a combo into mixture when adding egg.

6. Malted Milk Cookies: Add 2 tablespoons malted milk powder to flour mixture. Add 1/4 cup crushed malted milk balls when adding egg.

7. Cornmeal-Currant Cookies: Replace 1/3 cup of flour with 1/3 cup finely ground cornmeal. Stir 2 teaspoons grated lemon zest and 1/3 cup currants into mixture after adding flour.

8. Red-Hot Cookies: Finely crush 1/3 cup of red-hot candies and fold in when adding flour mixture.

9. Spice Cookies: Add 1 teaspoon ground cardamom, 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, and 1/8 teaspoon allspice to flour mixture.

10. Peanut Butter Chips: Reduce butter to 6 tablespoons. Add 2 tablespoons peanut butter. Fold in 3 tablespoons peanut butter chips when adding flour mixture.

11. Brown Butter: Melt butter over low heat until lightly browned and fragrant (do this in a pan that isn’t dark so you can see the change in color). Chill butter until firm then proceed with recipe as directed.

12. Toasted Coconut: Toast 1 cup of angel-flake coconut (the sweetened kind you get in the supermarket in bags) until golden brown. Grind a little more than half to get 1/3 cup ground and replace 1/3 cup of the flour with the ground coconut. Fold the remaining coconut in when adding the egg.

13. Chocolate-Chile Cookies: Remove 3 tablespoons of flour and replace with 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder. Add 3/4 teaspoon ancho or chipotle chile powder, and 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon to flour mixture.

14. Granola Cookies: Coarsely shop 1/2 cup of your favorite granola and stir in when adding flour mixture.

15. Orange-Cranberry: Fold 1 tablespoon finely grated orange zest and 1/4 cup finely chopped dried cranberries into dough after adding flour mixture.

16. Black Forest: Beat 2 ounces of melted and cooled semisweet chocolate into dough after adding egg. Fold in ¼ cup finely chopped dried cherries after adding flour mixture.

17. White and Dark Chocolate: Remove 3 tablespoons of flour and replace with 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder. Reduce granulated sugar to 3/4 cup and add 1/4 cup packed light brown sugar. Fold in 1/3 cup chopped white chocolate after adding flour.

18. Double Chocolate: Remove 3 tablespoons of flour and replace with 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder. Fold in 1/3-cup mini chocolate chips after folding in flour.

19. Rocky Road: Beat 1/3-cup marshmallow fluff when beating butter and sugar. Increase vanilla to 1 teaspoon. Fold in 3 tablespoons mini chocolate chips and 2 tablespoons finely chopped pecans after folding in flour.

20. Carrot Cookies: Beat 1/2 cup of finely grated carrot into the mixture when adding egg. Swap in 1/3 cup maple sugar for 1/3 cup of regular sugar.

21. Pine Nut Cookies: Fold 1/4 cup of pine nuts into dough after adding flour mixture. Add 1/8 teaspoon almond extract along with vanilla.

22. Crispy Rice Cookies: Stir 2/3 cup of crisp puffed rice cereal into mixture when beating in flour mixture.

23. Sesame Cookies: Beat 2 teaspoons dark sesame oil and 3 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds into mixture when adding egg.

24. Apricot-Anise Cookies: Fold in 1 1/2 teaspoons anise seed and 1/4 cup finely chopped dried apricots after adding flour.

25. Cashew Cookies: Reduce butter to 6 tablespoons and add 2 tablespoons cashew butter. Add 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg to flour mixture. Fold in 1/3 cup finely chopped salted cashews after adding flour.

26. Sunflower Seed Cookies: Reduce butter to 6 tablespoons and add 2 tablespoons sunflower seed butter. Fold 2 tablespoons toasted hulled sunflower seeds and 1 teaspoon grated lemon zest to mixture after adding flour mixture.

27. Whole-Wheat Cinnamon Sugar Cookies: Replace 2/3 cup of flour with 2/3-cup whole-wheat pastry flour. Add 1-teaspoon ground cinnamon to flour mixture. Add 2 tablespoons brown sugar to sugar and butter mixture.

28. Toasted Oatmeal Cookies: Toast 1 1/2 cups rolled or quick cooking oats until fragrant and golden brown. Grind 1 cup of the oats and once ground measure and substitute for an equal amount of flour. Reduce sugar to 3/4 cup and add 1/4 cup light brown sugar. Fold remaining 1/2 cup oats into dough after adding flour.

