Health Benefits of Kefir
June 29, 2007 | 7 Comments
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Do you drink kefir?
I discovered kefir when I was babysitting as a young girl for a family of Finns who always stocked it in their fridge. I thought it was the most delicious stuff! I never could find it anywhere except the health food coop across town until recent years, and now it’s available in most larger grocery stores. Apparently the benefits of kefir are more commonly known now that people are becoming hip to the benefits of probiotics.
I started drinking it a lot and giving it to my kids after learning some of the benefits of kefir.
Did you know that kefir has twice as much good bacteria as yogurt? Probiotics are very important for intestinal health and even for preventing food allergies. Probiotics even help the immune system work properly! Everything happens in the gut. If it’s out of whack, nothing works right.
You can drink it even if you’re lactose intolerant. Even some people with dairy allergies can tolerate kefir! My youngest nephew had trouble digesting dairy products but does great with kefir. It’s a great food for babies weaning from Mom’s milk as well as older toddlers and kids.
It’s high in calcium, protein and is easily digestible. Kefir is excellent for immune system health too.
When I was pregnant, it was sometimes the only thing my stomach could tolerate. I think it went a long way towards keeping the yeast beast away too (I know, thanks for sharing…but hey, it is a common problem for pregnant women!). I never had those problems when drinking kefir.
Kefir has been shown to reduce harmful cholesterol.
There are two brands that are readily available in most large groceries nowadays: Helios, which has a more tangy flavor that is similar to homemade kefir, and Lifeway brand which tastes more like yogurt.
You can also make your own very inexpensively and easily.
In fact it’s far easier than making yogurt. Basically, you obtain kefir grains (you can buy them online inexpensively or get some from a friend), add them to fresh organic milk, and leave it at room temperature for 12-24 hours. You’ve got kefir. 
I’ve heard great things about Body Ecology’s Kefir Starter Kit. It makes up to 42 gallons of Kefir. This starter kit isn’t exactly the same thing as obtaining your own kefir grains, which will live forever and can be used indefinitely.
Then to sweeten, add a drop of stevia or honey. Or make a smoothie with fresh or frozen fruit. It can also be used as a replacement for buttermilk in pancakes and other baked goods, or when making homemade salad dressing.
Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods
Give it a try. It’s super easy to make, and a very cheap health food.
Natural Moms Podcast #54
June 28, 2007 | 2 Comments
This week special guest Peggy O’Mara, author of 4 books on natural family living
Download mp3 link or read the transcript below.
Carrie Lauth: You are back with Carrie at Natural Moms Talk Radio and we are joined this week, and I’m so honored to be speaking with, Peggy O’Mara.
Peggy O’Mara: Hi Carrie. Great to be here. Thank you for asking me.
CL: Well Peggy, I’m sure that most of my listeners are familiar with you and your magazine, Mothering Magazine , has been around for over 30 years now.
PO: 31 years, ‘76 so yeah last year we celebrated our 30th anniversary and I know, it’s unbelievable.
CL: Wow! I can’t believe it. That’s wonderful.
PO: I know, I can’t either.
CL: Yeah, and you’re also the author of 4 books on having a baby naturally and natural family living , so I’m sure many of our listeners have either read your books or have seen Mothering or are subscribers.
PO: Well, I hope so. And let them know, in case they haven’t, to check out our website at mothering.com. It’s really a good place to find out more about us. We have discussion boards which are really fun for young moms, and all moms to be able to talk about issues with other moms.
CL: Yes, a very busy message forum. You guys just announced that your magazine is going digital so people can subscribe to the digital copy.
PO: Yeah. Some people freaked out, they thought we were going digital altogether. They were like, “Oh no, what about” , and we said, “Oh no, no. We’re just adding it”, you know as an extra thing, particularly for international readers and for people who really prefer that. It’s kind of a nice combo because if you have both, you could read your magazine in the leisure of your home, just take your time, and then mark those things you wanted to check about online and go to the digital version. And that allows you to click right through to everything directly from an ad or from a resource list. Do you know the end of the articles always have “For More Information…”
So it’s really– to me, I thought, as a researcher, I thought that would be the way I would use it. I want to probably do both of them even. We do have that online now available and to save trees you can also search it if you want to look for an article and you can send an article, print it out, and send it to a friend whereas, people tell us all the time they lend their magazines to a friend and they never see it again because they are so popular. So yeah so we have a digital version online.
CL: I think that’s great. That’s wonderful. Well, Peggy, I wanted to have you on the show to talk about what you’ve seen and experienced over the last 30 years. You were really on the cutting edge, if there is a cutting edge, of the natural parenting movement. You were doing it probably before there was a name “attachment parenting”.
PO: Yeah, that’s true exactly in fact I kind of find that amusing the different names it has, that just means more people are interested in it.
PO: When I started out as a parent, which was in 1974, my first child was born and like you, Carrie, I was a La Leche League leader. I became a La Leche League leader in 1975. I was down in southern New Mexico and I was part of what was called “back to the land” movement.
We were kind of the natural living pioneers that were disillusioned by the Vietnam War in the ‘60s and ‘70s and just wanted to make our own life that made sense to us, so we went back to the land. Some people went to communes, some people just had little farms, and so my husband and I had a little farm in southern New Mexico and we grew some of our own food, we canned, we had chickens and goats, and we wanted to live, you know, what we thought was a natural life, so then when it came time to have babies we wanted to figure that out too.
I actually didn’t start Mothering Magazine, it was founded by a woman named Adeline Evanston in southern Colorado in 1976. So when I had my babies and I started writing, I actually wrote an article In Defense of Motherhood because it was such an amazing experience to have a baby. No one had ever really told me that; they just told me the bad news, they hadn’t said how ecstatic I would feel, how wonderful I would feel, how empowered I would feel.
