Seven Secrets of Resilience for Parents: Navigating the Stress of Parenthood

By Andrew D. Wittman

The instant you become a parent, responsible for another life, you know you're in over your head. Parenting is a crash course in resilience, and most of us land flat on our backs wondering how – or if – we'll ever get up again. In Seven Secrets of Resilience for Parents: Navigating the Stress of Parenthood, Mental Toughness Coach Andrew Wittman brings his signature insight to redefine what it means to be a successful parent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732356818

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Copyright © 2018 by Andrew D. Wittman, Ph.D.

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Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.

Get Warrior Tough Media

107 Ambrose Trail

Greer, SC 29650

www.getwarriortough.com

Ordering Information:

Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address above, telephone [phone] or email [e-mail]

Published by: Get Warrior Tough Media, Greer, South Carolina

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018906194

Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

Names: Wittman, Andrew D.

Title: Seven secrets of resilience for parents : navigating the stress of parenthood / by Andrew D. Wittman, Ph.D.

Description: First Edition. | Greer, SC : Get Warrior Tough Media, [2018]

Identifiers: ISBN 9781732356801 (paperback) | ISBN 9781732356818 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Parenting--Psychological aspects. | Parent and child. | Child rearing--Psychological aspects. | Resilience.

Classification: LCC HQ755.8 .W58 2018 (print) | LCC HQ755.8 (ebook) | DDC 649.1--dc23

This work is dedicated first and foremost to my personal Mental Toughness Coach – Kim Wittman. With you constantly shoulder-to-shoulder with me in our endeavor to build a great family, along with three decades of your commitment, love, and partnership, we have raised three AWESOME kids!

To my closest and best friends, Drew, Jack and Mick! You guys ROCK and then some! Thanks for always standing with Mom and me. And thank you for allowing me to enlist you as my test subjects as I crafted, honed, and sharpened the Get Warrior Tough process. I am in awe of each of you and your Resilience! Boo Yah!

Special thanks to Dr. Jon Christiansen - this book would have never happened without your unwavering support and friendship.

To all the parents who agreed to share your stories with me for the book – THANK YOU!

To all my mentors along the way - I’m eternally grateful and will pay it forward.

And to YOU – the Resilient-Minded Parents!

Contents

INTRODUCTION – Leaving a Legacy

SECRET 1 – CRITICAL THINKING & THE BRAIN

CHAPTER 1 – How the Brain Works

CHAPTER 2- Being the Boss of Me

CHAPTER 3 – Thinking: A Physical Skill

SECRET 2 – INTERNAL IDENTITY

CHAPTER 4 – Being a Parent Isn’t Who You Are

CHAPTER 5 – Peer Pressure, Clicks, Bullies, and Backstabbers

CHAPTER 6 – Rivalries

SECRET 3 – MINDSET MASTERY

CHAPTER 7 – The Mindset Incubator

SECRET 4 – MOTIVATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

CHAPTER 8 – Approach or Avoid

CHAPTER 9 – The Ultimate Target

SECRET 5 – TAPPING INTO THE LAWS OF INFLUENCE

CHAPTER 10 – Becoming a Child Whisperer

CHAPTER 11 – Stress and the Hormone Dump

CHAPTER 12 – What Are You Saying?

SECRET 6 – COURSE CORRECTIONS

CHAPTER 13 – From Resistance to Harmony

CHAPTER 14 – Resolving Conflict: Defuse and De-escalate

CHAPTER 15 – Dealing with Change

CHAPTER 16 – Making Course Corrections

SECRET 7 – BALANCE

CHAPTER 17 – Life on All Eight Cylinders

CONCLUSION

NOTES AND RESOURCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION – Leaving a Legacy

Can You Give Anyone Anything You Don’t Have?

I have spent large portions of time on five of this planet’s six inhabited continents. Regardless of ethnicity, culture, economic status, political or religious ideology, I have observed something common to all humans – parents want their children to have a better life than they have. I’ve never met a parent who wouldn’t do anything for their kids. My wife, Kim, and I certainly feel this way. But just being willing to do anything for your child isn’t enough, otherwise every child would grow up and enjoy a happy, successful, and fulfilled life. A balanced life. A life filled with harmonious relationships, not ones frayed by hurtful wrongdoings, drama, and embitterment. A life filled with thriving abundance, not one filled with struggle. The enjoyment of a purposeful and fulfilling career they love, not grinding out a job they hate.

