this is one bottle i must get.
350 of these exclusive crystal bottles were released in the global launch before Christmas 2010, appearing in London, New York and Madrid, with a further limited distribution worldwide in 2011.
I’ll be there for you……just not all the time.
Consider a toddler who’s running in the park and trips on a rock, Bohn says. Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in that moment of shock, before she even starts crying. But, this actually prevents her from feeling secure—not just on the playground, but in life. If you don’t let her experience that momentary confusion, give her the space to figure out what just happened (Oh, I tripped), and then briefly let her grapple with the frustration of having fallen and perhaps even try to pick herself up, she has no idea what discomfort feels like, and will have no framework for how to recover when she feels discomfort later in life. These toddlers become the college kids who text their parents with an SOS if the slightest thing goes wrong, instead of attempting to figure out how to deal with it themselves.
If, on the other hand, the child trips on the rock, and the parents let her try to reorient for a second before going over to comfort her, the child learns: That was scary for a second, but I’m okay now. If something unpleasant happens, I can get through it. In many cases, Bohn says, the child recovers fine on her own—but parents never learn this, because they’re too busy protecting their kid when she doesn’t need protection.
“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle.
Long work hours don’t help. “If you’ve got 20 minutes a day to spend with your kid,” Kindlon asked, “would you rather make your kid mad at you by arguing over cleaning up his room, or play a game of Boggle together? We don’t set limits, because we want our kids to like us at every moment, even though it’s better for them if sometimes they can’t stand us.”
Kindlon also observed that because we tend to have fewer kids than past generations of parents did, each becomes more precious. So we demand more from them—more companionship, more achievement, more happiness. Which is where the line between selflessness (making our kids happy) and selfishness (making ourselves happy) becomes especially thin.
Let’s say, Jane explained, that a mother is over by the sign-in sheet, and her son has raced off to play. Suddenly the mother sees her kid fighting over a toy with a classmate. Her child has the dump truck, and the other kid grabs it. Her child yells, “No! That’s mine!” The two argue while the other kid continues to play with the truck, until finally the other kid says, “This one is yours!” and tosses her child a crappy one. Realizing the other kid won’t budge, her child says, “Okay,” and plays with the crappy toy.
“Her kid is fine,” Jane said. “But the mother will come running over and say, ‘But that’s not fair! Little Johnnie had the big truck, and you can’t just grab it away. It was his turn.’ Well, the kids were fine with it. Little Johnnie was resilient! We do teach the kids not to grab, but it’s going to happen sometimes, and kids need to learn how to work things out themselves. The kid can cope with adversity, but the parent is reeling, and I end up spending my time calming down the parent while her kid is off happily playing.”
“We try to be so correct in our language and our discipline that we forget the true message we’re trying to send—which is, don’t name-call and don’t throw the sand!” she said. “But by the time we’re done ‘talking it through,’ the kids don’t want to play anymore, a rote apology is made, and they’ll do it again five minutes later, because they kind of got a pass. ‘Knock it off’ works every time, because they already know why it’s wrong, and the message is concise and clear.
This same teacher—who asked not to be identified, for fear of losing her job—says she sees many parents who think they’re setting limits, when actually, they’re just being wishy-washy. “A kid will say, ‘Can we get ice cream on the way home?’ And the parent will say, ‘No, it’s not our day. Ice-cream day is Friday.’ Then the child will push and negotiate, and the parent, who probably thinks negotiating is ‘honoring her child’s opinion,’ will say, ‘Fine, we’ll get ice cream today, but don’t ask me tomorrow, because the answer is no!’” The teacher laughed. “Every year, parents come to me and say, ‘Why won’t my child listen to me? Why won’t she take no for an answer?’ And I say, ‘Your child won’t take no for an answer, because the answer is never no!’”
Kids feel safer and less anxious with fewer choices, Schwartz says; fewer options help them to commit to some things and let go of others, a skill they’ll need later in life.
“Research shows that people get more satisfaction from working hard at one thing, and that those who always need to have choices and keep their options open get left behind,” Schwartz told me. “I’m not saying don’t let your kid try out various interests or activities. I’m saying give them choices, but within reason. Most parents tell kids, ‘You can do anything you want, you can quit any time, you can try this other thing if you’re not 100 percent satisfied with the other.’ It’s no wonder they live their lives that way as adults, too.” He sees this in students who graduate from Swarthmore. “They can’t bear the thought that saying yes to one interest or opportunity means saying no to everything else, so they spend years hoping that the perfect answer will emerge. What they don’t understand is that they’re looking for the perfect answer when they should be looking for the good-enough answer.”
As a parent, I’m all too familiar with this. I never said to my son, “Here’s your grilled-cheese sandwich.” I’d say, “Do you want the grilled cheese or the fish sticks?” On a Saturday, I’d say, “Do you want to go to the park or the beach?” Sometimes, if my preschooler was having a meltdown over the fact that we had to go to the grocery store, instead of swooping him up and wrestling him into the car, I’d give him a choice: “Do you want to go to Trader Joe’s or Ralphs?” (Once we got to the market, it was “Do you want the vanilla yogurt or the peach?”) But after I’d set up this paradigm, we couldn’t do anything unless he had a choice. One day when I said to him, “Please put your shoes on, we’re going to Trader Joe’s,” he replied matter-of-factly: “What are my other choices?” I told him there were no other choices—we needed something from Trader Joe’s. “But it’s not fair if I don’t get to decide too!” he pleaded ingenuously. He’d come to expect unlimited choice.