So I wrote an article about that that eventually ended up in Mothering, which I happened to see up in Albuquerque at about the same time that it was first published, moved up to Albuquerque, and eventually was just able to take over the magazine; just started making payments out of the magazine. You know, we didn’t have any money, just kind of took it over and grew from 3000 subscribers, 3000 total circulation in 1970 whatever in 1980 to like about 100,000 circulation now.
CL: Wow, that’s a great story. So how were things different back then and how are things different today for people who want to parent naturally, and really listen to their gut instinct?
PO: I think it’s a bit of a paradox. Back in the ‘70s it was not very visible in the culture. There was a very small group of people who were doing that. An example is cotton clothing. Which we wanted to find cotton clothing, you literally could hardly buy it. It was the age of synthetics, of those flame retardants that were put on all the children’s pajamas, so we would get cotton clothing for our kids at used clothing stores where we could find them and there were a few stores that had some things, like some of the Penney’s and Ward’s and stuff, but being able to find natural products was really difficult.
We made most of our own things. There weren’t like natural cosmetics or natural creams so you would kind of improvise. There literally was no natural food market place at that time. There were no products. We went to a co-op; we’d drive 200 miles to go to a co-op to get our food in Albuquerque because we lived, as I said, in southern New Mexico, so the availability of natural things for natural living was really not–there wasn’t much of that but on the other hand there was a real purity to it in that those folks that wanted to live that natural way were having to really make lifestyle choices.
What I see today is there’s more availability of natural product but whether people make a consciousness choice with that or not is not always so. In other words, back in the day, it kind of came with the whole lifestyle. Now you can kind of dip your hand into the natural marketplace, have some cool natural things, but not necessarily have a transformation of consciousness.
And to me, the heart of the natural living movement, is as you said, it’s learning to come back to yourself. To come back to your instincts and to trust yourself in a culture which tells you, not only, trust everybody else, all the experts, but also tells you you’re not good enough just the way you are.
You know, all the advertisements, you could be thinner, you could be richer, you could be something else, which is no way to raise a family. I mean, for me as a parent, I teach my kids, what I taught them is that people were more important than things, that they were more important than these ideas of how things should be.
Let me continue from that, which is to say, that the ideas of natural parenting have much more credibility in society now than they did. So, say an idea, like the family bed, which back in the ‘70s you didn’t tell anybody about, you didn’t even talk about. It was talked about maybe in La Leche meetings, among friends. It was a very private kind of a conversation. Well, I’ve been surprised to find that that issue has gotten so much publicity and public attention and as a result of that has become much more credible for a lot of people who might not otherwise have wanted to give it a try.
Same thing with vaccinations. Again, a very underground issue of just a certain kind of parents– Again coming from this back to the land movement, we want to eat natural foods, want to have natural clothing, natural products. Well, what about vaccinations? It just raises that question from the natural point of view. Like what about that, is that ok? I have to figure that out. I have to think about that.
That was a much smaller conversation than it is now. Now it’s become a much bigger national conversation and in so many ways both my own experience and the magazine, we’ve been a predictor of that. We’ve always been ahead of the times in terms of articulating issues to our readers because my point of view is a parent can’t wait 5-10 years to hear information; your kids will be grown up so I can’t sit on anything as a journalist that I hear about, even if it’s controversial. My responsibility is to let parents know the information that they need to know to make good decisions. That’s what we’re all about at Mothering. So in both those issues, Family Bed and Vaccinations, and all the issues of natural parenting it’s all about getting back-that’s what natural parenting is, your own natural instincts.
The things that people do in natural parenting are just sort of simple common sense things. They’re not big concepts necessarily. What people have always done throughout history: they’ve carried babies, nursed their babies, had babies without technology, safely. They question intervention in different areas of their children’s life, they try to live a simple life.
It’s really the oldest kind of parenting and that’s why, as I said earlier, I get amused by the names because it’s rediscovered and called something new but it’s really “human being” parenting. It’s really the parenting of our species. It’s what our species, human beings, need. I think people forget that we’re a part of the animal kingdom. We think we’re some kind of, like, superior beings and while we have wonderful characteristics as human beings, we are biologically part of the animal species and as such we have needs, babies have needs, and one of those needs is to be touched and carried around and to be held; be with their parents, be with their mothers, so those things have been true since the beginning of time.
CL: Yeah … until the parenting experts came along and told parents they couldn’t listen to their babies and themselves anymore.
PO: Yeah and I think those have always been there. When you look back-I’ve got some old publications from the ‘40s, Child Family Digest, which was kind of the first thing that started to talk about natural childbirth, it was kind of parallel with the beginning of La Leche League, and a lot of those folks were saying well, what about breastfeeding, what about natural childbirth. They brought Grantly Dick-Read over from England. At the time he was the first person to talk about natural childbirth. I think his book was published in the late’30s actually but when I look at those publications, there were the same struggles, the same questions, about babies in the nursery, rooming in, touching, always– I mean, the experts have been there for awhile, not just now, but they do seem to be more prevalent in our society and not only more prevalent– it’s not only the experts but it’s the solution.
Isn’t it interesting that after all the brouhaha about the family bed there’s all these products. You know, these new products that say watch out for the family bed. Read this instead, or– oh yeah, we just got this thing in the mail, discreet nursing breastfeeding and there was this picture of Maggie Gyllenhaal, this movie star who had just had a picture of her breastfeeding. It was just a beautiful breastfeeding picture but some people used it as an opportunity to criticize her and then say, oh, you should cover up with this and you-it’s like, look at this picture of Maggie and her baby look beautiful and this woman covered up looks like she has a tent over her or her baby.
Again implying in both cases that, yes, it’s ok, but you know, use this thing and you’ll be better and you know that’s crazy, you need to cover up. You need to be discreet… I mean, in social and public situations you want to be aware of other people, but you have the right to breastfeed in public. And most women are totally discreet about that and mostly when there’s any problems there it’s the other person’s problem.