It is not enough to love your children. Not enough to want the best for them. There’s one and only one thing that is enough. My wife and I have deployed this one essential element in raising our own three happy, successful, and fulfilled children. And continue doing so, even now that they are almost adults. This one thing is resilience.

One definition of resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. I call it mental toughness and define it as the ability to take control of your thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and actions proactively, especially under pressure. Resilience is the skill to handle anything life throws your way. It is a mindset that says, I’m the problem, and I’m the solution. If I have a problem, it’s me, but the good news is, I’m also the solution. Resilience says, I cannot fail, as long as I learn and grow. Resilience operates from a foundation of love, not fear. Resilience turns negative stress into rocket fuel. Resilience taps into internal emotional drivers that enable a person to push past the obstacles, difficulties, losses, and pain to complete any worthy accomplishment.

Even though I am the one writing this book, make no mistake, my wife is the main driver in the discovery, deployment, and installment of mental toughness in our home. When most folks first meet us, they think I’m the driver because of my background: Marine infantry combat veteran, police officer, federal agent, private military contractor, and leadership and mental toughness coach. Kim is by far the more resilient and more mentally tough partner of our thirty-year marriage. She is the citadel, the fortress, and the rock that unwaveringly demonstrated and instilled that resilience in our kids while I was gone for large portions of time, deployed somewhere on those five inhabited continents.

I knew Kimmi was tough, but I had no idea how tough until she became pregnant with our first child. She, being one of those parents who would do anything for her kids, began a massive research project, which continues to this day. She discovered the concept of drug-free, natural childbirth and had us enroll in breathing classes. (You know the kind where we both sit on the floor with pillows and count Ha – Ha – He’s.) When that day in 1997 came, she birthed our firstborn child, Drew, with nothing but mental toughness and a bucket full of ice chips. The medical staff was in disbelief, as offers of epidurals were summarily dismissed. And she did the same for our other two, Jack in 2000 and Michaela in 2003.

It was back in the delivery room that I learned moms are much more resilient and mentally tougher than dads. And that you don’t have to join an elite military unit to be resilient and mentally tough. You don’t have to be in combat or a fire-fight or almost get killed in a war. If you’re a parent, you have it; the trick is to learn how to tap into it and deploy it.

Accessing resilience, or mental toughness, is a skill, and it can be learned, practiced, applied, and mastered the same as any physical skill: tying your shoes, brushing your teeth, or driving a car. Many people I have interacted with over the course of my life have seemed to believe that resilience and mental toughness are almost mystical. Not tangible. Not teachable. Not learnable. I assure you, they are tangible, teachable, and learnable for us parents and for our children. We must, however, answer a question first.

Can you give anyone anything you don’t have?

If you didn’t have a hundred dollars, could you give anyone a hundred dollars? If you didn’t have a cup of coffee, could you give anyone a cup of coffee?

It All Starts with Self-Esteem

There are numerous studies with varying statistics in the realm of self-esteem, self-worth, self-regard, and self-confidence, but to make it simple: approximately eighty-five percent of two-year olds have a healthy self-esteem, self-worth, self-regard, and confidence level. They don’t know the planet isn’t about them. They want what they want, and they want it NOW! We call them the Terrible Twos, and they have fantastic self-esteem until we drive it out of them.

In her audiobook, 12 Secrets to High Self-Esteem, Linda Larson says that by age fifteen, the number of those with healthy self-esteem drops all the way down to five percent. That means ninety-five out of one hundred teenagers need help. They don’t believe they deserve to have a good life, and with what we know about how the brain works (more on that later), that belief becomes a downward spiral.

Which brings us to these numbers: from about age twenty-four until the grave, only thirty percent of adults have a healthy self-esteem, self-worth, or self-regard. That means seven out of every ten adults need help.

Research from Purdue University shows that the number one fear of all human beings is ostracism or rejection. Cognitive neuroscience has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a tool used to measure brain activity by monitoring changes in cerebral blood flow and neural activation, to show that rejection is registered by the brain in the same way as physical pain. When you and your first crush in high school broke up and it hurt, it was as if it physically hurt.

Conversely, the number one need all human beings are looking to fulfill is unconditional acceptance, also called love. When we look for acceptance externally (from other people), we abdicate our self-worth to others. Remember that old country song, Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places. Until you internally accept yourself, you are not only abdicating your personal power, but you are also powerless to give that acceptance to anyone else--your spouse, your kids, your family, your friends, your co-workers, etc.

