As parents, we’ve ALL been there. We’ve tried to lovingly craft a meal that’s different and healthy for our kids only to be met with a resounding ‘ewwwww…” from across the table.
It can feel discouraging and sometimes even IMPOSSIBLE to get them to eat well – and be excited about it. But, don’t throw in the towel just yet. Mealtime doesn’t have to be a battle.
We’ve whipped up some Healthy Food Hacks your kids will love to eat as much as you’ll love preparing. (How’s that for a win-win?)
Two minutes after you see a blur of Oliver and Emma scream through the hallway, you hear a major crash in the living room. Immediately, you start berating the kids for running in the house. You head into the room, still yelling, only to find the cat sitting on the end table where the lamp once sat.
You turn around to find your kids staring at you with hurt faces and looks of disbelief that you blamed this on them.
We all make mistakes, and we need to teach our kids – by our own example – to own up to those faults, even when it’s really embarrassing for us.
Or even when we feel provoked by something our kids have done- like when we finally lose it after listening to our kids whine about something for 10 minutes.
As a parent, how do you feel about sleep? Is it something to look forward to? An activity you value like good food and regular exercise? A treat you’d like to have more of?
The answer is probably yes to all of the above–we grown ups welcome the chance to sleep!
Unfortunately, our kids often don’t get that message. The hurried, anxious, go-to-sleep aspect of bedtime comes through loud and clear, and without even realizing it, we send kids the message that sleep is negative, or even a consequence or a punishment.
Can I pour that juice for you?
Are you sure that’s the right answer?
Did you remember to put your homework in your backpack?
We ask our kids lots of questions each day in hopes of avoiding minor messes, stained shirts, and undesirable consequences for them. But mostly, we want to build their confidence.
And if we want to build their confidence, a logical follow-up question would be: Should I let my kids fail?
It’s a scary concept. As parents, we want to see our kids succeed in everything they do–whether it’s acing their science homework, making the varsity softball team, or simply making a sandwich without smearing peanut butter and jelly all over the kitchen.
To help our children realize success, we often inundate them with constant reminders, prodding questions, and superhero-like maneuvers to rescue them when we see a risk of failure. Or even worse, parents go to deceptive lengths to manufacture success for their children.
But does that hurt more than help?
We’re well-intentioned parents. We all want our kids to be happy and feel good about themselves and their accomplishments.
But when kids don’t experience what it’s like to fail, they miss the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and don’t learn how to improve for the future. Furthermore, they’ll begin to lack the confidence to take risks and won’t courageously face their problems head-on or roll with the punches.
Or, worse still, when we rescue our kids, they may come to believe things always work out–and we all know that’s simply not true.
According to child and adolescent psychologist Dr. Jennifer Hartstein, “kids who are constantly bailed out of problem situations will come to avoid situations where they might fail. As they grow older, that can increase anxiety and depression when they need to depend on themselves in tough situations.”
When we allow our kids to face failure, they learn to find creative solutions to their problems.
So, let’s ask again: Should I let my kids fail?
Making mistakes is a part of everyday life.
Mistakes make us human, not failures.
Mistakes are a chance to learn and will help us adapt to new and difficult situations as we encounter them throughout life.
In the long run, making mistakes and learning from them will give our kids MORE self-confidence and resiliency than when we swoop in to save them from failure.
While we don’t need to set our kids up for failure, here are 5 strategies to help kids face potential failure.
Let your kids know that risk-taking is an important value in your family. Share with your children how you’ve made mistakes and kept on trying.
Then, reinforce this belief with your actions. When your kid makes a mistake, don’t come down hard–encourage the effort, withhold judgment, and be an empathetic ear.
When risk-taking is a family value, kids will WANT to take on new challenges and experiences–whether it’s trying the scariest roller coaster in the park or signing up for calculus. You’ll also be more comfortable trying things outside your comfort zone–like picking up a hammer for Habitat for Humanity, learning a new language, or starting a new exercise program.
Difficult things are less difficult when done as a team–encourage your family to be the core catalyst for risk-taking, and you’ll be amazed how courageous you all become.
