Parenting Tips: Giving Choices

The next tip I want to discuss is giving choices. This is another tip taken from my 8 Tips for Parents.This is a very important concept that really begins from the time a baby is born and can be used throughout childhood and adolescence as part of a holistic pediatric approach to your child.

Giving Choices Accomplishes the Following:
1. Gives your child plenty of opportunities to practice this important skill of decision making.
2. Gives them a sense of identity and individuality through this process.
3. Helps with the long term goal of building self esteem.
4. Lays the foundation, and builds a track record of choices made and their outcomes.
5. Empowers your child and gives you some control at the same time.



All kids need to make choices and learn the difference between making individual decisions and complying with others. You want your kids to have plenty of practice at this so that by the time they reach their teenage years they will be well versed at making good choices.

This gives them a sense of their own identity and individuality. In addition, the consequences of making good choices will reflect on their own self esteem, and the consequences of making bad or poor choices will lead to learning valuable lessons so as not to repeat them again.

This lays the foundation and builds a track record of the choices they have made and their outcomes which is stored in their own memory banks. These choices are what they will refer back to over the course of their whole lives as they live, grow and learn more.

I usually recommend giving choices as early as possible. This serves the dual purpose of giving practice for the child, and it gives them an outlet to exert their own will power. Of course, in reality, you are the one who is giving the list of choices to choose from, but the overall feeling of making a choice can be very empowering for your child. It fulfills an important developmental need and it doesn’t require you to have to exert your own will power over your child’s.

This is an invaluable tactic when you’re trying to navigate through the preschool and early childhood years; when testing the limits of acceptable behavior and your patience are pushed to their maximums.

An example of giving choices might be asking, “Which of these three outfits do you want to wear to school today?” or maybe asking, “Do you want to help me clean up the kitchen, or help me vacuum the living room?”

In other situations, it may be more appropriate to give time windows as choices like, “Do you want to do your homework before dinner or after dinner?” Another one might be “Do you want to do your chores before school or after school?” I’m sure you can think of an infinite number of ways to use this technique. I highly recommend that you use it frequently.

For more information about my approach to holistic pediatrics,
visit this page on the Principles for Parents website called Your Healthy Child.

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Help Your Child Manage Anger

I believe one of the most important topics that parents can teach their kids about is how to handle emotional states like anger. As youngsters, we have a lack of experience and little where-with-all to handle powerful and unpredictable emotions.

Learning how to manage emotions like anger in constructive, natural and acceptable ways is one of the ongoing processes of childhood and beyond.

Here is a site and a book I came across which specifically deals with anger in children and gives some great alternatives to medication and the conventional approach, while respecting the individual variations that children inherently have across the spectrum of the population.

Dear Sebastian was written by Bianca Tora, a grandmother and writer who put together this book and the website called Help-Your-Child-With-Anger.com.

The following is a quote from the author:

“Thanks to recent research on brain neuroplasticity, exercise-induced brain stimulation, psychoenergetic science, the power of intention and attention, we knew we could help our grandson manage his anger without relying on drugs or institutional care. And that’s what we did–helped him manage his anger–with love, patience, belief and brain-building exercises. This website is the result of our encounter with anger. We decided to turn what we learned from it into anger management tips and resources that can help others like us.”
- Bianca Tora

In Chinese medicine, anger is under the functional category of the liver and gall bladder sub-system. What this means is from an energy perspective, children (and all of us) must use some of their allotted liver gall bladder energy to deal with anger as an emotion, either in the expression of it or the inhibition of it. Both outward expression and inward repression require energy from the liver and gall bladder system.

Not surprisingly, this same sub-circuit is in charge of dealing with stress (both internal and external) in addition to many other categories. It is no wonder then, that stress can increase the chances of a child having anger episodes more frequently or more pronounced as a result of stress provoking events and experiences.

In my practice, I have learned that I must look for additional pieces of information when investigating the causes of anger and the Chinese medicine system is a very useful framework in this regard. At the same time, it allows us to look for individual differences in order to come up with a strategy that will work for your child, not anyone else’s and not based solely on statistics and numbers.

Here is a short video that highlights this site called Help-Your-Child-With-Anger.com.

If you have a child who is having difficulty with anger as an emotional state, go to this website and read more about the many techniques available to address it. You may also leave a comment on this post or submit a question through my contact form.

Paradigm Shifting Principles for Parents: Individualize for Your Child

Individualization strategy for your child

I’m going to discuss this topic of individuality taken from my free ebook called Paradigm Shifting Principles for Parents. Perhaps the most important information I can give you is to pay attention to the context your child’s situation fits into. What I mean is, your child’s individual nature is unquestionably the most important factor in their learning, your parenting, and my general advice-giving in my supporting role to you as a pediatrician.

