MS - A Parenting Tool?

I come across many articles on parenting.  It's kind of fun for me to read some of them as a child of the 70's.  Who's with me;-)

Article Du Jour:

10 WAYS TO MAKE YOUR CHILDREN MORE RESILIENT
By Robert Brooks, Ph.D. and Sam Goldstein, Ph.D.

The following is a brief overview of 10 strategies to help parents foster resilience in their youngsters.  (I'm just going to list 1, which happens to be my favorite)

• Helping our children experience success by identifying and reinforcing their "islands of competence”. 

Just once I'd like to call my Army Dad to ask his opinion on some of these writings.  Can you see it? 

 

"Hey Dad, shame you didn't have this article to read back in '75. Says right here you could've helped me experience successes by reinforcing my 'islands of competence'. What say you?"

 

 

"Yeah? I gotcher 'islands of competence'.................." (I so love my Dad:-)

Anyway, I've often joked that I could write my own articles. No one would read them, as my thoughts are very old skool and outdated...like "run around the backseat of the giant Plymouth 'cause there aren't seatbelts" outdated, "jump your bike off ramps w/o a helmet 'cause there weren't any" outdated, "spin around on my Sit n Spin til I puked" outdated. Case in point, I've never heard of 'islands of competence'. But this time, I'm pretty sure I've got these fellas beat.

Whilst I enjoyed their thoughts tremendously, I could summarize their attempts at building a resilient child in one sentence. 

 

"Have a parent with ms."  

 

If anyone wants to see what resiliency looks like, they can simply look into the faces of my kids.  Yeah, I'd rather they learn it through 'islands of competence'...but having ms wasn't my choice.  At the end of the day, I think we can all agree I'd really screw up the islands.  Be them of competence, incompetence, continence, incontinence, yada yada...;-)

 

 

  (My kids in their "King and Queen of The Mountain" pose...they're such good sports:-)