CL: Well, your magazine has always been so refreshing. I get so irritated with most traditional parenting magazines! Someone sent me a gift subscription to one that I won’t name because someday they will probably sue me because I’m always talking about their dumb articles!
But there’s one recent one where they actually followed this Atlanta mom around the city as she went out with her 3 month old and snapped these photos of her nursing her baby very discreetly in all these different places with people stopping and watching. One young preteen boy actually came by and took a digital camera photo of her and I thought, you know, I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve been breastfeeding some kid for 9 years and I’ve only ever had 1 negative experience … and here this woman is, like, everybody is staring and pointing and laughing in this one day. And I’m thinking, I just don’t buy that. It just doesn’t look realistic to me.
PO: And they’re following her with a camera, too, right, so it is a bit of a fishbowl–
CL: That’s a good point. I didn’t even think of that. But I’m thinking, here they’re trying to do something good by talking about why are breastfeeding mothers made to feel like they’re doing something wrong by feeding in public, but at the same time they’re feeding into that scare tactic that if you breastfeed, this is what you’ll be facing and that’s why you need this pump or this formula.
PO: Exactly! And there’s so many things to say about that, but that’s exactly one of the things that would undermine a woman’s confidence in breastfeeding. She would feel, if she’s on the fence …”Well, maybe I don’t want to breastfeed. I don’t want to be in that situation…”
And yet, as you say, in my experience, I don’t even remember one time and I nursed in the ‘70s and early ‘80s in restaurants and all kinds of places and I don’t ever remember anything, one incident, in which people were critical so I think this is becoming a manufactured issue.
There have been a few incidents that have been publicized, that have been sensationalized, and were sensational in the media and probably an attempt to stir something up. But, in fact, there was a study done by the Office of Women’s Health as part of a Health and Human Services Department of the federal government and they found that 69% of people were just fine with breastfeeding in public and another study found that 90% of people were fine.
So it’s really not a problem and women shouldn’t think of it as a problem. It’s something that’s been sensationalized. But it’s also an emerging right for women so I think there’s a whole political aspect to it that is part of, is a good side to, all kinds of rights in society–the right to vote, civil rights, all those right have been fought for in society.
So while I think there’s not a big problem for individual mothers, there is an important movement to make sure that every state has the right kind of legislation for breastfeeding in public. Some have good legislation and others don’t. Even in those states that have good legislation, there’s sometimes not enforcement clauses. There’s not anything a mom can do if she is discriminated against in public. So it’s kind of a discrimination, isn’t it, and from that point of view the few cases that do happen should have protection.
In particular, in the work place, where a mom might be in a workplace situation where the people aren’t too educated about breastfeeding. In New Mexico this year we just passed a law that says an employer has to provide a place and a time for a woman to pump if she’s breastfeeding. But an employer might not know about that, they might not know how to do that or where to do that or that it’s important, so there’s a lot of education that’s necessary. But having laws like that begin the process to educate employers about the importance of breastfeeding and of retaining employees who might leave if they don’t have that opportunity. I think those are real important. That’s the other side of the coin on that so we do need to clarify some of our laws regarding breastfeeding in the sense of, again, civil rights and nondiscrimination.
CL: Well, what do you see for our future? Do you think things are getting easier or harder for people that want to parent naturally? What do you think is coming?
PO: I think it’s totally the future. I’m preparing a talk for an upcoming conference called The Sustainable Family: A Recipe for Optimism, so I think the natural family, the green family, the attachment family, the sustainable family-it’s all the same thing. It’s all the human intrinsic system that is based on the actual needs of the human being and also in terms of sustainability. People who are inclined to parent naturally also are inclined to have a lifestyle that is more sustainable.
So I kind of see the future in terms of possible climate change, in terms of those kind of upheavals as being– as the natural way of parenting, as being kind of a solution to that in the sense that, say for example, gas prices go up, transportation gets higher, food perhaps becomes more expensive. Because of that, the family that learns to rely on their local resources– their farmers’ market, their local farmers, their local businesses– is not going to see such an interruption as the family who’s dependent on food that comes from other places. So this is the whole conversation, I’m kind of going off on a big thing here but I think the natural way of life is really a survival position.
It’s kind of a minimalist position, you know. It’s a kind of a “small is beautiful” position. You’re saying to your kids …”You don’t need to have all that stuff. You don’t need all those fancy toys. Let’s play with the pots and pans, let’s play with the toilet paper roll.” You know, kids could care less about toys.
CL: Yeah or “Let’s go outside”.
PO: If we don’t inculcate them into the culture, if instead we give them really good human values of cooperation with each other, which is another thing, again, that is part of the natural family, the cooperative model rather than the domineering model. It’s kind of the old society that’s dying now …domination. Let’s dominate nature, let’s dominate each other, let’s dominate these countries over here.
What’s being born in our world is a whole new world view of cooperation, not without a lot of struggle, but the natural family is right on that wavelength of the future and so I think people that make those choices are less dependent on the culture, less dependent on the cultural myth, they’re more free of the opinions of others. More individuals, more authentic, that stream is the future. So I don’t know how, obviously, that will all play out but I’m quite convinced that that way of life, that way of thinking, is kind of survival of the fittest really on the bottom line.
CL: Yeah, that’s an interesting way of putting it. Because this generation of children that are being reared with these principles, are going to be the adults who are then again raising children and making decisions.
PO: And just one, one generation being raised free, being raised to think of themselves as inherently good. Huge. That will change the world.
It already is. This is the second generation now because we’ve got– you’re the age of my oldest daughter and I see now moms who are reading the magazine who are the daughters of previous readers of the magazine or previous La Leche League leaders, you know, kind of second generation and wow, that’s powerful.
CL: Yeah, that is that’s really cool. I know I sometimes meet women and my own mom and other women her own age and they say, “Well, this is what we did and we didn’t tell anybody and there wasn’t a support group“.
