The holidays are not always a happy time for many people, particularly for adults who are disappointed or hurt year after year — that their family isn’t what they want it to be, that they got stuck with all the gift-buying and holiday tasks, that they always do do do for everyone, everywhere, and no one seems particularly grateful.

Which makes the holidays a fruitful time to think about forgiveness. If we want to feel happy over the holidays, we need to let go of grudges from last year and prevent those same old transgressions from happening again — and in many (often very difficult) cases, anticipate the times we’ll be expected to hold hands with family members who have hurt us.

My point: This holiday season will be a lot happier if we aren’t angry and resentful. I’ve blogged before about how forgiveness is something we do for ourselves, to lead happier lives:

Few people fully realize the huge impact the ability to forgive can have on their happiness, nor do most people think of this as a skill that they need to teach and practice with their children. But important it is: forgiving people tend to be happier, healthier, and more empathetic.

Fred Luskin, the director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, has spent decades researching and teaching about forgiveness. Luskin emphasizes that forgiveness is not about forgetting, as the adage would have us believe, but about letting go. It is about choosing positive emotions over negative ones; it is a decision that results in an entirely different emotional experience.

Luskin has developed a program to help people learn to forgive even the most heinous acts. I’ve translated his forgiveness program here into skills and concepts we can practice ourselves:

• A good first step is to develop the ability to understand your emotions and articulate them when something is bothering you. Practice this by identifying and talking about your feelings, particularly when you are hurting.

• When you are upset, practice mindfulness. This will help turn off your fight or flight response so that you can respond to the upsetting situation more effectively.

• Another important way to practice forgiveness is simply to acknowledge how awful we feel when we ruminate about how we’ve been hurt, and remind ourselves of all the positive benefits for ourselves of forgiveness. When we feel hurt, it can help to recognize that what we are feeling is distress coming from what we are thinking and feeling right now, not from the original offense, whether it was months or just minutes ago.

• Remember that we suffer when we demand things that life is not giving us. We can hope for things, of course, and we can work hard to get what we want. But we cannot force things to happen that are outside of our control. When we expect something outside of our control to happen and then it doesn’t, we feel hurt and wronged. Practice letting go of desire for things you have no influence over, and redirect your energy towards things you do have control over.

• Talk with someone neutral about your desire for revenge, if that is holding you back. Remember that the best revenge is a life well-lived. When we focus on how we’ve been hurt, we give power to the person who hurt us because it causes us to continue hurting.

Forgiving is tough business. It takes courage and resolve to let go of negative feelings when we’ve been wronged. Fortunately this gets easier with practice — especially if we start with the small stuff and get in the habit early on — and it makes us stronger and better people.

Image courtesy of eekim

‘Tis the season for electronic gifts. But these days, parents need to provide their kids with much more than batteries for all their devices.

Everyday I read something that leads me to believe that tech devices are dramatically affecting our kids’ normal social, sexual, intellectual, and emotional development. What I’m most amazed by, frankly, is how uninvolved we parents tend to be in the online lives of our middle schoolers. Our tweeners tend to seem much more savvy than they actually are: They may have technical skills, but usually they don’t have the social skills they need to navigate the sophisticated online and social media world.

Smartphones, tablets, and computers are powerful, wonderful devices that I can hardly imagine living without. But our kids get addicted to them easily, and they often use them inappropriately.

Middle schoolers are not old enough (or developmentally ready) to have as much freedom online as they often do these days. Think of these devices like cars: Before kids can drive them alone, they need to know the rules. They need clear roads with bright lines painted for them to show them where—and where not—to go.

In order for parents to teach these rules to our kids, many of us need a crash course in them ourselves—consider it a new technologies boot camp. If your middle schooler seems to be spending more time on Facebook or texting than she is in-person with her friends, this boot camp is for you.

Step 1: Make it clear which SPACES are appropriate for device and computer use.

Just because we can take a laptop into the bathroom does not mean that this is an appropriate thing to do. These are the places where it is typically NOT OKAY to use a computer, tablet, or smartphone:

● The car, unless it is planned for a long road trip. If your kids are used to being on their devices while you shuttle them around town, re-introduce them to the car window. Encourage them to learn the names of the streets you are driving on. Talk to them. If they complain about being bored, remind them that boredom is not a health hazard, but technology overuse is.

