671 karma · joined October 20, 2014
I have a high needs 8 year old. I find there are certain things that always trigger her -- poor sleep, hunger, watching TV/playing video games, too much play with other people. It takes a lot of discipline to keep these in balance, but the effort pays off most of the time.
As far as discipline goes, every child has different needs and every parent has their own style. Most likely there is an underlying cause to the behavior -- be it developmental, physical, emotion -- and as parents we rarely know the true cause.
"Time in" rather than "Time out," reading together, going outside in nature can all be healing.
Hand in Hand Parenting has some good gentle discipline resources. "Raising Your Spirited Child" or "The Highly Sensitive Child" may be good resource to assess your son's temperament.
The "Your X-Year Old" series of books is often a good measuring stick to figure out age expected behaviors.
Time ins, punishment, rewards, etc are all linked to short term wins -- not long term success. "Unconditional Parenting" is one of my favorite books on the subject.
Finally, if this is a new behavior, it is possible there was an outside catalyst -- not what a parent wants to think about. Do work on giving your son tools to communicate -- words, drawings, a good understanding of his biology (age appropriate). Having a neutral professional he can talk to is helpful as well.
Good luck -- what a lucky son to have a father so humble as to ask for help.
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
NonViolent Communication: A Language of Life
Some of these results include: 1. Increased size and activity in the areas of the brain responsible for attention and emotion regulation, higher order cognition, interoception, and memory extinction 2. Decreased activity in areas of the brain areas responsible for mind-wandering, memory retrieval, and emotional reactivity 3. Increased telomere size and a younger looking brain. One researcher from UCLA (Dr. Luders) used an AI program to guess the age based on MRIs of different brains. Meditators were significantly younger. 4. People who meditate regularly require less sleep.
This is just a small slice of example research. Most of the research is based on meditation. In my opinion, meditation is a tremendous part of Yoga, although not necessarily what we see in the Western World. Also, its important to note that there are many different ways to meditate and branches of Yoga. Each of these require different studies to understand the impact.
A few days later he passed in what I found to be the most humiliating and painful few days. After I watched him die, I promised myself I would never let my kids see me die that way -- petrified and feeble. I hadn't realized it then, but the child I made that promise for was barely one when I got my diagnosis. The odds were not in my favor, but I wanted nothing more than to give her a mother.
I decided to risk everything and be treated. I spent what could have been the last months of my life in a hospital, too sick to see her. As my oncologist told me -- I was losing one year to save the rest. Best risk of my life. She's almost eight and has a one year old brother. Life is good.
Good luck to you. The world is filled with miracles. Your attitude will be the most important thing your children remember. Keep loving them.
These parents were doing their children a service and trying to break free from the overprotective craziness that has everyone keeping their kids inside. And the response they received is crazy. As if its not hard enough to go against the grain and give your kids more independence, now there is precedence that if you do, you may be at risk.
Our jobs as parents is not to protect kids from life, but to give them the tools to navigate it.
Part of giving them tools is giving them the opportunity to fail and learn from it.
The rates of depression, suicide, bullying and drug use have been climbing higher and higher -- we're not helping our kids stay safe, we're keeping them from gaining wisdom.
Eventually it will change, though I suspect things will get worse before they get better... change comes when the pain of staying the same is too great -- we're all too comfortable keeping our kids inside.
I recently was let go from my director of engineering position when I was 9 months pregnant. They said they were outsourcing their operations, but I was the only team-member let go. I also would be on maternity leave during a critical release... I can't say they let me go since I was going to have a baby, -- I think their decision to outsource made sense. I just think it was a catalyst as there was zero transition plan and probably would have been too hard to let me go during or right after maternity leave, which would have made more strategic sense.
I seriously consider leaving technology for good after dealing with the challenges of being a woman, mother and engineer for so many years.
I'm not alone, its pretty common for women to leave technology after having kids.
There is such a push to have more women become technologists, but if we leave once we become parents, what's the gain? The struggles of culture and technology are far deeper than getting more young women to be interested in engineering. Women aren't the only ones to suffer. It's hard for men too. The culture also seeps into the quality of products we create -- in both design and code.
Unfortunately, I have only seen the culture become more toxic as time goes on, not less.
Maybe I'm jaded. I'm certainly sick of it.
Years after treatment, I was in "menopause" and not a candidate for fertility treatment (fsh > 50 AMH = .17). My only hope was a donor egg.
My husband and I naturally conceived in July and our baby boy is coming in a few weeks.
I share this not because I think every woman can have babies, but because our science is still limited in understanding conception. There is a lot more to creating life than what we can "see" at the moment.
Speaking as a once single mom with an extensive technical resume, finding a job can be next to impossible. Regardless, living in the city increases the chance.
Most people have a hard time realizing they are stressed out -- you are suddenly completely freaking out! If you wait until there is a problem, you've waited too long. Risk shows up way before it manifests.
Daily gut checks are an easy way to notice risk. Ask yourself "how is the estimate aligning with the actual work left?"
Once you know there is misalignment, the most valuable way to discuss is focusing on work left.
The most important thing to remember when you know you are stressed out is to take a deep breath and relax. Understanding how you are evaluated for success and primary business drivers will allow you to discuss risk and delays in a language that can influences others and address what is more important.
Things that really help estimations: 1. Thinking about work in relative complexity rather than time allocations. More complex work increases time exponentially. Unknowns are almost always filled with gotchas. Any work that is more than a medium in complexity is best experimented on in spikes or broken down into smaller pieces of value.
2. Use your gut. It knows better than your head because these problems are often too complicated and deep to really have any idea how long they are going to take
3. Firm up definition of "done." There is a lot of overhead beyond coding the solution that makes something complete. Having a well known definition of done that everyone agrees on will help consider all the things that are often forgotten.
Go easy on yourself. Your estimates aren't wrong, they are off. You don't make good money because you are solving easy problems with well known solutions. You are creating simple solutions to complicated problems. Estimating anything when its complicated is most often inaccurate...
When all else fails default to Uncle Bob's standard answer: 3 weeks :)
Good luck!