PO: There was no support group.
CL: But I talk to my mom all the time about how the way she raised me was very different from the way she raised my sister who is 7 years older than me because she had a different education and a different level of support.
She talks about how harshly she was criticized by some of her friends and people. You know, just strange things, like the fact that she let me run around naked. There was a question in one of her friend’s minds about that and it was very hurtful to her. But I have a completely different experience with some of the things I do with my children because I have the support and I know how to go out and find my tribe.
PO: Oh good. And you probably don’t have such conflicts about what to do because you have some history already with that right?
CL: Right; yeah. And being able to learn from her experience and listen to her as she talks about that, and seeing my friends and how their parenting helped or harmed them is a very powerful thing. A lot of my mother’s friends are really eating their words now!
PO: Yeah, yeah, and I– that’s interesting for me, having adult children. I have 4 children, they’re 24, 28, 30, 32 and they’re pretty happy about the way they were raised. That was a nice surprise for me as they got into adulthood and they became aware of how differently they had been raised than other people. They really, really appreciated it.
Spanking is a perfect example. I started out spanking my kids. I didn’t know any better and like your mom I got educated and, I don’t know if it’s the same, but I got more educated and learned new things and improved over time that I stopped spanking and really didn’t even punish them. I really just believed in cooperation and engaged in their cooperation in various ways. So as a result I think they never feel belittled or overpowered by me in that way and grew up to really appreciate that and were like, “Wow mom, that was really good, thanks”. I like how that happened. I didn’t realize at the time how good that was so I’m happy that I have a good, healthy relationship with my adult children and that’s a wonderful result of having a nonadversarial way of raising them.
CL: I think that is a natural result of that approach, I really do. I’ve seen that.
PO: In fact, it’s funny again, with the culture. The culture is so distrusting of closeness and I’ve got older kids that I’m really close with and my kids will say, my daughters will say, “It’s ok that we’re so close, you know”. We know it is but the culture says, “Get away, get away from those kids; send them off somewhere”. Again, the nuclear family, the whole human species is, is raising children in community. Human beings have always raised children in community, they’ve always been part of an extended family and this nuclear family thing we have is just such a new experiment.
CL: And it’s a very unhealthy one, I believe, especially for the mother because it’s a recipe for post partum depression and burnout.
PO: Exactly.
CL: Look at all those moms that we see in the news. That’s what’s happening with them, you know.
CL: Well, do you think the internet has been a boost for people who are parenting differently?
PO: A huge boost. You know, when I was a new mom I had 2 thoughts when I had my 2 babies my first 2 are 18 months apart and I was pregnant with my 3rd by the time my 2nd was 2. So I had 3 kids under 5 … I had my kids pretty close together. When I had my first 2, I lived in southern New Mexico, as I had mentioned, like out of town a little bit, we had an 8 party line. It was 8 people sharing the same phone line so I’ve gone from an 8 party line as a new mom, to the internet.
I couldn’t even imagine the thrill of having that kind of support as a new mom when I was so isolated. Not only were my ideas not what everyone else was doing but I was so isolated, just physically isolated. I went to La Leche League meetings and saw my friends, but it was nothing compared to what it seems like the sense of community that moms can have on the internet.
You can find information right away about something which is how I got started, by just cutting out articles putting them in file folders in a file cabinet for my friends. Different things that would come up, I was just always interested in researching health issues.
To go from that to the internet where you can just find anything right away and where you can have this community. As I’ve mentioned, our discussion boards at mothering.com … we now have 85,000 on our discussion boards. We have more members of our discussion boards than we have subscribers to the magazine!
It’s such a rich place to get support for special situations. All kind of conversations there from all kinds of different parents from all different points of view. And then there are special things that come up or crises that come up or emergencies.
There’s a real sense of community there and as you mentioned earlier, this whole idea of finding your tribe, which was an article we published years ago about this whole idea of how do you find those people like you and get the support that you need because it’s so important.
Mothering can print really good articles but you really often need a community to help you to have the courage to change. You may want to, you may think, geez that sounds good. I want to try it, but if you’re the only one, it’s kind of hard. Most people are going to want and need to have some other people that are like them so they don’t feel like they’re crazy.
It’s like what I say: when you go to a conference you really go there to see other people, you know. Ok, its true we’re all in this together, we’re all doing this thing, and we’re good, you know?
PO: So, the internet has been huge and the internet has democratized information in a way that nothing has before in the sense that most everyone has access to the internet in some way. I mean certainly computers, the cost of that, but you could go to the library. It’s really made the issues of people that we might never have heard of more available to us because of everyone, or most everyone, having access to the internet.
We’ve gone from, as a business, our first machine was a fax machine which, gosh, that’s when Nora, my youngest, was a baby and I was pregnant with her. And I would always turn away from it when I was faxing. I would think what’s wrong with this machine it’s going to give me something, you know!.
And then we got computers and we got–no that was a copying machine, that was just a copier. We got a fax machine in the ‘90s so just our business going from the days, just my history with the business from the days when I just used a typewriter in the days where we had to carbon copy everything, to the days of the internet and computer it has just made our business easier and our ability to reach people so much stronger.
CL: Yeah, that’s very cool. Well, Peggy, thank you so much for joining us this week. It was really fun chatting with you.
PO: Oh, you’re welcome, Carrie.
CL: Yeah. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time and this was really great.
PO: Well, let me know another time we can talk other issues if something comes up in particular I’d love to chat with you again.
CL: Yeah, absolutely, me too.
If you would like to subscribe to Mothering, click here: Mothering Magazine
You can also find articles from Mothering magazine here.
U Pick Farms - Local, Organic Produce on the Cheap
June 27, 2007 | 3 Comments
Searching out local “u pick” farms is another way to eat more local and organic produce without blowing your grocery budget. Not all of them are organic farms, be sure to ask… but even if they aren’t, eating local (even if it isn’t organic) has its advantages nonetheless.