● Bedrooms and bathrooms. If you think your middle schooler is mature enough to have a computer in his or her bedroom, read Catherine Steriner-Adair’s book The Big Disconnect. Believe me, it can forever change their development. Laptops, phones, and tablets get charged in the kitchen at our house.* (I do let my daughter take a smartphone into her room after school and before dinnertime, where she uses it to talk and text. She is not allowed to use it for Internet access in her bedroom. This means that kids do homework in our house in public spaces, not in their bedrooms.)

● Public spaces where others can overhear a conversation, like restaurants, school, or any place where someone is helping you, like in a check-out line at a store. Remind kids that when we are texting or talking on the phone, we are ignoring the people around us, which is especially rude when they are helping us with something.

Step 2: Identify appropriate TIMES to be on a device.

For example, here are some times when it is NOT appropriate in our household to be texting, snapchatting, Facebooking,** playing an electronic game, emailing, etc:

● While they are doing homework. I am aware that most middle-schoolers chat while doing homework and are better at multitasking than us middle-agers. But the ability to FOCUS (you know, do just one thing at a time) is a core life-skill that more and more of our kids are failing to develop.

● During meals. There is usually nothing so important that it can’t wait 20 minutes. Daily family meals actually ARE important to kids’ development, and need to be accorded that importance.

● During bedtime routines. In the evening all devices can be set to their “do not disturb” setting and put in their chargers (iPhones and iPads can be set to do this automatically) a half hour before bedtime.

Why 30 minutes? Because the low-energy blue light emitted by our tablets and smartphones stimulates chemical messengers in our brains that make us more alert, and suppresses others (like melatonin) that help us fall asleep. Changing electronic reader settings to have a black background may help if your kids like to read before bed on a tablet or electronic reader.

Step 3: Make it clear what is private, and what is not.

Here is the biggest ever newsflash for most seventh and eighth graders: They are not entitled to privacy in their texts, emails, Facebook or Instagram posts, etc. The computers, phones, and tablets they use are, in fact, owned by their school or their parents.

As such, schools and parents are accountable for everything that happens on them. This means parents have a responsibility to control all of the passwords on the devices they own, and they have the right to read all posts created or received on said devices.

Why? Two reasons. First, because everything that kids do online is much more public and permanent than they typically think. If they want to write a private love note, they should use a pen and the US Mail. If they want to have a private conversation, they should do it in person. Make it clear what is private (their journal, for example, or their bedroom) and what is not: all online communications.

The second reason that middle-schoolers are not entitled to privacy online is that kids usually behave differently—and by that I mean better—when they know that they are being watched by adults. They are emboldened by independence, and once they do something risky or against the rules online and get away with it, they are likely to do it again.

So collect your middle-schooler’s passwords, and USE THEM. Log in and read their posts and texts. (See Step 4 if you see something you don’t like.) Insist that they accept any and all requests to connect via social media with relatives and trusted adults: This can be a part of the village that helps keep an eye on your kids.

Step 4: Teach kids to seek help when things go awry—and have a plan yourself as a parent when they do.

Inevitably, our kids will be spammed, flamed, and even bullied online or via email. And they may make major mistakes themselves that have deep consequences. First, be clear about what you see as bad online behavior, and establish clear consequences should that bad behavior come from your child.

Second, teach them that their how they respond when something goes wrong usually matters a lot, so their first response should be to get help from you or their school. Establish an “amnesty” policy with them so that should they realize they (or one of their close friends) has made a mistake, they feel they can seek adult help repairing any damage.

If you aren’t sure how you’ll respond when things go wrong, or what situations middle-schoolers typically deal with online that you might need to help them with, take the time to read the last couple of chapters of Steiner-Adair’s The Big Disconnect.

Step 5: Actively teach kids to use their devices and social media accounts as a force for good.

On balance these technologies are good. They represent progress, not the death and destruction of our youth. But kids need to be taught how to use these sophisticated tools to make them happier, and to make the world a better place. (For ideas about how to do that, see this post about How to use Facebook to Increase Your Happiness.)

Perhaps this goes without saying, but kids will do what we do, not what we tell them to do, so the most important part of this boot camp is probably modeling these behaviors. When we text our work colleagues during dinner, we teach our family that work is more important than them. When we check Facebook during a red light in the car, we teach our kids that boredom is intolerable, and that it is safe to be online while driving.

