As the month of February comes to an end, our Valentine’s Day excitement (or anxiety) is put in our past, and we look forward to the season of Spring. During Spring time, everything feels new! In addition to flowers, new relationships are also blossoming, and it is important to recognize unhealthy behavior in both new and existing relationships.
 
February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month, and here at West Lake High we want to provide awareness on what dating violence might look like and how to receive help.
 
What is dating violence?
Dating violence is a type of intimate partner violence. It occurs between two people in a close relationship. The nature of dating violence can be physical, emotional, or sexual.

• Physical—This occurs when a partner is pinched, hit, shoved, or kicked.
• Emotional—This means threatening a partner or harming his or her sense of self-worth. Examples include name calling, shaming, bullying, embarrassing on purpose, or keeping him/her away from friends and family.
• Sexual—This is forcing a partner to engage in a sex act when he or she does not or cannot consent.

 
Who is at risk for dating violence?
Studies show that people who harm their dating partners are more depressed and are more aggressive than peers. Other warning signs for using dating violence include:

• Poor social skills
• Inability to manage anger and conflict
• Belief that using dating violence is acceptable
• Having more traditional beliefs about the roles of males and females
• Witnessing violence at home
• Alcohol use
• Having behavior problems in other areas
• Having a friend involved with dating violence
• Witnessing violence in the community

 
What are some warning signs I should look for?

• Checking cell phones, emails or social networks without permission
• Extreme jealousy or insecurity
• Constant belittling or put-downs
• Explosive temper
• Isolation from family and friends
• Making false accusations
• Constant mood swings towards you
• Physically inflicting pain or hurt in any way
• Possessiveness
• Telling someone what to do
• Repeatedly pressuring someone to have sex

Where can I find help?
There are many resources for victims of dating violence and those who are looking to help. Some of these include:

• Teen Dating Abuse Helpline: 1-866-331-9474
• National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673
• www.breakthecycle.org
• www.thesafespace.org
• ​www.loveisrespect.org

Happy Valentine’s Day! Many people spend this heart-stamped holiday showing their loved ones they care with flowers, chocolates and gifts. But what about self-love?

It is not always easy being a human being, so it’s important to consider how to choose self-compassion. We are often faced with difficulties that lead us to push ourselves too hard and be overly self-critical. According to Mindful, a non-profit focused on the practice of mindfulness, the thoughts we feed our minds are directly linked to our mood and how we take care of ourselves. Each day we have the option to feed our minds with encouraging and loving phrases, or critical and judgmental words.

One way to help shift away from negative thinking is to identify four non self-nurturing thoughts and five self-nurturing thoughts. Here are some examples:

Non self-nuturing thoughts:
-I have no one in my life who truly loves me.
-I will always be fat, so why bother trying?
-I am dumb.
-Nothing in my life ever goes right.
 
Self-nurturing thoughts:
-I am worthy of love.
-I accept myself as I am right now.
-I am smart and capable of succeeding.
-My life has up and downs just like everyone, but I have enough right now.  
 
Reflect on how reading the above thoughts made you feel. Did reading the non self-nurturing thoughts make you want to curl up in bed with a box of chocolates? Did the self-nurturing thoughts make you feel empowered, happy and confident? That’s not surprising – It has been proven that practicing self-nurturing thinking leads to more positive emotions, greater self-compassion and less depressive symptoms.

In addition to shifting your thinking, I encourage you to think of other ways to practice self-love.

Here are some ideas to get you started:
-Be your own best friend and find ways to enjoy your own company.   
-Surround yourself with loving people.
-Write or say positive affirmations to yourself each day, such as “I am beautiful”.
-Practice self-care.
 
I challenge you this Valentine’s Day to take one of the above tips and show yourself some love. If you like what you are feeling, then keep it going – Self-compassion can be (and should be) a year-round practice! 

-Kristi, Katie & Elizabeth

Does this sound familiar? 

"It’s no longer enough just to play town soccer; elementary schoolers also have to be on a year-round club team and receive private coaching. Your daughter’s getting As in math class? Time for an after school enrichment program to learn more-complex concepts—and might as well throw in tutors for reading, science, foreign languages, and dance for good measure. Every time I decide to let my 11-year-old twin boys and eight-year-old daughter find their own way, like my parents did when I was a kid, I get sucked back into thinking that I need to help them get ahead. No one wants her kid to be average anymore—at anything."