What the statistics bear out is pretty disheartening: seventy percent of adults aren’t going to accept you because they haven’t accepted themselves. And a whopping ninety-five percent of teenagers can’t accept you because they haven’t accepted themselves. On the flip side, eighty-five percent of two-year-olds accept you just the way you are (all because they completely accept themselves and freely give away that acceptance.)

This reality leaves you with two choices: spend the rest of your life only interacting with two-year-olds or accept yourself. Love you, and then love others. But you must love you first – because you can’t give anyone anything you don’t have.

If the empirical research is to be believed, seventy percent of parents have not internally accepted themselves and are looking for that acceptance from outside sources. Seventy percent of parents, all of whom cannot give anyone anything they don’t have, cannot fulfill the number one need of their children: acceptance. No wonder 95% of teenagers, all whom have low self-worth, must go looking outside the home for acceptance. They seek acceptance from external sources like social media, which is stocked full of their peers who also haven’t accepted themselves. And the downward spiral is in full effect.

Self-acceptance is the foundational step in navigating the stresses of parenthood because it is the foundation of resilience itself. Our children must know beyond any doubt that they are completely accepted by their parents. How many of us have longed for that acceptance from our own parents and not received it? Alas, they could not give what they themselves did not have.

Two-year-olds are extremely robust and full of boundless energy. Learning to crawl, walk, talk, run, and jump. Mistakes, miscues, and failures are simply part of the process of accomplishment. But at some point, many begin to realize they aren’t unconditionally accepted, as parents who have not accepted themselves blur the lines of behavior and identity, expressing disappointment in the child instead of correcting unhelpful actions or behavior. If you have found yourself doing this, don’t despair. It’s not your fault. It’s an imitated behavior, passed down from generation to generation.

Imitation: Monkey See, Monkey Do

Imitation is how we learn. Our children will do what we parents do. They will not do what we tell them to do, which we already know. That whole do as I say, not as I do thing doesn’t hold water. If you don’t like the way your child is acting, the first place to look is in the mirror. The second place to look is the various influences on your child, i.e. the internet and online content, television programming, family members, teachers, friends, babysitters, etc.

Susan Pinker, a developmental psychologist and journalist, shares her experience during the first Gulf War in 1990. She was working as a clinical psychologist in Montreal and began receiving numerous referrals from pediatricians of children between eight and ten years old suddenly beginning to wet their beds. Others refused to go to school and were afraid to leave the house. After investigating, a commonality was found. Each of the children, though strangers to each other, came from homes that had strong family connections to Israel, which was in the daily news due to Saddam Hussein’s missile attacks. The children, although living halfway across the planet from the devastation of war, were mirroring their parents’ emotional reactions.

We live in South Carolina. We regularly enjoy fabulous weather throughout the year; however, spring and summer often bring fantastic thunderstorms with awesome displays of lightning. The trees in our yard, both front and back, have been scarred by several crackling bolts of electrostatic energy. The entire house would shake as if we ourselves were under an indirect fire assault. When our children were young toddlers, they would come running into my arms at the first boom of a thunderstorm, crying and hyperventilating, their little bodies shaking with fear. I would scoop them up and calmly whisper in their ear, Is Daddy scared?

They would pant, No, sir.

Then you shouldn’t be scared. When you see Daddy get scared, then you should be scared. But until then, you don’t need to be scared. Okay?

Yes, sir. And the calming would begin. Crying would stop. Breathing would return to normal rates, as would heart rate, and eventually the fear would dissipate.

In neuroscience, this practice is called neural coupling. Studies have shown that human brains, when in the same space, time, and interaction, sync up. Our brains literally begin to mind-meld, and the same regions of the brain fire off in the same sequence in real time. Princeton University neuroscientist Uri Hasson demonstrated the power of this concept in an experiment, which was conducted in two parts. The first phase involved a graduate student, while being brain scanned via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), telling an unrehearsed story about her high school prom night. Phase two involved twelve other students listening to the recording of the prom story, also while being brain scanned via fMRI. The results showed that the listeners’ brains fired off in the same patterns and sequence as each other’s and the storyteller’s. Along with this finding, further research has shown there is a leader-follower distinction when neural coupling occurs. The leader’s brain dictates what is to be mirrored and imitated, and the follower’s brain(s) hook in, match up, and fall in line. Therefore, as a parent, modeling resilience and mental toughness is imperative. And secondarily, deliberate and calculated guidance is essential when it comes to other influences, especially the consumption of media content. The producers of any media are by default assuming the leadership position in directing the brain’s activity. (I’m actually doing it right now. By reading this, you are thinking about what I am leading you to think about.)

