Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Howard C. Stevenson-- a father of a preteen son-- is an associateprofessor of education in the School, Community, and Child ClinicalPsychology program in the graduate school of education, psychologyin education division at the University of Pennsylvania.
Gwendolyn Davis is a postdoctoral research fellow at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. She has more than fifteen yearsexperience working with children and families.
Saburah Abdul-Kabir is the community research coordinator of theCOPE (Community Outreach through Parent Empowerment) project at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. She is a wife and the mother of sixchildren.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Stickin' To, Watchin' Over, and Gettin' With provides the guidance you need to protect your children from racist hostility while at the same time teaching them character and responsibility. Just as important, the book also shows how to discipline your children in a way that does not rely on spanking or other forms of painful coercion. Written by three African American educators, counselors, and parents, this book outlines an effective program for raising and disciplining your children:
Stickin' To— Offer your kids unconditional love and support.
Watchin' Over— Give children loving supervision and protection.
Gettin' With— Show youngsters loving confrontation and accountability.
The authors also show how using their Cultural Pride Reinforcement (CPR) method can create a sense of pride in your children and help you develop a village of loving and supportive family members, ministers, teachers, coaches, mentors, and elders.

Aus dem Klappentext

Stickin' To, Watchin' Over, and Gettin' With provides the guidance you need to protect your children from racist hostility while at the same time teaching them character and responsibility. Just as important, the book also shows how to discipline your children in a way that does not rely on spanking or other forms of painful coercion. Written by three African American educators, counselors, and parents, this book outlines an effective program for raising and disciplining your children:
Stickin' To Offer your kids unconditional love and support.
Watchin' Over Give children loving supervision and protection.
Gettin' With Show youngsters loving confrontation and accountability.
The authors also show how using their Cultural Pride Reinforcement (CPR) method can create a sense of pride in your children and help you develop a village of loving and supportive family members, ministers, teachers, coaches, mentors, and elders.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Stickin' To, Watchin' Over, and Gettin' With

Jossey-Bass

Chapter One

Stickin' To, Watchin' Over, and Gettin' With Thyself

The tyrant is only the slave turned inside out.

Think about myself? I don't have time to think about myself. If I take care of my child, I'm takin' care of myself. If I don't take care of them first, I won't feel good anyway. If I had to do it all over again, maybe I would have followed my dreams and had my kids later, but I made my choice a long time ago. Being a parent means wrapping up your dreams and packing them away. I made my bed, and now I have to lie in it. I love my kids, and they'll always come first.

* * *

When we speak to a group of parents, we ask them if they would want their children to stay up late, get hardly any sleep, act "evil" toward classmates, look tired and worn down at school or church, and ignore their body's warning signals until they get sick. The answer is always "No way!" Yet when we ask them to examine their own lives, they admit that this describes their own lifestyles.

Children learn how to care for themselves by watching their parents. It's scary to think that children watch and imitate what we do and how we live. They not only watch what we do, but they watch how we do it with others. So you can imagine how important the relationships we choose are. Thus another key aspect of parenting is considering the adult relationships we are involved with. How we treat ourselves and allow others to treat us are two sides to the same coin in the eyes of our children.

Ever see your child mimic your gestures, language, or hand movements? Even when they don't seem to be paying attention, they watch us like hawks and will take what they see to heart. In this chapter we want to give parents strategies for knowing when and how to be ready for the endless ways Black youth will need them. How do children learn to love themselves? How do they learn to be patient, kind, and caring? Yes, you know the answer. Most of what they learn is from us. Just think of your own childhood and who people say you act like the most. Is it true that "you're just like your parents"? These and other questions make parenting one of the hardest jobs to do-because the questions never stop coming. If we want to know who our children are, then we have to know ourselves first.

In African religious philosophy, self-knowledge is the greatest knowledge one can achieve. We believe that African American parents have to manage many selves-individual selves (me, myself, and I) and cultural selves (me, you, and us). This self-knowledge involves how much you know and appreciate the past, present, and future experiences of your life and culture and the lives and culture of your people. For African American parents, becoming very well acquainted with our personal and cultural selves is winning half the battle. So although we talk about the importance of affection, correction, and protection for children, the most important lesson is that parents must apply these principles to themselves first. If this happens, then they should expect to see the maximum benefit from these ingredients in their children. So how do parents stick to, watch over, and get with themselves?

How do you stick to, watch over, and get with yourself?

1. Know your individual self.

2. Know your cultural self.

KNOWING YOUR INDIVIDUAL SELF

* * *

If you know what hurts yourself, you know what hurts others.

* * *

A person who does not know and appreciate himself or herself is less likely to treat others with care and concern and more likely to act out or hurt other people-especially children. A parent without adequate self-knowledge is like a gardener without garden tools. They may have the ability, but they have to work twice as hard to get half as much results.