But here’s the thing: We can also model positive behavior. We can turn our devices off, and keep them off at significant moments in our day. When we are online, we can post inspiring quotations and send our friends gratitude emails. We can text pictures of the kids to grandparents. And these technologies can make us more efficient (rather than just more distracted), and that efficiency can buy us more time with our middle-schoolers—who are readying themselves to leave our nest at any moment.

 

*A tangent that will make me seem like a luddite, but I can’t help throwing in: My kids use old-fashioned alarm clocks to wake up in the morning. One of them uses the “clock-radio” that I got for Christmas one year when I was in grade school. This in and of itself is amazing: My kids can’t believe something electronic was ever designed to last more than a couple of years and is still operable 30 years later.

**Note: My kids are not allowed to have Facebook accounts until it is legal for them to do so, at age 13. They have tons of friends and are somehow surviving socially being the “only kids in their entire school” who don’t have Facebook accounts. (Perhaps because many of their friends actually don’t have active Facebook accounts.)

The kids and I are preparing to go to a friend’s party, where we’ll be wrapping presents for less-fortunate children, like those spending Christmas in one of our local hospitals. Also knowing that the Salvation Army near us has said it’s short on toys this year, I asked each of my kids to take stock of their toys or books and select a few in really good shape for us to donate. Choose five, I suggested—one for every new toy they hope to get for Christmas.

I thought this seemed like a nice holiday tradition for us to start, and I hoped they’d get the non-materialistic message. Molly, however, heard something else.

“WHAT!?” she screamed. “I’m only getting FIVE toys for Christmas?! I WANT MORE THAN THAT!” And then there were nearly tears.

Holy cow, you’d think that my kids would have escaped all the materialistic mayhem at this time of year, what with their preachy mother and zero exposure to toy advertising, as we don’t get any TV stations and don’t listen to radio Disney. Apparently not.

Paranoid that despite my best efforts I’m raising materialistic consumers, I decided to look into why some kids are so materialistic while others could care less about having all the latest stuff.

Turns out that there are two things that influence how materialistic kids are. The first is obvious: Consciously or not, we adults socialize kids to be materialistic. When parents—as well as peers and celebrities—model materialism, kids care more about wealth and luxury. So when parents are materialistic, kids are likely to follow suit. Same thing with television viewing: The more TV kids watch, the more likely they are to be materialistic.

The less obvious factor behind materialism has to do with the degree to which our needs are being filled. When people feel insecure or unfulfilled—because of poverty or because a basic psychological need like safety, competence, connectedness, or autonomy isn’t being met—they often to try to quell their insecurity by striving for wealth and a lot of fancy stuff. Because of this, relatively poor teenagers ironically tend to be more materialistic than wealthy ones. And less nurturing and more emotionally cold mothers tend to have more materialistic offspring.

So materialism and the behaviors that go with it—desiring and buying brand name clothes and luxury items—can be symptoms of insecurity and a coping strategy used to alleviate feelings of self-doubt or bolster a poor self-image. But if what kids are really seeking is greater happiness and fulfillment, materialism is a terrible coping method. At best, it will only provide short-term relief; in the long-run it is likely to actually deepen feelings of insecurity.

One way to curb kids’ materialism is to limit their exposure to advertising. Another way, it turns out, is to try to meet their emotional needs, not their material ones. On that front, the research I cover in this blog suggests some good places to start; practicing gratitude, for example, or by emotion coaching—even simply by eating dinner together.

Epilogue: After her initial complaints, Molly has really gotten into the Christmas spirit—especially after we stopped to think about what it might be like to be poor or in the hospital over the holidays. All she needed to do was to think about how she has the power to help other people and her mood improved dramatically—and her generous spirit has emerged.

Selected references:

Goldberg, M.E., and Gorn, G.J., Perrachio, L.A., Bamossy, G., “Understanding Materialism among Youth”, Journal of Consumer Psychology 13 (2003).

Kasser, T., The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

Rose, P. and DeJesus, S.P., “A Model of Motivated Cognition to Account for the Link between Self-Monitoring and Materialism”, Psychology & Marketing 24, no. 2 (2007).