Parenting & Schools

Today is the day that one of our authors, Scott Crabtree, announces the release of his new card game, Choose Happiness@Work, aimed to stimulate group exploration about ways to become happier at work.

The 5i Change (?) Agent Model characterizes recurring themes in the ways that people use positive psychology in their livelihoods. While they may be teachers or coaches or therapists or doctors or dancers, what they actually do with positive psychology can be described by 5 verbs. Knowing which of these verbs characterize your own approach helps you take steps to augment your impact on the world.

Perhaps I don’t need to fear the world I leave behind for my children. Perhaps technology is paving the way for them to come together as a common humanity.

“If you could do only one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?” This question, posed by Greg McKeown stopped me in my tracks. Applying it specifically to work, I wondered what one thing I could happily do for the rest of my life. The answer, strangely enough, arrived in my head as a diagram.

This kind of selfless love requires that we sit with our uncertainties and fears and yet assure our children that they are not alone. It requires that we refrain from fixing the cracks and fissures in the urge of making their lives perfect. It requires that we contain our impulses and desires and live in the hope of creating something far more beautiful than perfection.

Two years ago, my two-year-old son suffered a severe scald burn covering 16 percent of his body. My unborn baby had a birth defect needing attention. In the year-and-a-half that followed, I saw my boys through four surgeries. I went through two surgeries myself after a complicated second trimester pregnancy loss. Seven particular tools from positive psychology helped me come through some very difficullt times. I believe I have experienced posttraumatic growth following these adversities, and Roepke and Seligman’s recent article helps me see why.

Sometimes our children do something totally unexpected and unacceptable. Then we try desperately to make sense of what happened by playing it over and over in our minds. We can hope for particular outcomes, but with that hope comes fear that it will not be so. Is the road to fearlessness found by giving up hope and letting go of dreams? But not to dream of their futures is an intolerable posture.

As these thoughts and images flashed through my mind, I had a sudden surge of humility. The awareness that I did not have all the answers grounded me in my own limitations. The realization that she was not asking for my solutions but simply talking out loud to find her own solution made me question my role as a parent.

We all have our own little bubbles of fear resting deep within us. Our relationships with our children take us back to these bubbles. I am beginning to recognize my reactions as based on these fears and to forgive myself for being human, so I can embark on the journey to change. I am reconnecting to my own goodness and beginning to embrace the parts of me that want to love unconditionally and accept non-judgmentally.

As a mother, I knew what was best for him, I told myself. I could not trust his teenage judgment. But something deeper prompted me to question my reasoning. Did I fear knowing his goals in case they were different from mine? Was I running away from the possibility that his ideals of success would not measure up to societal standards? Would I be able to face it if they didn’t? I slowly began to see myself hiding behind the guise of motherhood.

Yes, I could rest assured that they will not be gullible in life. But this thought did not reassure me. Instead, something gnawed at my heart. Something murmured its disquiet.

I first encountered Fredrike Bannink when she was leading a conference. workshop on techniques for positive supervision. I was impressed by her gentleness, her realism, her practicality, and her humor. She had seen and handled all the problems that people raised. I thought, “I would love to learn from this woman. She knows how to stimulate outstanding performance.”

Now I have the chance with this wonderful resource.

Moral beauty pays tribute to our stature as a social species. It elevates us towards selfless pro-social behaviors and connects us at the level of common humanity. Physical beauty, on the other hand, ties no familiar thread across time and culture.

Gretchen, you are indeed an accomplished author and I do enjoy your books. You achieve a lightness and self-discovery that many academic books lack, and yet you still root much of your work in the scientific findings that I value.

The character strength of Open-mindedness or Judgment becomes a sticky one precisely because it straddles a boundary between character and questioning ethics. Open-mindedness seems to stem from compassion and a sense of tolerance and receptivity. Conversely, judgment implies logic and rationality, as well as a determination that one option is superior to another.

My twins’ busy schedules had become a source of worry for me. Rare were the moments when I saw them relax with a storybook, while the afternoon away with friends, or unwind by throwing hoops in the basketball net.

So I made taking time out a priority.

Yesterday I sketched the 3 main topics highlighted in the Appreciative Education conference in early January. Today I want to talk the ways appreciative education relates to positive psychology, appreciative mindsets, and ways appreciative education can contribute to my own goals around creating positive universities and university experiences.

I guess it is the nature of parenthood to find your children ungrateful. Or at least not as grateful as they could be, should be or used to be. This feeling really hit me hard when my twins entered their teenage years. Then I realized how easily I had erased the memories of my little pigeons helplessly hooked up in their incubators, how conveniently I had become ungrateful to the forces that had listened to my desperate pleas for the life and health of my little babies.

This article tries to answer some of the most burning questions about positive education with the strongest evidence currently available to support our proposition. These are the questions we tend to experience when discussing positive education with an interested but skeptical audience.

This year, I have decided to build a mud-room in my mind. Yes, I can see your confusion, but hear me out and it will begin to make more sense.