Parents who lack personal self-knowledge may

1. Act out past childhood pains through their parenting

2. Expect their children to behave like adults

3. Fail to separate personal needs from their children's needs

4. React to children with a short fuse and an evil eye

5. See the world in "either-or" instead of "both-and" terms

What do we expect to see in parents who lack personal self-knowledge? Well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist or a psychologist to figure this out. Over time, without this self-awareness, parents are likely to do one or more of a number of things. One outcome of self-ignorance is to live out one's childhood through his or her child's life experiences. The buying of toys (say, around Christmas) or the purchasing of clothes can become the arena where one seeks to rehabilitate one's broken childhood. The parent's inner child is screaming, "I wish I could have had these things when I was a child!"

Another result of self-ignorance is that parents may begin to confide in their children as adults or expect them to understand their adult life experiences. When children are unable to meet the emotional demands of parents who are lacking in self-knowledge (and all children are unable to meet these demands), parents feel even more isolated. When this occurs, parents may withdraw their affection to save whatever they have for themselves. In some female-headed households sons can play different roles, including child, buddy, protector, and therapist. These roles can be unhealthy when they become overwhelming for the child or when the child's own childhood needs are not being met (for example, if the child is not making same-age friends or is not learning how to handle conflicts with peers).

How can these kinds of problems be avoided? How can we become better parents by knowing our own strengths and weaknesses? There are several steps in getting to know your individual self.

How to Know Your Individual Self

1. Know the warning signs of excess personal baggage.

2. Lighten your excess personal baggage and ask for help.

3. Strengthen and lengthen the end of your emotional rope.

4. Become a "both-and" parent.

Know the Warning Signs of Excess Personal Baggage

Frequently Asked Questions

"Will somebody tell me because I may not be Bill Cosby, but I'm doing the best I can!"

What do I do when I get overwhelmed?

If I can't control my temper, what should I say to my child after I calm down?

What has helped me to calm my anger in the past?

What can I say to the people around me after I am angry?

How come I am the one that gets all the flak?

Have you ever seen someone who has taken a vacation with too much luggage? You may see them in the airport or bus station and notice that they have little awareness of the people around them. Why? Because they are overwhelmed with their belongings. They are either overly apologetic or oblivious to others because their bags are so weighty. When they move with all of their luggage, you can see that look of anxiety and fatigue on their faces. The fatigue comes from having to deal with their decision to carry so much. Anxiety comes from the possibility that they might have made a bad decision, or worse-some of their personal belongings may be lost.

Personal baggage is very similar. It is heavy because it is connected to a past that is often hard to get over. It still weighs you down. And it is complex. You may not understand why you sometimes become so angry with your child, but in fact he may remind you of someone you had difficulty with in the past or someone you are having trouble with now. Maybe the feeling of helplessness is so hard to handle because it reminds you of past abuses, humiliations, or difficult situations. Who knows? You know. But it takes time to admit it to yourself. It may take a while to uncover past pain, but your children will feel safer if you try. If you identify your personal baggage and prevent it from undermining your parenting, you will be giving your children a wonderful gift.

Child in the "Hood"

Most parents think that once they are adults, they leave their childhood behind, but nothing could be further from the truth. You can take the inner child from the "hood," but you can never take the childhood out of your heart. This fact, although quite easy to understand, is one of the most misunderstood and forgotten facts known to parenting and adulthood. For some reason adults selectively forget what their childhood was like, especially when they have kids. And why not? Although many of the memories are priceless, some are, frankly, worth forgetting.

Childhood is a time when you are outsized, outnumbered, out-powered, and outthought by almost everybody, including other children, so where's the fun in that? Psychologically, this is at least a stressful experience; children with parents who don't understand this stress or forget about it are less likely to get help to deal with the stress. Black children whose parents are also unaware of the racial stressors of childhood may feel more pressure to survive childhood.

One of the ways children survive childhood is to play a role that satisfies the family's overall needs. For some families children play the mediator or psychologist. Some children play the rebel. Some play the weak, innocent one or the "do-gooder." Whichever role we play, the role is often meant to distract us from the larger tensions in the family, the neighborhood, or the society at large. When these tensions go unresolved, children carry them into their adulthood. The pains of childhood are often the emotional ingredients of bad parenting.

So trauma experiences could have occurred when you were expected to be a "real man" before you were ten by showing you could take a spanking without crying, when one of your parents called you out in front of all of your friends, or when you got a spanking from the playground all the way home. These experiences may all be part of that unresolved pain. It does not affect some parents. But for others the memory sits and hovers like a computer virus waiting to mess up their parenting. So if you remember that you were treated unfairly as a child, you can deal with it by turning those experiences into a "plus" or a "minus." But whether those experiences are perceived as a plus or a minus, you might fail to resolve their importance to you. Some parents will take a plus and include it in their parenting as a "necessary evil" or take a minus and never apply strategies like it, considering it unnecessary under any circumstances. This rigid style of parenting reflects parents who did not survive childhood well, and that fact comes out in their parenting.