Like most of my peers, I’d always thought that providing choices to young children gave them a valuable sense of agency, and allowed them to feel more in control. But Barry Schwartz’s research shows that too much choice makes people more likely to feel depressed and out of control.
It makes sense. I remember how overwhelmed and anxious I felt that day I visited the parenting aisle at Barnes & Noble and was confronted by all those choices. How much easier things would be if there weren’t hundreds of parenting books and listservs and experts that purport to have the answers, when the truth is, there is no single foolproof recipe for raising a child.
We can expose our kids to art, but we can’t teach them creativity. We can try to protect them from nasty classmates and bad grades and all kinds of rejection and their own limitations, but eventually they will bump up against these things anyway. In fact, by trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up. Maybe we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do—and some letting go.
Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/how-to-land-your-kid-in-therapy/8555/
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Happiness is a tough concept to grasp (what EXACTLY will make you truly happy?) but yet everyone yearns for it. I guess, the gist of it all is to learn how to maintain a healthy balance of yes’s and no’s. Too much of a good thing can never be good and in fact will backfire in the long run. However, it is always the case of “Easy to say but hard to do”.
Parenting, is INDEED, an art form.
learning to let go,
fifi
A very apt post just for the creative people
Mr Phillip Glass, the contemporary composer, works on his new compositions only between 11am and 3pm. That is the time, he says, when his creative ideas come to him. When film-maker George Lucas needs to write or edit a script, he sequesters himself in a small cottage behind his house where he gets no calls or visitors.
A lesson in managing creativity can be found in the work discipline of such inventive geniuses: A protected bubble in time and space fosters the imaginative spirit.
That notion challenges some prevailing wisdom – particularly the assumption that upping the pressure on workers will squeeze more innovative thinking out of them. Many managers assume that just calling people into a high-demand brainstorming session will get everyone’s best ideas out on the table.
That is dead wrong, according to new research on the creative process. In a knowledge economy, where competitive advantage comes from leveraging the most innovative ideas and executing them well, leaders at every level would do well to reflect on these findings.
In a study led by Ms Teresa Amabile, a director of research at the Harvard Business School, researchers asked more than 1,000 knowledge workers – members of research and development, marketing and information-technology teams – to keep daily diaries. This data trove revealed a disconnect between how managers think they can best support creative efforts and how those who are actually making the efforts assess what helps them most.
When the researchers asked managers to name the most effective ways they could encourage creativity, the most frequent response was praising people for good work.
When they asked the workers themselves, the No 1 carrot turned out to be providing ongoing managerial support of their daily progress. Only 5 per cent of managers got this right. Daily progress towards a large goal, even small wins, primes positive moods and catalyses creativity, the Harvard study found.
Members of creative project teams also described the most common ways managers unwittingly undermine creative work.
These ranged from dismissing an idea out of hand to ignoring suggestions to torpedoing an employee’s creative project, for instance through an abrupt reassignment or a cavalier change of mind. The researchers advised managers to set clear goals and then let people accomplish them in their own ways.
THE AHA! MOMENT
The Harvard researchers also recommended that supervisors protect workers’ time and resources so they can have periods of sustained focus on their projects. This advice – to manage staff time well – is supported by new brain research that reveals what happens at the moment of Aha!
Ms Joy Bhattacharya at the University of London has found that in the moments just before a creative insight, the mind is typically relaxed and open to new ideas, as indicated by an alpha brain wave.
As the Aha! approaches, there is an abrupt shift marked by high gamma-wave activity. This indicates that far-flung neural circuits are connecting in a new network. A third of a second after the peak of this activity, a novel idea floats into the mind.
This finding indicates that creative insights cannot be concocted on demand; they need to ripen. The first step in the creative process typically involves immersion in the problem and current thinking and then gathering any information that might be relevant. But in the next stage, intense effort should give way to letting what is known as the “cognitive unconscious” work on the problem by making novel connections.
Constant distractions interrupt the mental space where creative insights simmer. That is why so many Aha! moments come in the relaxed space of downtime – when we are doing something other than tensing to be creative.
Anyone whose work involves strategic thinking can learn something from the findings. The usual method for devising a competitive strategy is to come up with an idea and then analyse its value. The trouble is, no one tells you how to come up with that idea in the first place.
Mr Sergey Brin and Mr Larry Page, who created the innovative search formula that became the basis of Google, know something about that process. They have instituted Google’s famous once-a-week day for employees to work exclusively on their pet creative projects. Long before Google existed, 3M set aside 15 per cent of employee time for the same thing.
Another trendsetter was Xerox PARC, the legendary Silicon Valley research centre known for insulating its creative staff from competitive pressures and giving them time to reflect, explore and collaborate.
Xerox PARC is the birthplace of a plethora of computer-age basics including laser printing and the graphical user interface that gave us windows and icons.
In a day when the use of innovative ideas provides a competitive edge, it is good to understand how squeezing time and people can unwittingly squelch creativity, hurting an organisation’s future. The best advice for someone who manages innovative thinkers is to nurture the conditions where creative ideas can flow most freely. BLOOMBERG
totally,
fifi