Today me, the kids and some friends headed out to Adams Farm in Fayetteville, GA. In less than one hour just my crew picked about 9 pounds of blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and blackberries, as you can see in the pictures. I can see why farm families were usually large… little kids are great farm hands.
They had a great time picking, even the baby, who is lower to the ground which meant less squatting for Mom. And she did pop a few in her mouth despite my best efforts to keep her from it. 
If you’re in the US, you can search this site for local you pick farms: Pick Your Own It’s fun going berry picking, and also educational for the kiddies - one hour in and these city slickers were HOT, TIRED and ready to head to the nearest air conditioned environment! I think doing this really makes you appreciate what life is like for farmers, and the work and love that goes into the food that makes it to our table. Actually, once I got in the groove, I really started to enjoy myself. It was a kind of meditation. I was in the zone. I just wanted some water and a fan. LOL
Dads And Anger
June 23, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I got permission from Mark Brandenburg to reprint this article here. If you have a Dad in your life who has a problem with anger, maybe you can forward it to him. 
“Get up to your room!” Frank shouted at his kids. The two of them sprinted out of the living room and up the stairs.
They’d been lucky this time. Although they’d been terrified by his screaming, they were far enough away to avoid the blows that sometimes followed. And as they huddled together in their room, they hoped they wouldn’t hear the footsteps coming up the stairs. For if they did, there would be more anger, and more fear.
Sadly, this scenario plays itself out in millions of households across the country. For centuries, men have learned to use anger in an attempt to control their kids. And while it does have short-term results, the long term damage is tremendous, both for the children and for the fathers who carry this anger.
In fact, a 2002 study on men’s anger at Johns Hopkins University (Archives of Internal Medicine 2002; 162: 901-906) showed just how damaging anger can be. The study followed 1,055 men for an average of 36 years following their schooling. It examined the risk of premature and total cardiovascular disease associated with anger responses to stress during early adult life.
The results of this study were that young men who quickly react to stress with anger have three times the normal risk of developing premature heart disease. Also, these men were five times more likely than men who were calmer to have an early heart attack, even if they didn’t have a family history of heart disease.
While it has been clear for a long time that anger damages relationships, the health problems associated with anger have never been made as clear. Anger not only hurts your relationships, it can kill you.
Anger like Frank’s damages relationships more than any other single factor. It hurts loved ones, and creates mistrust. It has caused his own children to fear him. And it prevents him from getting underneath his anger to experience his own fears. For underneath all of his anger is fear. Fear of not being able to control his kids, or even a fear of failing completely in his life.
Frank, like many other men, keeps this a very private matter. A sense of failure and shame surrounds men who struggle with their temper. These feelings cause these angry outbursts to “stay in the family,” causing the cycle to stay the same, or even worsen. And the simple truth about men improving their anger is that it’s a matter of choice. It’s a choice to continue to alienate loved ones, and it’s a choice to take responsibility for your anger.
Here are some options for men seeking to improve themselves:
- You are the only one who can make you angry—accept this responsibility and you’ve a come a long way towards getting better.
- Write down the irrational thinking that contributes to your anger (people should always treat me kindly, etc.). Ask yourself where you developed this thinking and give yourself some alternative thoughts that are more productive.
- Become more aware of tuning into your body when you begin to become angry. Deep diaphragmatic breathing is a great way to do this. The idea is to focus on you, not the “target” of the anger.
- Prepare yourself before a stressful situation and “practice” your new, calmer response to it. Be aware that it might take some time to feel comfortable with this new response.
- Find the stressors in your life that might be contributing to your anger—do what you can to reduce these stressors, and add some self-care into your life.
When talking about health hazards for men, anger needs to be included alongside the other lifestyle factors that can shorten men’s lives. Managing your anger is a learnable skill, and it benefits everyone around you.
And just as importantly, it may save your life.
Warmly,
Mark Brandenburg
Natural Moms Podcast #53
June 22, 2007 | Leave a Comment
This week special guest Jan Hunt, author of Parenting From The Heart joins us. Jan is a parenting counselor and director of the Natural Child Project.
Download mp3 link HERE. Or read the transcript below.
Carrie: You’re back with Carrie at Natural Moms Talk Radio and this week I’m honored to be joined by a very special guest, Jan Hunt, who is the author of The Natural Child - Parenting From the Heart
Jan: Hi. Thank you for having me.
Carrie: Well, this is a real treat. I think most of our listeners have probably heard of you and your books and your site, The Natural Child. You’re the director of The Natural Child Project and also an editorial assistant of Empathic Parenting. So, that gives us an idea of what you’re all about. I think that your book is required reading for all new parents. It’s really great. I enjoyed it so much. Would you like to tell us a little bit more about what made you decide when you had your son, your young son, to embrace this style of parenting? What influenced you?
Jan: A lot of things. We didn’t know very much about parenting. I have only an older brother. I didn’t have younger siblings. I didn’t do very much babysitting and I was pretty naïve about childcare. I remember thinking when I was pregnant how scary it was to think that I would have to use punishment because that was kind of a given in our society and knowing at the same time that I wouldn’t want to do that, but I didn’t know what else to do.
Then I was very lucky to find the book The Family Bed by Tine Thevenin. When I read the first chapter, really all it took was the first chapter, it completely turned my thinking around. It reassured me that I could follow my heart and that that would be the best thing for my child. It was such a relief to realize that and to realize that I didn’t have to use punishment and that I wouldn’t be a wimp for not using punishment. In fact, I would be doing the very best thing for him.
That chapter made such a huge difference for me and my husband that we’ve put that up on our website, that first chapter. That was the first influence that we had. And then I heard about La Leche League and eventually got into going into La Leche League meetings when Jason was just over 1 year old. They were surprised that we were still nursing without their help! I never did become a League leader, but I attended probably 50 meetings at least and that was extremely helpful. They covered not only everything about breastfeeding but they also were very reassuring about this type of empathic parenting.