One example is parents who fail to discipline because they feel being harsh can hurt their children and who thus become so permissive that their children fail to feel safe and to understand appropriate boundaries. The minus of being humiliated as a child has been carried into parenting and leads to excessive permissiveness and the abdication of discipline. An example of a plus is parents who feel their beatings helped them and who, without questioning their childhood experience, automatically resort to the use of physical punishment, not fully knowing why or caring what effect the strategy has on their children. The belief is "My daddy spanked me, and I turned out all right. It's a good thing because my daddy was a good man, and that's all I need to know."

How do you know if something is unresolved from your childhood? Well, it often depends on how rigid you are about your parenting. If you think something has to be done the same way all the time and are unable to give up on your view or at least talk about an alternative, you may just be carrying excess personal baggage. If you find that you start telling childhood stories that have no particular focus or meaning, you may be trying to recover your childhood. If you get furious about little matters for no reason or you use your children as minitherapists, you just might be reliving your childhood through your parenting.

Warning Signs of Excess Personal Baggage

1. You have flashbacks of childhood experiences while thinking freely or driving.

2. You instantly get furious at something your child does, and you have no idea why.

3. You start referring to stories of your own childhood so often that your children say, "Oh, Lord, here we go again."

4. Your childhood stories don't have a focus or a lesson attached to them.

5. You find that you are willing to fight to the death over a small issue (like which way the toilet paper should roll).

6. You talk to your child as if he or she were your personal therapist.

7. You defend your parents' discipline strategies way too much.

Defending Our Parents' Form of Discipline

I can remember as a child saying to myself that when I grow up I'll never do this or that to my children. I promised myself I would not-no, could not-treat my children the way my parents treated me. Now I sometimes hear myself saying the same words to my children that my mother used to say to me!

* * *

Why do most people defend spanking by their parents when the topic comes up? Well, there are several reasons, but the key reason is that we love our parents. The reasons why people are reluctant to critique the spanking behavior of their parents often come from this one simple fact. Another reason is that spanking does not happen outside of a relationship or relationship context. If a stranger physically reprimands a child for negative behavior, it's not called "spanking," it's called "assault and battery." No, spanking mostly happens within a history of parental caring and frustration, and children (even adult children) will defend this relationship, whether it worked for them or not. To critique the spanking is to critique the loving parent, and few of us want to do that.

Many of us have cultural rules that say, "A child should never question the authority of a parent. Never!" And this includes never challenging a parent's motivations for discipline in conversation, in writing, or even in one's own heart, mind, and soul. Ironically, children are going to defend their parents even in the most abusive of situations. Studies have shown that physically and sexually abused children protect the image of their parents when they are young; not to protect the abusive parent is to somehow fail to protect oneself.

This is where the statement "I got spanked, and I turned out fine" comes in. Often we judge our parents as "good parents" using gross rather than fine examples of proof. We defend our parents based on statements like "They loved me" or "I am still alive." We look at the larger outcomes and less at the finer emotional life consequences and find it hard to be too critical.

Ten Things Adults Say to Defend Their Own Parents' Discipline

1. "They loved me."

2. "I'm still alive, ain't I?"

3. "I got spanked, and I turned out fine."

4. "I got over it."

5. "They were doing the best they could."

6. "They had a lot of things on their mind."

7. "They were trying to teach me a lesson."

8. "I was a bad kid. They had to spank me."

9. "If I was them, I would do the same thing."

10. "I'd rather them discipline me than society."

Lighten Your Excess Personal Baggage and Ask for Help

The first thing to admit to yourself is "I am overwhelmed." It is absolutely normal for all parents to feel helpless and overwhelmed, so give yourself the space to say it. You know what alcohol counselors say to folks who have drinking problems? They say the first step is admitting that you have a problem. Well, parents may not think they have a problem, but they do have feelings of being overwhelmed. Not admitting it can turn into a big problem. Remember what we said: parenting is a lifelong acquaintance with helplessness. So it happens to all of us, over and over again. If you admit your helplessness, then you can begin to deal with it by asking the question, "How do I ask for help?" Questions that parents often ask themselves about the past include the following:

Frequently Asked Questions

What do I remember about how my parents raised me?

What still angers me about what my parents did?

Do I let my anger about my parents' behaviors influence how I raise my children?

What behaviors in my parenting are the same as my parents'?

What do I do about spanking my children? I got family that says I do it too much, and some say I'm too easy. Who's right?

I got spanked, and I turned out all right. Why do I feel so bad after I do it, though?

Is there a time when spanking is okay?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Stickin' To, Watchin' Over, and Gettin' Withby Howard Stevenson Gwendolyn Davis Saburah Abdul-Kabir Copyright © 2001 by Howard Stevenson. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.