29. Butterscotch Cookies: Reduce sugar to 1/2 cup and add 1/2 cup packed light brown sugar. Fold in 1/2 cup butterscotch morsels after adding flour.

30. Tropical Cookies: Fold 1/3 cup finely chopped dried pineapple, 1/4 cup finely chopped dried banana chips, and 2 teaspoons grated lime zest after adding flour.

Sandy Gluck hosts Martha Stewart Radio’s Everyday Food weekdays at 11 a.m. EST on on Sirius XM.

IF you are curious about how a Mother’s Coach can enhance your life in all areas, please contact Kim Richardson to schedule a free trial session. Visit her websites:  www.themommyblues.com or www.kimarichardson.com or Email:KimARichardson@aol.com t o contact her.

This blog entry  was posted by Kim Richardson, Certified Professional Mother’s Coach and  experienced Clinical Psychologist and Counselor. She offers life coaching to Mothers by telephone and Skype, and training, workshops and seminars to mental health professionals and consultants who wish to add coaching to their professional repertoire.

What exactly is a Mother’s Coach?

By now most people have heard of life coaching. In fact, it seems that every other person has become a Life Coach. Life Coaches usually specialize in an area of life coaching – a niche. My niche is coaching mothers. I chose this area because, as a psychotherapist, my specialty is working with pregnancy, fertility, adoption, mothering (parenting) and postpartum issues.

Perhaps you are reading this blog because at some point you may have wondered what it’s like to have your own mother’s coach. What exactly is a mother’s coach, you may have asked yourself?

In this article, I am going to show you how useful and effective a mother’s coach can be by describing a scenario and showing you how it would be handled by a coach vs. a consultant, a mentor or a counselor / psychotherapist.

Can a Mother's Coach help me get my baby to sleep? "Yes!" says Kim Richardson founder of www.TheMommyBlues.com

SCENARIO : Kathy is a first-time mom who is having trouble getting her baby to fall asleep. She is exhausted from nursing him to sleep but cannot stand to put him down and listen to him crying, as she leaves the room.

Her first call for help is to a baby sleep consultant who assesses the situation and advises Kathy to use a technique in which she is to put the baby down and leave the room for progressively longer periods. The consultant reassures her that the baby will not suffer from this, and that he should be falling asleep easily after 3-7 nights.

Kathy tries this technique but is unable to follow through. Her baby’s cries upset her to the point of tears and she is unable to tolerate any crying.  Even though the baby may not be suffering, Kathy is!

Next Kathy talks to her psychotherapist.  Together they explore her feelings. She describes terrible guilt when he cries and says that she feels as if she is abandoning him when she does not respond to his cries. Talking about her feelings reminds her of the time her mother was hospitalized for 7 weeks when Kathy was 5 years old. She recalls crying herself to sleep at night, and missing her mother. She feared that her mother was gone forever. Kathy realizes that her son’s crying evokes this painful memory that was, until now, forgotten. This is a helpful insight for Kathy, though it does not immediately change her actions with her son.

A few days later, still exhausted, she makes a call to her birth instructor, Mary. A woman in her 40s with 5 children in adolescence and older, To Kathy, Mary appears to know everything there is to know about birth, babies and parenting. Mary seems to be the epitome of the kind of mother Kathy would like to become – calm, wise and clear about her ideas. She arranges for Mary to visit her the next week.

Kathy is excited to show Mary her baby and hopefully talk about her difficulties with sleep. She feels sure that wonderful Mary, with all her knowledge and experience can help her. Without thinking about it, Kathy has reached out to someone from whom she wants to learn about mothering, someone who will function as a mentor to her.

The following day, surfing the web, still looking for sleep solutions, Kathy stumbles upon the site of a Life Coach who specializes in working with mothers – a Mother’s Coach. The coach offers a free trial session and Kathy decides to give her a call and set up a session.

During this trial session the coach invites Kathy to talk about an important issue she would like to solve. Kathy says she would like to be able to get her son to fall asleep without having to nurse or rock him for 1-3 hours. The coach asks Kathy what she has tried so far and how it has worked for her. Kathy describes the last few months and the coach listens without interruption. After clarifying a few things and asking some more questions which get Kathy to really think deeply about her values, her strengths and her vision for herself as a mother, the coach asks Kathy what she feels would be the right thing for her and her son.