Or what about this? 

"When students reach middle and high school, a striking number use private tutors to move from average to honors-level classes, or to help them stay afloat under their heavy AP course loads, according to numerous teachers and parents I spoke with. Interestingly, there’s no stigma attached to having a tutor the way there was when I was young. To these kids, it’s just another extracurricular. That concerns Dori Hutchinson, the director of services at the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University. When one of her sons was in middle school, Hutchinson remembers another mother asking if she had tutors lined up for next year. She was taken aback: Her son was doing well in school, so why would he need extra help? “Well, it’s so hard to get As,” the mother replied.
​“I was not going to get him a tutor to go from a B to an A,” Hutchinson recalls. She worries about the message that sends to kids—that a B isn’t good enough. “There’s this thought that we need private lessons to get better,” she says. “Instead, we need to show our kids that it’s okay not to be the best at everything.”

Read on...

"What’s so wrong with wanting our kids to succeed, anyway? Nothing, technically, but nearly half of all college students are struggling with anxiety and depression in pursuit of perfection, Hutchinson tells me: “They’re incredibly driven…but not all that happy.” 

If any of this is resonating with you, make sure you finish the article here! 

Stay Healthy, Chaps!
-Kristi Waidhofer
 
What’s so wrong with wanting our kids to succeed, anyway? Nothing, technically, but nearly half of all college students are struggling with anxiety and depression in pursuit of perfection, Hutchinson tells me: “They’re incredibly driven…but not all that happy.” While she says there’s no direct causal link, she definitely thinks this “high-performance, high-productivity culture” is contributing to their fragile states of mind. Kids nowadays have worked so hard to get to where they are that they’re burned out by the time they reach college. Rather than thriving, they’re merely surviving. They’re anxious, depressed, not sleeping, abusing substances, dropping out of school, battling eating disorders, or worse. Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death among teenagers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the 2013–2014 academic year, three Newton high school students took their own lives within four months. In April of this year, a Lexington High School senior committed suicide. The stress levels are palpable in hallways.
Hutchinson points to teenagers’ lack of resilience—the ability to face and overcome challenges. The issue is that “we’re not allowing our kids to make mistakes and learn from them,” she explains, giving the hypothetical example of well-meaning parents who hire a math tutor for their son throughout high school. As a result, he gets As. When it’s time for him to take the SATs, they again get him a tutor and he scores 700 on the math section. “But then the kid goes off to college on his own and is devastated when he gets a D in Calculus 101,” Hutchinson says. “He hasn’t had the chance to recognize that maybe math isn’t his strength.” Nor his passion. “You need to make sure your kid is there because he or she loves it—not because it’s a résumé-building line,” she adds.
Hutchinson understands parents’ motivation: “It’s coming from a place of love…and anxiety. You hate to watch your child struggle.” The problem is, “We’re trying to develop kids who have no deficits,” she says. “We all have weaknesses and vulnerabilities—that’s part of being human.”
Naylor, the sports psychologist, sees the same thing happening on the playing field: “As parents, we’re great at supporting our kids; we’re bad at letting them feel challenged.” If a child doesn’t get playing time, or if she has to sit on the sidelines, “that’s okay,” he says. Tears of frustration indicate passion—and intrinsic motivation. Look at Michael Jordan, who was cut from the varsity basketball team during his sophomore year of high school. He managed to turn out just fine.
 