No matter what it is–tying our shoes, sinking free throws, or diagramming a sentence–we’re bound to have a few hiccups along the way as we learn. Make sure your kids know to expect some failures as they try new things, and let them know that it’s normal and expected. Emphasize the positives of learning from mistakes, and how miscues make us more resilient.
Wendy Flynn said, “Allow yourself to be a beginner, no one starts off being excellent.” When kids (and adults) truly believe this, it’s possible to see failures with rose-colored glasses. Instead of setbacks, failures become steps forward to life-long learning and success.
Some of the most successful people in the world, from business tycoons to all-star athletes, had to overcome major obstacles and failures throughout their careers–think Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, to name a few.
Share these stories with your children and pepper the conversation with personal stories of how you’ve improved following difficulties in your own life.
While we naturally want to step in when our kids fail, we need to avoid rescuing them. We can, however, support them and do a run-down of what happened (and what to try next time).
Try empathizing, saying, “I can tell that was hard for you. Now that you’ve been through this, what would you try next time?”
Don’t solve all the problems for them, but allow them to build up their critical thinking skills and develop a plan for the future.
Many times, parents feel just as much pressure for their kids to bring home a straight-A report card as the students do. School is one of the hardest places to let our kids fail, but it’s one of the best–and most important–places for them to take responsibility for their own success.
Learning to manage assignments and practices, dealing with teachers and classmates, and improving their work will all serve them well as they head to college and the workforce. This doesn’t mean you need to completely withdraw yourself from your kids’ academic responsibilities or extracurricular activities–just offer the right kind of support.
Be clear that your child’s academics are completely their responsibility, and give them the tools and resources to solve problems when they arise. Help them to recognize when they may be struggling and how to deal with it–talking to the teacher after class or studying with a friend, for example.
Run through how a meeting with a teacher to discuss a test grade might go–but make sure your student goes to the teacher, not you.
If the report card comes home with poor grades, let your kid experience the consequences of the situation to truly learn an important lesson. Encourage and support them in raising their grades, but make sure the responsibility to improve is in their hands.
As they earn grades that they’ve worked so hard to achieve, they’ll be proud of what they’ve done, and they’ll have a great work ethic and sense of responsibility to carry them through college and beyond.
Disappointment is a regular aspect of all our lives, so the answer to “should I let my kids fail?” is clear: giving our kids the tools they need to roll with the punches and bounce back from failure will be a lesson that will serve them the rest of their life.
As much as we’d like to, we can’t protect our kids forever, but we can give them the skills to be the best they can be. Early experiences with failure will help them make tough decisions as they grow older and ultimately guide their successes.
If you’d like to learn even more strategies to raise confident, capable and grateful children, I’d love for you to
JOIN ME FOR A FREE ONLINE CLASS!
I’ll teach you how to get your kids to listen–no nagging, yelling, or reminding required.
As always, I’m wishing you the best in your parenting journey. We are here if you need us!
As far as I know, no mom has ever tweeted:
Wet sheets again for Kyle. Whole family is exhausted. #WishBedwettingWouldStop
Toileting problems aren’t openly discussed in our culture. But in my pediatric urology clinic, they’re what I talk about all day long — with distressed parents and with kids who miss out on sleepovers and feel crummy that they can’t stay dry.
Most of these families have been led to believe that:
a) accidents and bedwetting are a normal part of childhood, and
b) they need to wait it out.
Both notions are wrong. Truly, most of what parents and even many pediatricians believe about toileting troubles is not based in fact.
Here’s the real poop…
Kids wet the bed because they’re deep sleepers or their “bladder hasn’t caught up to their brain” or for psychological,
hormonal, or hereditary reasons.
Reality: Most children wet the bed because their rectums are clogged with poop.
The hard, bulging poop mass presses against the bladder, compromising its capacity and irritating the nerves feeding it.
Bedwetting is not caused by deep sleep (here’s why), an underdeveloped bladder, hormones, or stress and is never, ever a child’s fault.
And while bedwetting can run in families, it’s the propensity toward constipation, not the bedwetting itself, that’s passed down.
