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Mar
20
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I think one of the most important things to introduce to our kids is the idea of empathy. Empathy says you should visit people when they’re sick in hospitals. Empathy says that we should want to feed the hungry. Certainly over the last 15 or 20 years, for a vast majority of the population, this quality has been lost or clouded over by other things. I think over the next couple of years, with the sharing of the pain that we’re going to feel nationally, you’re also going to see an elevated sense of empathy. People are going to know what it’s like for the people who have nothing, because now many are going to have less. | |||
Blog Posts by James Lehman, MSW
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Dec
04
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As parents, it’s easy to focus on the kids and lose sight of ourselves and our needs as adults at this time of year. So, when we look at how to manage family and behavior problems during the holidays, we need to look at the effect the season has on us and on our kids. We are often overwhelmed by the amount of work we need to get done on the job and the amount of pressure we feel due to social obligations at this time of year. Add in the stress of gift buying (especially in divorced and blended families) and we feel a tremendous emotional fatigue—which means we have fewer emotional resources with which to manage our kids. The whole thing can become a cycle of stress. | |||
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Nov
20
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I’ve been saddened by all the reporting that’s been done on the Nebraska Safe Haven Law, which allows parents to abandon children without fear of consequence. The reason I’ve been saddened is because all the news reporting has been focusing on the parents’ irresponsibility and the weird way the law was written and passed. None of it focuses on the real problem, which is the amount of desperation parents feel. | |||
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Apr
21
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A day with a child who has Oppositional Defiant Disorder is a series of battles. It starts when they wake up, continues at breakfast, intensifies when they have to get dressed, and doesn’t end until they fight with you over bedtime. | |||
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Apr
02
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A group of third-graders—kids ages 8-10—were caught plotting to attack and kill their elementary school teacher. They even had assigned roles—one child was going to blacken the windows of the classroom, and another was going to clean up afterward. The nine boys and girls in the learning disabilities class (kids in the class have ADHD, ADD and developmental delays) were organized enough to bring knives, a paperweight, handcuffs and duct tape. The plan was to knock her unconscious with the paperweight and then stab her. The reason why they were going to attack her? She’d scolded a girl for standing on a chair in the classroom. The teacher of the class, Miss Belle Carter, said that they were “good kids” and couldn’t believe they were planning to attack her. | |||
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Mar
14
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From time to time, kids will say that they’re bored of school. There’s some research that indicates that when some kids are bored, they’re actually mildly angry. And so, I think that kids do get angry with school, it is boring sometimes. They also don’t like the responsibility of all the assignments. As they get older, these assignments don’t appear to prepare them for the adult world and they resent it, and they resent having to do them. | |||
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Feb
29
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In the news this week, there have been stories of misconduct by teachers, students and other school authority figures, from the teacher who duct taped his student to a desk, to the Pre-K teacher in Texas who was caught on tape saying “You all are stupid kids. If you’re mean to me, that means I get to be mean to you—got it?” And then there was the school bus driver in Phoenix who got into a shoving match with a 15- year-old student. (The student was suspended, the bus driver is now on paid leave pending further investigation.) In this post, James Lehman talks about what’s going on in our schools, and why teachers need training, too. | |||
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Feb
11
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Parents who don’t have good parenting skills use aggression. Men who don’t have good relationship skills (like the father mentioned in the last post) use aggression to compensate for a whole range of things—and usually it’s their own inadequacies and fears. | |||