We jump through hoops to make sure our children succeed for many reasons. Obviously, it’s because we want them to be happy and healthy…and we don’t want to close doors to opportunity prematurely. And maybe we’re also hoping for a competitive edge to get them into college (and some help paying for it, too) when acceptance rates are at an all-time low and tuitions are skyrocketing.
But might our own egos have something to do with it? A Westwood mother of three whom I’ll call Jill tells the story of a mom who arrived visibly upset to a fifth-grade graduation party. When everyone asked what was wrong, she told them her son hadn’t placed into the honors math class for middle school. She began to cry and said that her “biggest fear was that her kids would be average,” Jill explains. “She said, ‘My kids are a reflection of me—out there for the world to see what kind of mother I was.’”
I was shocked she’d say that—until I realized that thought has probably crossed all of our minds at some point, however fleetingly. When our kids shine, we take credit. Every time I go on Facebook I see one parent or another trumpeting their kid’s most recent achievement—whether it’s winning a ribbon at a swim meet or getting first place in the spelling bee. No wonder we feel pressure to help our kids excel. It’s no longer about keeping up with the Joneses—it’s about keeping up with their children. Still, it’s important to remember that our children are not extensions of ourselves. They are freethinking beings with their own interests. We can’t mold them into mini-me’s, nor can we live out our dreams vicariously through them.
A friend recently sent me a New York Times article in which college admissions officers shared advice they give their own kids. A quote from MIT dean of admissions Stuart Schmill resonated: “If you couldn’t write about this on your college application, would you still do it? If the answer is ‘no,’ then you shouldn’t be doing it.”
How freeing would it be if we actually followed his advice? If we backed off and gave our kids space to figure out what they enjoy doing—not what wethink they should do, or what their friends are doing? If we stopped overscheduling them? If we let “good” be good enough and didn’t rush to hire tutors and private coaches at the first hint of interest or glimmer of talent?
A former competitive college athlete, Jill says it took her 13 years of motherhood to learn what she calls the magic words of parenting: “I want to do that.” She’d always struggled to get her eldest son to participate in soccer, band, baseball—you name it, he dragged his feet. Then one day he announced he wanted to try fencing, a sport that wasn’t even on her radar. From day one, “he had his bag packed and ready to go,” she says. It was her awakening: “I’d put in no time, energy, money, or volunteer hours. I didn’t even know the rules.” And yet her son was good at it—and actually enjoyed it. “I finally learned that mothering is easier and requires less effort when the kid drives an activity,” she says.
It’s not easy to ignore societal pressure to push, push, push; to trust that our children will find their own way without our stepping in to be their street sweeper, snowplow, Zamboni, or whatever you want to call it. But here’s some perspective: Our parents didn’t sign us up for all the extras—in fact, they didn’t sign us up for much at all, instead booting us outside to make our own fun in the neighborhood. They were more concerned with whether we ate our vegetables than how many goals we scored (at a game they likely didn’t attend). And look how well we turned out. We don’t owe our success to private coaching and tutoring; we owe it to our intrinsic desire to be our best self. That’s what we need to focus on with our children: building their self-esteem; creating a safe environment where it’s okay to fail and okay to try again; and encouraging them to be nice, honest, and loyal. And, perhaps most important of all, embracing mediocrity.


Read More About:

• Long Reads
• Parenting
• Schools 2017

Julie Suratt
 bmagdigital+jsuratt@gmail.com
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What’s so wrong with wanting our kids to succeed, anyway? Nothing, technically, but nearly half of all college students are struggling with anxiety and depression in pursuit of perfection, Hutchinson tells me: “They’re incredibly driven…but not all that happy.” While she says there’s no direct causal link, she definitely thinks this “high-performance, high-productivity culture” is contributing to their fragile states of mind. Kids nowadays have worked so hard to get to where they are that they’re burned out by the time they reach college. Rather than thriving, they’re merely surviving. They’re anxious, depressed, not sleeping, abusing substances, dropping out of school, battling eating disorders, or worse. Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death among teenagers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the 2013–2014 academic year, three Newton high school students took their own lives within four months. In April of this year, a Lexington High School senior committed suicide. The stress levels are palpable in hallways.
Hutchinson points to teenagers’ lack of resilience—the ability to face and overcome challenges. The issue is that “we’re not allowing our kids to make mistakes and learn from them,” she explains, giving the hypothetical example of well-meaning parents who hire a math tutor for their son throughout high school. As a result, he gets As. When it’s time for him to take the SATs, they again get him a tutor and he scores 700 on the math section. “But then the kid goes off to college on his own and is devastated when he gets a D in Calculus 101,” Hutchinson says. “He hasn’t had the chance to recognize that maybe math isn’t his strength.” Nor his passion. “You need to make sure your kid is there because he or she loves it—not because it’s a résumé-building line,” she adds.
Hutchinson understands parents’ motivation: “It’s coming from a place of love…and anxiety. You hate to watch your child struggle.” The problem is, “We’re trying to develop kids who have no deficits,” she says. “We all have weaknesses and vulnerabilities—that’s part of being human.”
Naylor, the sports psychologist, sees the same thing happening on the playing field: “As parents, we’re great at supporting our kids; we’re bad at letting them feel challenged.” If a child doesn’t get playing time, or if she has to sit on the sidelines, “that’s okay,” he says. Tears of frustration indicate passion—and intrinsic motivation. Look at Michael Jordan, who was cut from the varsity basketball team during his sophomore year of high school. He managed to turn out just fine.
 
