Posts
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Defining and Distilling Authoritarian Parenting Style
Was our disciplining an attempt at intentional Authoritarian parenting or just wing-it threat and bribe? Does the following set of definitions connect dots?[i] Δ Cold: low responsiveness, aloof and distant, affection is given sparingly, if at all; boundaries are maintained between parent and child. Δ Demanding/Unbending: strict, making non-negotiable rules, not considering the child’s…
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Depicting Authoritarian Parenting
I think we managed ‘happy families’ (check with the Brits on that one) until we signed Yasik up for school – roughly 3 weeks. The journal says Week 3 was ‘one heavy duty week’. Yasik was, in parenting jargon, ‘testing boundaries’ in ways I have read are not unusual for institutionalized adoptees, or, for that…
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Introduction to Parenting Styles
Most parents start out with a child with no words. We started out with a child whose words we couldn’t find in the dictionary, and even if we found them, we couldn’t figure out how to use the dictionary’s definition to our advantage. When we said ‘Nyet’ to Yasik we had little idea what that…
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Set and Setting: spiritual
Psychology asks how we find ways of being in the world that we can live with, homeostasis. It seeks a way to adapt to the world whether a person has a sense of safety or not, can trust or not, believes he or she is accepted or rather is seen as less than, does or…
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Set and Setting: psychological
I can’t read minds, not even to see into my son’s mindset. His setting I can do; I kept a journal and I read, read, read. But how my son picked up on the settings he found himself in and how his translation of his environment and interactions with it settled in his mind, I…
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Set and Setting: social, western Canada
Boarding a plane in Moscow in the early morning, we left a harvest moon in our wake. For Yasik transitioning from a Russian social setting to a social setting in a western Canadian family and urban community was a transition from life on the moon[i] to what? The image of the moon seems apt enough.…
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Set and Setting: social, first Russia
‘They’ say we are social beings, maybe on a spectrum from extrovert to ambivert to otravert to introvert to …, BUT most of us do seem to want people in our lives.[i] Being part of a group, with family ties and community provides protection, access to resources, and opportunities for cooperation. For the individual in the…
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Set and Setting: culture, language, religion
If you had asked us point blank, we would have assured you that we were going to honour Yasik’s Russian heritage. I guess by going to Russian meet-ups and by eating piroshkies, but in reality – likely because we gave it no conscious thought to what retaining his Russian heritage might mean – we were…
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Set and Setting: Physical
In my mid-teens I was on a train coming from Edmonton and headed to my home in the Fraser Valley for the Christmas holidays. I’d fallen asleep and woke in the early morning as the train was pulling into the Blue River station which was right up against a mountain. That mountain assured me that…
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Set and Setting: Historical, Political, Economic
Parenting an Adopted Child reminds us “that children’s lives do not begin the day they are adopted. Regardless of the type of adoption, children have biological relatives and genetic histories of their own”[i]. When seeking to know an adoptee’s mindset it is likely in the best interests of adopters to acquaint themselves with anything available…