Carrie: Well, you don’t hear that phrase emphatic parenting that much anymore. I used to hear that a lot several years ago, but mostly you hear about attachment parenting nowadays. It’s definitely a good thing that there are organizations like Attachment Parenting International and like you said, La Leche League, because there’s a place for parents who instinctively felt that they wanted to raise their children like this to find other parents that have the same beliefs.
Jan: Yes, it’s very, very helpful to have that kind of support because it isn’t in our society. If you think about it for most of human existence, we live in a community of people, all of whom knew our child from birth and could give us the kind of support that we needed if we were tired or just wanted a break. There were people around who would have also been attached to our child.
Now, we’ve got about as far from that as we can, where we’re living in very isolated situations and often moms are home with their children without any support at all. They often live miles from their own parents or even if the parents are nearby, they may not have the same approach.
So I’m always recommending support groups to my clients, La Leche League, Holistic Moms Network, API, like that, and if there isn’t one locally, I always encourage them to consider starting one of their own and some of my clients have been really surprised when they did that thinking that they pretty much knew their community and didn’t think it would be like-minded people around, but when they advertised the meetings, they were amazed to see who showed up. There really are supportive people maybe closer than we think.
Carrie: Yeah, they tend to come out of the woodwork! Well, your book raises what I think is such an important question and that is, why is it that as a society we always think that children are so very, very different from adults and what that means is, why do we think that the way to help children behave better is by making them feel terrible. How would an adult feel if they were shamed or screamed at or hit, etc.? Why do we think that way in our culture? Have you come to any conclusions about that?
Jan: It’s really difficult to know exactly how that started. I think probably the best resource for that would be Robin Grille’s “Parenting for a Peaceful World.” We carry that in our shop on our website. He has done an enormous amount of research into just that question and really covered the grounds as well as anyone. I think you have already interviewed Robin about his book. There are just so many factors. There’s not just one factor. There’s just so many factors about how do we come upon such a philosophy and where does it really start? There are just so many different routes that that has taken.
I’m encouraged though because there are just more and more people who are becoming aware of this — I don’t want to say new age, I’d say age old philosophy of treating children like the human beings that they are and I think this is growing. The more we talk about it, the more books there are about it and of course the Internet has been a huge influence I think for helping people to realize that there are other approaches that they can take. It’s sad if you look at it from one perspective and think how far we’ve come from the ideal way of looking at children, but at the same time I’m encouraged that I think we’re going in the right direction.
Carrie: Yeah, I think so. Now, Jan, you offer parenting coaching. What does that look like? What is your typical client who calls you? What kind of questions do they have and what does a coaching session look like?
Jan: It’s usually set up to our website. I have a counseling page there at naturalchild.org and it’s nearly always by telephone, occasionally for various reasons I’ll do an email session. I prefer telephone just because I can cover so much more in the same amount of time. I’m not sure if there really is a typical situation, but many of my clients are young mothers with small children and they know that they want to do something different about a certain type of behavior that’s happening. They want to understand it better. They want to look at it from the child’s point of view. They want alternatives to punishment, but they just don’t know what that would look like.
So, usually it’s about an hour and I’ll have the person explain to me what’s going on and what they’ve already tried and then I’ll do what I can to help them look at it from the child’s point of view to encourage them to have compassion for the child and give them some real practical advice. I’m much more practical than theoretical in my counseling sessions. I give lots of suggestions of ways that they can respond to particular kinds of behaviors.
Carrie: Do you think that sometimes parents may get harder than it needs to be because they’re trying so hard to do things right and by the book instead of really listening to that voice within?
Jan: Yes, I’ll definitely — not intentionally of course, but whenever a parent responds to a child in a less than compassionate way, it’s going to make things worse, so you can’t get into what I call a downward spiral and the good news is, as I tell my clients, that you can just as easily set up an upward spiral where you start to listen with an open heart, with compassion.
The child will pick up on that immediately and will respond in kind. It’s not as dire as it seems and usually just takes about an hour for the parent to start to realize that it’s not going to be such a difficult process after all. It’s not going to take them years to turn around their philosophy or their thinking or to gain the kind of knowledge that they might need. We all have the knowledge. It’s in our heart. We know how much we love our child and if we can go from there, if we can use that as a starting point, then we can go on to this more encouraging, more positive relationship.
Carrie: Yes, that’s very true and we’ve all been children… and if we just think for a moment about what it felt like to be a child, I know that for me personally I remember just being so frustrated with myself because I was clumsy and would spill things all the time. The funny thing is, in my family, I break more dishes than any of my children ever do. I’m still a klutz.
Jan: I know the feeling.
Carrie: But I’ve never shamed a child or punished a child because they broke something and I think it is because I so keenly remember my own shame about that and interestingly my parents did not shame me for breaking things or destroying things, but that was coming from inside of me.
Jan: Well, not necessarily inside of you, not only that, but it’s also in our culture. The belief that we have about parenting and the belief that a child may have about their own character may not come from the parents. It may come from a TV show or a movie or something they’ve overheard the neighbor say.
That’s one thing that I always try to establish in my sessions is that the parents don’t need to carry everything on their shoulders. They don’t need to feel that they are completely responsible for something that isn’t going very well.
It’s so much of the harm that comes in families is really because we’re immersed in a culture that really doesn’t trust children and doesn’t look at children as human beings. We can take that on ourselves where our children can hear it or be criticized by someone else. There are all of those factors, but the more a parent can do to alleviate that, the better.