The constipation-bedwetting link is well documented in the scientific literature and is confirmed daily in my practice. Problem
is, many doctors rely on inadequate methods of detecting constipation (they ask how often the child poops and press on the child’s abdomen). Other doctors don’t know, or don’t believe, that constipation is by far the leading cause of bedwetting.
Let’s talk evidence…
The most rigorous studies ever conducted on childhood wetting were led by Sean O’Regan, a kidney specialist drawn to the topic because his 5-year-old son wet the bed every night. A test called anorectal manometry showed his son’s rectum was so stretched by stool that the boy couldn’t detect a tangerine-sized air balloon inflated in his bottom. His rectum had lost the tone necessary to fully evacuate and the ability to sense the urge to poop. So, stool would just pile up.
Ultimately, O’Regan’s Canadian research team tested hundreds of children with enuresis (daytime and nighttime pee accidents) and encopresis (poop accidents). Virtually all were, like O’Regan’s son, stuffed with poop.
When their rectums were cleaned out with daily enemas, the wetting and soiling stopped.
In my clinic, we X-ray every child who presents with toileting problems (X-rays are easier to conduct and to undergo, than anorectal manometry) and measure the diameter of their rectums. A normal rectum is no wider than 3 cm.
Well over 90% of my wetting patients are shown to be extremely constipated, with rectums stretched far beyond normal. In our bedwetting study published in Global Pediatric Health , all the bedwetting patients had rectal diameter greater than 6 cm.
Like O’Regan’s patients back in the eighties, mine stop wetting once their rectums are clear and shrink back to normal size.
Yes, even the “deep sleepers” and the kids with “small bladders” or family history of bedwetting.
If your doctor attributes your child’s bedwetting or daytime accidents to any cause other than constipation, I would insist on an X-ray and measurement of rectal diameter.
Your child will “outgrow” bedwetting and accidents if you wait it out.
Reality: Many children do outgrow wetting; some come to my clinic as distressed 10th graders. Do you want to find out which category your child will fall into?
Many pediatricians won’t show the slightest concern about bedwetting until a child is at least 7 — and even then, many won’t take action. But research shows this is unwise — especially if a child wets the bed nightly and/or has daytime accidents.
In a study of more than 16,000 children, researchers concluded that the notion that bedwetting will spontaneously resolve with age “probably applies only to those with mild enuretic symptoms” — in other words, kids who wet the bed infrequently.
Children with daily symptoms are far likelier to become bedwetting adults. In fact, left untreated, a 9-year-old who wets the bed has about a 70% chance of becoming a 19-year-old who wets the bed.
My opinion: If your child is 4 or older and wetting the bed, especially if the child shows any of the red flags listed in our 12 Signs Your Child is Constipated chart, insist on an X-ray and aggressive treatment, discussed in myth #5.
Like bedwetting, daytime pee and poop accidents are not normal in toilet-trained children and are caused by holding stool. Sure, during the potty-training process kids will have accidents. But children who never quite graduate to fully toilet trained are not late bloomers; they’re constipated.
When children have trouble toilet training, it’s because their parents started the process too late.
Reality: It’s the children who train earliest who typically end up, a couple years later, with the most severe problems. Yes, this applies to those potty-training prodigies who “trained themselves” at 18 months!
Research at my clinic, published in Research and Reports in Urology, found that children who trained before age 2 had triple the risk of developing daytime wetting problems compared to children who trained between 2 and 3. The early trainers also had triple the risk of becoming constipated.
This isn’t to say I recommend potty training 26-month-olds. I don’t. Based on my experience, I don’t think children under 3 should be in charge of their own toileting habits any more than they should be in charge of the family budget. Sure, toddlers can be trained to use the toilet; that doesn’t mean they will respond to their bodies’ urges in a timely manner. Young children are more prone to holding.
I know many parents are under pressure to meet preschool potty training deadlines. My take: find a different preschool. The
risks of early or rushed toilet training are too great.
So why do so many late potty trainers pee and poop in their pants? Because these kids were constipated when potty training
began and were therefore destined for failure.
Kids who poop every day or have soft stools can’t be constipated.
Reality: Many chronically constipated kids poop daily, even multiple times a day, and many have loose stools.