Kathy is quiet for a moment, and then reaching from somewhere inside her, she realizes very clearly what it is that she wants to do.
“I am prepared to decrease the time I spend nursing him to sleep, but I do not want to leave the room if he is crying for me, she says. It might work for others, but it’s just not for me. I can’t do it. I realize why I cannot from my psychotherapy, and maybe I could do this one day, but not now. Not with this baby. I am clear about that.  So, perhaps, what I will do is..”

In the following sessions, the Mother’s Coach and Kathy put together a plan of action and some supportive structures that will help Kathy towards her goal of getting her son to sleep more easily. As they work together, they discover other areas in Kathy’s life that she is neglecting and would like to work on changing. They work as a team, helping Kathy fulfill her potential in all the different areas of her life.

Their work together does not interfere with Kathy’s work with her psychotherapist. Unlike psychotherapy, coaching is practical, future-looking, goal-based, and action-oriented.

As a result she feels less helpless and chaotic in her mothering and can set time aside for other areas that are important to her, such as friendships, her health and her marriage. She has a plan for going back to work and feels calmer and clearer about it.

IF you are curious about how a Mother’s Coach can enhance your life in all areas, please contact Kim Richardson to schedule a free trial session. Visit her websites:  www.themommyblues.com or www.kimarichardson.com or Email:KimARichardson@aol.com to contact her.

This post was written by Kim Richardson, Certified Professional Mother’s Coach and  experienced Clinical Psychologist and Counselor. She offers life coaching to Mothers by telephone and Skype, and training, workshops and seminars to mental health professionals and consultants who wish to add coaching to their professional repertoire.

Telemedicine? the way of the future?

Psychotherapists, counselors and psychoanalysts have used the telephone for psychotherapy treatment for many years. Talk therapy is certainly possible and effective using the telephone and made even more effective with the lowered costs of video equipment and Skype.

In my counseling practice I have offered telephone therapy to clients who move away from my location. And in most coaching practices in the USA, the use of the telephone is standard (less so in Australia and the Netherlands).

Video skype is a great option for new clients that I cannot see face-to-face. I have a colleague who uses Skype for couples therapy. On my website, clients can download a collection of writings about the effectiveness of telephone treatment

Here is a report on telemedicine and the increasing use of the internet in the medical field:

Healthcare reform needs better choices: report

Mon Jul 20, 2009 8:16pm EDT

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

a WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Telemedicine, workplace clinics and finding ways to help people stay healthier may be more important for reforming the U.S. healthcare system than insuring everyone, according to a report to be released on Tuesday.

Incentives will be needed to encourage people to change their ways before they develop heart disease, diabetes and other so-called lifestyle diseases that now eat up so many medical resources, consultant Pricewaterhouse Coopers said in the report.

“Cranking up supply to increase access is likely not the answer. The United States now spends more than any nation on healthcare and has a record number of clinicians in the workforce,” the company said in a statement.

“Instead, solutions will lie in new models of care and in using technology, incentives and behavior change to unclog the jammed access points.”

Congress is working on legislation that would set up a government-run health insurance plan to compete with private insurers, provide coverage to many of the 46 million uninsured and try to stem runaway medical costs.

President Barack Obama, trying to rally support for reform efforts, said on Monday lawmakers must overcome their differences and enact reform now because spiraling healthcare costs were weighing on American families.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute team conducted 37 in-depth interviews with officials at healthcare providers, the Veterans’ Administration, community health centers and other groups, read other studies and commissioned an online survey in April of 1,000 consumers.

They found half of those surveyed would be likely to seek healthcare online. “In Hawaii, more than 1,000 health plan members have engaged in an online consultation with physicians since the service was launched in 2009,” the report reads.

The Veterans Health Administration has said it has reduced use of its system by 30 percent over six years using telemedicine — remote consultation, diagnosis and sometimes even treatment using video or online links.

HEALTHCARE AT WORK

“Ten percent of employers surveyed by PwC in 2009 said that they’re providing worksite clinics, up from 1 percent in 2008,” the report adds. “Of consumers surveyed by PwC, 37 percent said they’d be likely to use a worksite clinic, and 36 percent said they’d be likely to use a retail clinic.”