What most parents don’t realize is that although their own child is unique, our current medical system considers them to be the opposite. This is a shocking realization for everyone involved, including myself as a practicing physician! While we in the medical community pay lip service to the laudable goal of treating your child as an individual, the fact is, very few practitioners have the time, the understanding or the framework within which to work to accomplish this goal. It is my view that you as the parent are the only one who can possibly attain this outcome for your child. No practitioner or medical system can do it for you or for them. All we can hope to do is point you in the right direction. This has been and will continue to be my goal in my interactions with you, either in person or indirectly through my writings.

How Does Your Child Absorb Information?

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about to make this more clear. In my practice, I place a lot of importance on how your child takes in information, and how they assimilate it. Some kids are very feeling oriented and kinesthetic or sensitive to their surroundings including other people. Some kids are much more verbal and talkative, and they show an ability to communicate their wants and needs to you in a flurry of words and phrases. Still other kids are more auditory, and they need to hear instructions, encouragement, and/or reinforcement, sometimes repeatedly and numerous times before it will finally “sink in”. As you can see, the logical strategy is to match the method with the easiest way your child can absorb the information you are trying to get through to them.

Pigeon Holing is Not Logical

If I am called upon to give advice to help parents with a child with a particular problem, it is imperative that I know which of the above methods will most likely result in the most efficient way to address the issue. Is it logical for me to arbitrarily choose one method for all kids of a certain age group, knowing that there is wide variability in how kids take in information? This is what I call pigeon-holing and I see it constantly cropping up in the medical field in particular. As a physician, I am just as much to blame for this unfortunate tendency because I used to think and practice in that way. Now I am trying to reverse the trend and begin the necessary dialogue to find common ground between parents and practitioners for the benefit of your kids.

Individualize Your Approach to Your Child

Now if we come back to your role as the parent. There is no doubt that you have the most influence and hold the most important position when it comes to your child, period. What I want you to know is that there is nothing wrong with individualizing your approach to all things related to your child, and I would include the medical or health related decisions you make. I can only make this statement now, after many years in practice, because I have arrived at an understanding that includes the energy medicine view of your child and your family. I do not believe we can ignore the very important contribution energy influences make during your child’s growth and development years. You can read more of my perspectives on this in other posts I have made in the energy medicine category here.

If you’d like more information, go here to download the full version of the free ebook: Paradigm Shifting Principles for Parents.

Parenting Tips: Foreshadowing for Your Child

I wrote my 8 Tips for Parents piece a while ago, and I just wanted to share one of those 8 tips today called, “Foreshadowing”. I borrowed this literary term to describe the exercise of narrating the future for your child. This is basically a technique that gives your child something to shoot for. In other words, it gives them a direction or a pathway to follow, and the advantageous part of this is that you are the one leading the way.

There is no doubt that parental expectations can be a powerful motivator especially in the early years. In the energy medicine system, this foreshadowing is happening all the time, and can be very useful if it is harnessed and used correctly.

Let’s take an example of preparing for school. This is a significant milestone around age 5. It includes the novelty of school with its rules, order, and social scene. At the same time it involves the necessary
absence of you as the parent, as your child enters the long process of becoming educated through the school system. By foreshadowing what will happen when your child enters school for the first time, you can essentially prepare them in advance. This can take the form of statements directly to your child or to others. It can take the form of actions, like visiting the school itself, going to the playground, or maybe meeting teachers or the principal. These preparatory steps are basically foreshadowing for your child what school will be like.

I often recommend that parents make statements like, “I wonder what you’re going to learn in kindergarten?” or “How many friends do you think you’ll make in your first month of school?” These types of statements foreshadow the positive aspects of the upcoming scenario and they can make it much easier for your child to make this important adjustment.

Here are three things I want you to remember about this topic called foreshadowing:

1. Foreshadowing allows your child to get in sync with your expectations of the future.

2. This means they have something to shoot for, or a pathway to follow.

3. Foreshadowing is best used with open ended, nonchalant, “I wonder” type of statements and questions.

Another very important tip is to use what I call “gossiping”. If your child hears you talking to someone else about them, their ears are sure to perk up. In the energy medicine way of looking at your child, this can happen even if your child is too young to understand what you’re saying. The typical scenario would be if you are talking on the phone to grandma, and you mention something about your child by name. Something like “Guess how well Bobby is doing in school?”, or “You should see how fast Bobby is learning to read!”. These statements directed at other people but particularly extended family members can be like gold.

If you make use of this technique, I am optimistic that you will see your child responding to new situations or previously stress provoking ones in a more calm and confident manner. So keep foreshadowing in mind as a technique you can use whenever you see an opportunity to prepare your child for the near or the distant future. Give it a try, and let me know what kind of results you get.

If you liked this tip, you may want to know the other seven included in my 8 Tips for Parents  here.

The Living Matrix: Information as Medicine

I am a pragmatist, and my medical training and education in general has taught me to look for consistency in one’s position and particularly across many diverse fields and subjects. This is the one way that the “truth” can be strived for when the waters are muddy and the conflicting viewpoints are more numerous than the concurrent ones.