We jump through hoops to make sure our children succeed for many reasons. Obviously, it’s because we want them to be happy and healthy…and we don’t want to close doors to opportunity prematurely. And maybe we’re also hoping for a competitive edge to get them into college (and some help paying for it, too) when acceptance rates are at an all-time low and tuitions are skyrocketing.
But might our own egos have something to do with it? A Westwood mother of three whom I’ll call Jill tells the story of a mom who arrived visibly upset to a fifth-grade graduation party. When everyone asked what was wrong, she told them her son hadn’t placed into the honors math class for middle school. She began to cry and said that her “biggest fear was that her kids would be average,” Jill explains. “She said, ‘My kids are a reflection of me—out there for the world to see what kind of mother I was.’”
I was shocked she’d say that—until I realized that thought has probably crossed all of our minds at some point, however fleetingly. When our kids shine, we take credit. Every time I go on Facebook I see one parent or another trumpeting their kid’s most recent achievement—whether it’s winning a ribbon at a swim meet or getting first place in the spelling bee. No wonder we feel pressure to help our kids excel. It’s no longer about keeping up with the Joneses—it’s about keeping up with their children. Still, it’s important to remember that our children are not extensions of ourselves. They are freethinking beings with their own interests. We can’t mold them into mini-me’s, nor can we live out our dreams vicariously through them.
A friend recently sent me a New York Times article in which college admissions officers shared advice they give their own kids. A quote from MIT dean of admissions Stuart Schmill resonated: “If you couldn’t write about this on your college application, would you still do it? If the answer is ‘no,’ then you shouldn’t be doing it.”
How freeing would it be if we actually followed his advice? If we backed off and gave our kids space to figure out what they enjoy doing—not what wethink they should do, or what their friends are doing? If we stopped overscheduling them? If we let “good” be good enough and didn’t rush to hire tutors and private coaches at the first hint of interest or glimmer of talent?
A former competitive college athlete, Jill says it took her 13 years of motherhood to learn what she calls the magic words of parenting: “I want to do that.” She’d always struggled to get her eldest son to participate in soccer, band, baseball—you name it, he dragged his feet. Then one day he announced he wanted to try fencing, a sport that wasn’t even on her radar. From day one, “he had his bag packed and ready to go,” she says. It was her awakening: “I’d put in no time, energy, money, or volunteer hours. I didn’t even know the rules.” And yet her son was good at it—and actually enjoyed it. “I finally learned that mothering is easier and requires less effort when the kid drives an activity,” she says.
It’s not easy to ignore societal pressure to push, push, push; to trust that our children will find their own way without our stepping in to be their street sweeper, snowplow, Zamboni, or whatever you want to call it. But here’s some perspective: Our parents didn’t sign us up for all the extras—in fact, they didn’t sign us up for much at all, instead booting us outside to make our own fun in the neighborhood. They were more concerned with whether we ate our vegetables than how many goals we scored (at a game they likely didn’t attend). And look how well we turned out. We don’t owe our success to private coaching and tutoring; we owe it to our intrinsic desire to be our best self. That’s what we need to focus on with our children: building their self-esteem; creating a safe environment where it’s okay to fail and okay to try again; and encouraging them to be nice, honest, and loyal. And, perhaps most important of all, embracing mediocrity.


Read More About:

• Long Reads
• Parenting
• Schools 2017

Julie Suratt
 bmagdigital+jsuratt@gmail.com
You Might Also LikeTBT: Patriots Win First Super Bowl in 2002

No, Joe Kennedy Wasn't Drooling during His Response Speech


Named Tom Brady? You Could Win a Free Hotel Stay

Around The Web

TRENDING

1. Top 35 Bars in Boston: The Ultimate Guide to Drinking in the City
2. Democrats Applaud Rep. Joe Kennedy’s State of the Union Response
3. Patriots Sent Off with Cakes, Crowds, Torches, while Eagles Flew Commercial
4. Harvard’s Free Architecture Course Is Back This Year
5. On the Market: An 18th-Century Home in Newburyport