How can that be? Well, a stretched-out rectum lacks the tone to evacuate fully, so many constipated kids need to poop often. And “fresh,” soft poop can ooze past a hard clog, so a constipated child may even appear to have diarrhea.
While it’s true that everyone who eats daily should poop daily, you can’t assume a child who poops every day is not constipated.
The “corn test” some doctors recommend — where your child eats corn and you note how long it takes for the bright yellow
kernels to show up in her stool — is worthless. Bowel transit time is just not a reliable indicator of constipation.
What does signal constipation in kids? Giant bowel movements are the reddest of red flags, as I explain to kids in Jane and the Giant Poop. Other signs: hard, formed poops that resemble rabbit pellets or logs; underwear “skid marks,” stomachache, chronic urinary tract infections, and, of course, accidents of any kind.
Many pediatricians fail to detect constipation because they follow the inadequate guidelines of the International Children’s Continence Society: They simply ask parents whether their children’s bowel movements are infrequent and if their stool consistency is hard.
You can fix a child’s chronic constipation with a high-fiber diet and some Miralax.
Reality: No amount of prunes will dislodge a large, hard mass of poop clogging a child’s rectum. Nor will daily,
small doses of Miralax do the job. Only when you take aggressive measures will a chronically, severely stretched rectum bounce back to normal size and recover permanently.
The regimen I recommend, the Modified O’Regan Protocol (M.O.P.), combines enemas with oral laxatives, such as Miralax, magnesium citrate, or lactulose. (Yes, enemas are safe for constipated children.)
Whatever method you use, it’s important for the rectum to be cleaned out on a daily basis for several weeks. This will allow it to shrink back to size, regain tone and sensation, stop encroaching upon the bladder, and stop aggravating the nearby nerves. A one-time clean-out is unlikely to accomplish all that.
Withholding stool is a deeply ingrained habit in children, so when half-measures are taken, relapse rates are high.
I used to recommend, as a reasonable alternative to enemas, a high-dose Miralax clean-out followed by a maintenance regimen of the laxative. But I no longer do, because my published research, and my experience with more than 2,000 patients, have demonstrated that laxatives are not nearly as effective enemas for resolving bedwetting or daytime accidents.
In one study, published in Global Pediatric Health, my clinic found that after three months, 30% of the patients treated with Miralax had stopped wetting, compared to 85% of the patients treated with M.O.P.
Yes, enemas are safe. They do not cause dependence, electrolyte imbalance, or psychological trauma, as I explain in The Physician’s Guide to M.O.P., a free download you can hand to any skeptical doctor.
Of course a high-fiber diet is important, for preventing constipation and a recurrence. Every day I see patients whose junked-out diets are exacerbating their problems or compromising recovery. Our highly processed diet is a major contributing factor to our nation’s potty-problem epidemic. (Early toilet training is another.)
However, the first order of business has to be breaking up the clog.
Why hasn’t your pediatrician mentioned all this? The link between constipation and urinary problems isn’t typically taught in medical schools, at least not in depth.
I didn’t learn this stuff myself until well after I’d started practicing — and after I’d steered hundreds of patients wrong. At no point in my urology training did anyone mention Sean O’Regan’s studies.
A couple years back, I tracked down Dr. O’Regan, now retired and living in Arizona. I asked him why he thought his research, compelling as it was, never made a splash. He told me: “Constipation is a distasteful subject. No one wants to talk about it.”
That’s as true today as it was back in Dr. O’Regan’s era.
Steve Hodges, M.D., is a pediatric urologist, an associate professor at Wake Forest University, and the father of three girls.
His books include
Bedwetting and Accidents Aren’t Your Fault,
Jane and the Giant Poop, and
The M.O.P. Book: A Guide to the Only Proven Way to STOP Bedwetting and Accidents, all available on amazon or at
BedwettingAndAccidents.com.
At any given time of the year, millions of kids participate in a wide spectrum of competitive extracurricular activities like sports, dance, cheerleading, debate, theater, and more.
When I think about that, I’m reminded of the words of the great American sportswriter, Grantland Rice, who penned, “For when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He marks, not that you won or lost, but how you played the game.”
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