One frequently cited problem is the overuse of expensive emergency departments. Half of those surveyed said they had visited an emergency room for a need other than an emergency during the last 12 months. “Medicaid patients use hospital emergency departments twice as much as the uninsured,” the report reads.

The use of emergency departments rises with the ratio of people with insurance. States with the most people lacking health insurance had lower rates of emergency department use — a finding that challenges the common wisdom that uninsured people and illegal immigrants are clogging hospital emergency rooms.

Hospitals often encourage this behavior, the report found. “Many hospitals are marketing and expanding their EDs as a way to increase admissions,” the report reads. “About one-third of patients who go to EDs were admitted for an inpatient stay.”

“It’s clear that access to insurance coverage does not translate into access to care,” Dr. David Chin, leader of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Health Research Institute said in a statement.

The study also said people will have to be encouraged to lose weight, eat healthier foods and exercise more — behaviors linked to diabetes, heart disease and fully one-third of all cancers.

Email Marketing Dos and Don’ts

As a mother with three young children, I find working as a coach and therapist to be a real gift. I can be at home when my children are home and I can schedule my working hours around their school hours. I am so grateful not having a company or boss dictate my working hours. Of course, this comes with many disadvantages too. I do not get any benefits, or paid holidays. And I have to do all my own marketing (greatly helped by Mike Litman of Total Coach).

I am posting this helpful newsletter from Paul Gillin, social media expert, about email marketing:

Timely Advice and Strategy
For Business Marketers and Executives

by Paul Gillin, October 8, 2009

As I write this essay, the founder of Email Data Source is telling the audience at the Inbound Marketing Summit, that email marketing has a return on investment of 44:1. I believe that, and Bill McCloskey’s words remind me that it’s been a while since I sang the praises of this venerable but highly useful marketing tool.

E-mail should be central to your online marketing plan.  It’s how you turn casual passersby into steady customers. It gives you permission on a regular basis to contact your constituents. It’s your best tool for driving website traffic and business results.

As a practitioner of e-mail marketing going back nearly a decade, I’ve learned a few simple do’s and don’ts. Fortunately, there aren’t a lot of rules. The most important ones are to be useful and to respect the access that your subscribers have granted you.

Do give visitors to your websites every chance to subscribe to your e-mails. Put a signup form on every page. If you can manage it, squeeze a promo into your e-mail signature. Remember, a Web contact is casual but an e-mail subscription is a relationship.

Do give your subscribers special treatment. Offer them exclusive offers and discounts. Some software companies now give newsletter publishers free promotional licenses to products that are one release out of date. Look for these offers and ask if you can adapt them for your subscribers.

Do use an e-mail service provider. I use iContact, but there are many others, including Constant Contact,Benchmark Email and Lyris. There are even free options. For a nominal cost, you’ll get reporting, tracking and list management you’d never be able to duplicate yourself.

Don’t deceive your subscribers. If you tell them they’re signing up for a newsletter, don’t send them promotional messages. If you say you won’t contact them more than once a month, then don’t do that. Monitor your unsubscribes. If a lot of people are leaving, they’re trying to tell you something.

Do provide a Web version of your newsletter. Mine is here. This makes it easy for people to share your content on social bookmarking sites, Twitter and Facebook. It also makes you discoverable by search engines.  Finally, it’s a way for people to respond to you.

Which reminds me: do invite response to that Web version you just created. Email is boring when it’s one way. Start a discussion.

Do sweat the subject line. Make it provocative or intriguing. However, don’t mislead people into opening the newsletter if you can’t deliver the goods.

Do keep messages brief and varied. Provide several “points of entry” to engage your audience’s different interests. Have fun. The most well-read item in my newsletter is the short “Just for Fun” blurb at the end. Do you think I don’t know that?

Do provide alternative delivery in text format. All service providers support this option. Not all subscribers prefer HTML and they shouldn’t have it forced on them.

Don’t add subscribers without their permission. There’s nothing wrong with renting an opt-in list, but scraping addresses off websites or borrowing other people’s lists can get you in legal trouble.

Don’t underestimate the value of e-mail marketing. This newsletter consumes three to four hours of my time every week. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think it was important.

To subscribe to Paul Gillin’s newsletter, go to www.gillin.com