I’ve just actually came across an article. I’m going to try to get permission for it for our website. The parent was talking about “do - overs” that she was trying to establish for herself, a way to undo some of the mistakes that she made with her children. One of the examples she used was spilling. She became quite upset when her daughter spilled a cup of juice and she caught herself afterwards and after I think not being very helpful with it. She caught herself and said, “Okay, I want a do over,” and she gave her another cup and said, “Spill this.” I really like that.
I like that idea that parents don’t have to live with mistakes forever. They can ask a child to undo something, to be creative and imaginative and fun ways of making amends and of letting the child know that you’re not happy with your own responses and this is something very, very different of course from previous generations where parents felt that they had to be the authority, that they couldn’t show any kind of weakness to the child, but this is going the other way. There is another website called Playful Parenting, which gets into this kind of playful attitude that children who are always playing, it’s so wonderful, and they can really be responsive to playfulness on the part of the parent.
Carrie: Parenting is so important, but it doesn’t have to be serious all the time.
Jan: Yeah, exactly.
Carrie: Well, Jan, you have a new book that’s coming out shortly, ” The Unschooling Unmanual.”. Tell us more about that.
Jan: Yes, I’m really excited about this. This is actually a compilation book and most of it was written by a woman in Europe. She lives in Holland. It’s wonderful, wonderful writing. It’s just very, very clear. She really knows exactly the right approach to take to all of the typical questions that people have about unschooling and we’ve gotten permission to use that writing. That will be the majority of the book and it will also include two chapters from Rue Kream’s wonderful book, “Parenting a Free Child,” and two or three of my own articles. We’re hoping to have this out by the end of July.
Carrie: Oh, that sounds fun. Tell us a little bit about your other book too, “A Gift for Baby.”
Jan: “A Gift for Baby” is a children’s picture book. My idea was to write a book that would give the same as my parenting book, as “The Natural Child,” but for the next generation, so try to reach future parents while they are still children or as early as possible. It’s a fun picture book. I was very fortunate to find a wonderful illustrator. The book took me about five minutes to write. I was taking a shower and the whole book just kind of popped into my mind. It took me about five years to find the right illustrator. I found Sunny Rosanbalm who did a really beautiful job. It’s a fun children’s picture book. It has kind of a twist ending to it. At the same time, it also illustrates all of the kinds of parenting recommendations that I make, holding and nursing and all of the attachment parenting recommendations are shown in that, in the illustration.
Carrie: Well, one of my favorite things about your book, “The Natural Child,” is the article about the hidden messages that we give our children and to me, it’s so clear, the connection that you’ve made here between various behaviors that come up and the responses of the parent and what the child is picking up about that, what the child is thinking, how they are perceiving that situation, and then the problem that we’ve created for ourselves when that child is a teenager or an adult. For our audience that has not read the book, do you want to explain a little bit more about that?
Jan: Yes, that’s interesting. That one article was one that I didn’t really that much, but I’ve had so much feedback on. Apparently, it has really reached a lot of people, which is wonderful.
I was just trying to get across that everything a child does, they do for a reason, and the reason in almost every case is that they have an unmet need. One of the examples that I use in my counseling is the emotional tank. This was in a parenting book that I’ve read some years ago and the author was comparing children to cars. He said that if we jump into our car and we want to go 100 miles, but we noticed that we’re almost out of gas, we don’t get mad at the car, we don’t just get upset. We just realize that the car has a need that needs to be met and we go and get gas and then we can go our 100 miles. He was giving this analogy that a child is similar in that the child has an emotional tank and if that emotional tank isn’t filled, then they can’t go their 100 miles.
The nice thing is that what fills the emotional tank, unlike the car’s tank, what fills the emotional tank doesn’t cost anything. The three things that he listed, and I agree, that fills that tank are eye contact, gentle touching and undivided attention. So, if a parent is really unsure what’s going on, at least what they can do is think, “Oh, this child has some unmet needs. How can I help? I can give eye contact, gentle touching and undivided attention.”
After I read that book, I started doing that beforehand. I started doing that in the very beginning of the day and just before I was about to make dinner so that Jason could go his 100 miles instead of having to stop every 5 miles and put in another gallon of gas, instead of having to try to catch up all day long. That can be exhausting where the child feels less and less that their needs are being met. They’re wondering if they’re ever going to be met so they get kind of frantic or they get clingy and the parent is always trying to catch up just like we would if we were giving the car just a gallon at a time, but if we fill up that emotional tank early first, then we can prevent and prevention is where it’s all at, that’s what I’m always trying to help parents to do is to prevent the kinds of behaviors that are challenging for them. It’s just so much easier if it just never happens, then they don’t even have to think about punishment or how to handle it because it just won’t happen.
Carrie: Yeah, that’s a very good point. Well, another thing I appreciated about your book was the section about advocating for children. It seems like every, I don’t know, a few weeks or a few months on a parenting message forum, I’ll see something like a parent asking, “I think I saw something inappropriate. I think the child is being abused,” or “I saw something in the grocery store with this mother who is just being very verbally abusive to her child. What should I have done?”
Jan: Yeah, exactly. It’s a very common question. It kind of relates back to what I said earlier about the fact that we’re no longer living in tribes and communities. We have strangers. When a stone age tribe is discovered, very often the anthropologist or whoever was visiting could be the very first stranger that those people had ever seen and it seems so unusual and strange to us to hear that kind of story, but as I said before, for most of our existence, that’s what we had. There were no strangers. We all knew each other ever since birth.
So, we have to remember that this is a very, very recent kind of thing that we’re doing here, very recent experiments and all the new kinds of things that are happening in our culture make it so difficult because we don’t know these people and so it’s very, very difficult to intervene when you see a stranger doing something that you don’t approve of. It’s very difficult to do that without possibly alienating her even further and causing her to be even harsher with her child. At the same time, we know that this child deserves better treatment and if we walk past, that’s giving the message of acceptance and approval. So, it’s a real dilemma. I think our website is probably the only one that has several articles on this subject. This is actually our next book. We’re going to do a book or a booklet on intervention. “Standing Up For Children in Public” is what it will be called.