It is clear from my perusal of the literature and my own exploration of such diverse fields as music, medicine, physics, life sciences, mathematics, social structures, politics, and even spirituality and religion, that the overriding consistent theme among all of these is that we are energy based beings, with vibration and energy signatures at the very core of our existence, and within our universe we are engaged in the human experience as individuals.

I see this consistency overwhelming the old paradigm of Newtonian physics and the dependence on physical explanations for everything under the sun. Indeed, this outdated way of thinking will soon be gone, especially as our methods of measurement of such things as the human energy field, functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, the frequency of vibration of our very own DNA strands, and the electromagnetic field characteristics of our own heart energy system show the general public in no uncertain terms that these energy descriptions are real. Since we live in a society governed by personal choices, it is no surprise that certain segments of our population have chosen to ignore these findings for many years now. My contention is that this microfocused view will not last long, as more and more people gain access to this information.

Here is the trailer to the movie called The Living Matrix. I recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about energetics and what it means for medicine, science, and our daily lives. Even in my lifetime so far, many things I learned or was taught in medical school and elsewhere have had to undergo “revision” in light of new information and our continuously expanding knowledge base. The movie was made in the style of such films as “What the bleep to we know” and “The Secret”. I think it is very well done and worth a look.

If you are interested in seeing the whole movie I know you can order it from the website like I did at TheLivingMatrixMovie.com

Let me know what you think by leaving your comment below.

Energy: A New Term to Help Your Child

Energy is the new “common currency”

Along with this new time that we are living in, it is apparent that we need a new language or new terminology to describe what is happening in as close to realistic terms as possible. Only in this way can we have a meaningful and productive discussion. I propose that we use the term “energy” as our common currency of information exchange.

The previous method of using physical components like chemicals, hormones, anatomical and physiological words to describe what is happening in our physical systems including your child’s body and mind; they have simply become obsolete. Even in the rigorous halls of academia, the descriptions of what is actually going on in our bodies has had to undergo a radical shift in perspective and consequently nomenclature.

I believe we are in a profound period of transition, and it will not be easy to reconcile or even understand the meaning of this change in real time. This is even more compounded by the fact that your child is changing on a daily basis, and the methods and strategies that may have worked yesterday will no longer work or even apply today. In my experience, simply changing to “energy” as our common denominator can make a huge difference in how we evaluate, describe, and come up with strategies to treat your child.

I see kids in my practice for varied reasons and at varying times in their development. I have learned over the years, that the energy medicine system provides a wonderful and comprehensive framework to work within and to better describe what’s happening with your child. Let’s look at an example.

A child presents with new onset allergies to grass and pollens at age 10. This is not that unusual, but the circumstances reveal that this child has not had any major changes in living situation, routine, school, relationships, etc., so the question that must be asked is, “Why is this happening to this child now?”.

I think this is a legitimate question, given the fact that he did not have allergies in the first ten years of life. This is where the energy medicine system comes in very handy. This child experienced a fearful event in the winter, just prior to developing these springtime allergies. What was that event? He needed to have surgery and stayed in the hospital for 5 days.

From an energy perspective, this has tremendous meaning. Do we think this child’s energy system is more likely to pay attention to an event like having surgery and being away from home for 5 days, or is it more likely to keep the immune system in balance so as not to over-react to environmental allergens like grass and pollens as he had done for the previous 10 years?

It turns out that in the Chinese medicine system, the same reservoir of energy required to deal with fear and fear-provoking events is responsible for the health and maintenance of your child’s immune system. In accordance with the principle of balance, a disturbance in the immune system or any other body subsystem can take the form of over-reaction or excess (like allergic responses) or under-performance and deficiency (like having a weakened constitution and predisposition to getting sick and catching colds frequently).

Again, I just want to emphasize the framework and the context which this perspective and viewpoint provides both to the practitioner trying to help the child and family, and to the parent who can appreciate and understand the activity of their child’s system in a new way.

Perhaps the most valuable result of this way of looking at any child’s situation, is that it shows how logical and conservation and preservation oriented the body and energy system really is, as opposed to a random series of events and misfortunes that a child has to endure.

Once we switch to using the child’s energy system and describing energy related functions, now we have moved into the territory of energy medicine and the term “energy” being used in the context of distribution and decision-making by the child’s own intelligent underlying system.

Do you see how the onset of allergies is much easier to comprehend and explain in this context? This allows us to not only address the new symptoms that have appeared for this child, but we can simultaneously focus on the underlying part of his energy system that could use some re-balancing or strengthening right now. It is much easier and better to tackle certain issues sooner rather than later. I think everyone can identify with this concept, once it is put into terms we can understand and agree on.

I believe it is extremely useful to use “energy” as a new medical term and as a systematic way to explain what otherwise would likely never come to the awareness of parents, practitioners, or children themselves. I have been amazed at how useful this way of thinking about symptoms, disorders and diseases is for me as a doctor who works with kids and their families. I encourage parents to learn more about this approach to evaluating what’s going on with their children.