Carrie: Well, I know for a fact that what you say here is true about standing up for that child can have a very significant impact on them because I’ve know a couple of people who are adults now who did suffer abusive treatment at the hands of their parents, and they said that the fact that there was one person in their life who witnessed that and pointed it out, that enabled them to know, “Okay, this is not normal. This is not the way that a family should be even though it’s what I have been used to my whole life.” That one experience, that one person was like something they can hold on to.
Jan: Yes, they can make a huge, huge difference and that’s why I encourage people to intervene as best as they can even if they might make a mistake, even if they antagonize the parent. It still will make a huge difference. It can make a huge difference to that child.
In fact, I have a friend who had a very, very difficult childhood and she told me about an experience that she had when she was sitting in the backseat of the car. Her mom was in the front seat. They were parked in a shopping center parking lot. She doesn’t remember what was happening with her mom, but she was crying in the backseat and her mother was, she said as usual, ignoring her crying. Would you believe that three teenage girls came by the car and started yelling at the mom for ignoring her child? Even though that’s not maybe the ideal kind of intervention, but it made such a huge lifelong impression on my friend. She said it was the first time that she ever even considered that her mother was wrong. Until that moment, she was taking in her mother’s blame and criticism internally and thought that she was completely responsible for every problem they were having. That just made a huge, huge difference.
So, yeah, even if we do make mistakes, it can still have a very great benefit for the child. The book will of course try to help parents do this in the most kind way. There are still lots of situations that I haven’t figured out yet. Lots of times when I haven’t intervened myself just because I can’t think at the time, it’s very difficult because it’s a stressful situation and when we’re stressed, we don’t think very clearly. That’s in fact why we’re wanting to write this. It will probably just be a little booklet that maybe people can carry with them with reminders or ideas about what they can say that will be maybe the most tactful thing and the most helpful thing.
Carrie: Oh, that’s great. There is definitely a need for that. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Jan.
Jan: You’re welcome. I enjoyed it.
Exciting Research on Breastfeeding and HIV/AIDS
June 22, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I’ve been interested in this issue for some time. Do HIV positive Moms harm or help their children by breastfeeding? Marian Thompson, one of the cofounders of La Leche League International, founded Another Look to take … well, another look at the research.
Here is a recent finding: Breastfeeding alone cuts the HIV risk. Mixed feeding, meaning partial breastfeeding and partial formula feeding, increases the risk because of the damage formula does to the baby’s gastrointestinal system which cause tiny “cuts” in the baby’s bowel, increasing the likelihood of HIV transmission.
Interestingly, the current party line here in the US is for HIV positive women to formula feed. But in developing lands, where formula is prohibitively expensive, and clean water to mix it with scarce or difficult to obtain, this is not so.
Thankful Thursday
June 21, 2007 | 4 Comments
This week I’m so thankful that I can stay home and earn money while I raise my babies.
I’m thankful that my car runs.
I’m thankful for the free Starbucks coffee at Barnes and Noble’s Entrepreneur Breakfast this morning.
I’m thankful that last Monday I could help a roomful of women learn how to work from home.
I’m thankful for the Itch-Aide all natural itch cream that helps my kids sleep when they have ant bites!
What about you?
Skip The Baby Food
June 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Interesting thing I came across: Gill Rapley, deputy director of Unicef’s UK Baby Friendly Initiative said feeding babies pureed baby foods could cause health problems later in life. She has spent 25 years as a health advisor there and is convinced that spoon feeding leads to problems like constipation, overfeeding and later on, texture pickiness. She also blames the food industry for convincing parents that they should give children pureed food. Hmm… would that be the same food industry that convinces Moms that their breastmilk is inadequate?
Now, I always thought that the reason I never did “baby food” was because I was lazy to make my own and too cheap to buy jarred baby food. I even wrote an article about the easy (meaning, lazy. Ahem) way to make your own baby food.
I also hated that whole shovel it in, watch them spit it out, wipe the chin, shovel again, etc… I just handed the kid a banana or some soft cooked peas or carrot or avocado or whatever when he/she was 8 months or so. At that time they have a pincer grasp and can pick up a teeny bit of solid food from the highchair tray.
Worked for 4 kids. They’re still alive, well fed … and none of them are picky!
Birth as a Rite of Passage… Discuss :)
June 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment
A previous guest on Natural Moms Talk Radio, Marcie Macari is hosting a live chat sponsored by Mothering.com tomorrow, June 20th at 9PM EST.
She wanted to invite YOU, as a friend of NMTR, to participate in the discussion on Birth as a Spiritual Rite of Passage, and the concepts in her book:”She Births: A Modern Woman’s Guidebook For an Ancient Rite of Passage”.
Marcie is going to mention a “secret word” one time during the chat. Remember that word, and you will receive a Buy 1 Get 1 offer on her site: http://www.bloominbellysoaps.com/, good for 3 individual items of your choice! (Excluding giftboxes and Blessingway Cakes.)
That means you could get 6 items for the price of 3! Just attend the chat, watch for the secret word, and email Marcie at: bloominbellysoaps@gmail.com . For more information on how to attend the chat, please visit: http://www.mothering.com/interactive/live_chat/live-chat.html .
Discounts for Natural Products Online
June 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment
If you like to buy natural products online, here are a couple of sales and coupon codes for you:
ADDITIONAL 20% off any order at Native Remedies or PetAlive.com. Native Remedies offers a large selection of natural health products. As long as you place your order by June 30, 2007 you will get 20% off the entire order.
To receive the discount special offer, simply enter natural20 (no spaces) in the Customer Code field in the shopping cart, and then press the Submit button (don’t forget to press SUBMIT!), and you will receive the discount.
The Body Shop sale - summer clearance with 75% off many items. They offer a wide variety of skin care, makeup and products for the home.