However, before you can model anything, you must learn it and imitate it. Consider this book your field guide to imitating, learning, and modelling resilience and mental toughness. I will give you not only the biopsychology (how the body, mind, and emotions interact) of mental toughness and the cognitive neuroscience (how the brain works), but also real-life examples and illustrations that you can imitate, along with adopting science-based principles.

To that end, I will ask you to wear two hats during our time together. The first hat is that of the student. Learning and growing, you yourself becoming resilient and mentally tough. You are gaining control over your thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and actions, especially under pressure. You are learning to handle anything life throws your way. You are adopting a mindset that says, I’m the problem, and I’m the solution. If I have a problem, it’s me, but the good news is, I’m also the solution. You are espousing a philosophy that says, I cannot fail, as long as I learn and grow. You are operating from a foundation of love, not fear, and turning negative stressors into rocket fuel. You are mastering how to tap into your own internal emotional drivers and push past the obstacles, difficulties, losses, and pain. You are gaining clarity and knowing who you are, where you are going, and why you are going there. You are learning to be rooted and grounded, a citadel and fortress that weathers any storm.

The second hat is that of the teacher, the mentor, and the coach, consistently modeling resilience and mental toughness for your kids. Deliberately and lovingly guiding them to gain control over their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and actions. Instructing them in creating and discovering their own internal identity and teaching them to solve problems, not complain about them. Being their safety net of growth and learning, allowing them to risk failure. Coaching them on how to turn negative stressors into rocket fuel and mentoring them to find and tap into their own internal emotional drivers so that they can push past any obstacles, difficulties, losses, and pain. Helping them get to know who they are, where they are going, and why they are going there, teaching them to be rooted and grounded, a citadel and fortress that weathers any storm.

SECRET 1 – CRITICAL THINKING & THE BRAIN

C

HAPTER 1 – How the Brain Works

The cell phone in my pocket buzzed. It was a text from Kimmi,

Eric just died. Go to their house now and be with Ruth.

I grabbed my car keys and bolted. During the four-minute drive to Eric and Ruth’s house, my brain began to flood my conscious mind with every bit of information about their family stored in my memory. Their oldest child, Justin, and our oldest Drew had been thick as thieves since elementary school, both now one-year shy of graduating high school. They had gone on a trip to Australia together for one of the student ambassador programs, as well as numerous other adventures.

We had a rare friendship with them, a family friendship. They have two boys and a girl, Justin (11th grade at the time), Layla (9th grade), and Miles (7th grade). We have two boys and a girl, Drew (11th grade at the time), Jack (9th grade) and Michaela (5th grade). Eric, a forty-five-year-old entrepreneur, helped me when I started my own firm. He took my boys hunting and fishing along with his boys. Sleepovers. Birthday parties. Movies.

I parked on the street in front of their house and ran up the porch steps. I rang the bell. Ruth came to the door. She was poised and dignified and had tears flowing down her cheeks.

How are you here?

I shrugged, Kimmi sent me.

He’s gone.

I’m so sorry, I hugged her.

She tearfully began to mutter, What about Justin’s graduation? Who will walk Layla down the aisle?

That’s not for today, Ruth. Where are the kids?

If ever there was a situation that called for resilience, this was it. Ruth not only had to deal with navigating the stress of losing her spouse of twenty-two years, but she also suddenly found herself to be a single parent with three teenagers.

The beginning of the road to resilience starts with getting a handle on the how the human machine operates. To do so, we must first understand how the brain works. Nothing that happens in the machine occurs without the brain’s input. Nothing. And the human brain is the original search engine. It must answer a question. The answer doesn’t have to come out of your mouth, but the brain must search for an answer whenever it is presented with a question. As an experiment to see this fact in action, no matter what I ask you next, do not recall the information.

What’s two plus two? (Stop answering the question.)

"What color is the sky? (Quit it. Don’t think of the answer.)

In which direction does the sun rise?

In which direction does the sun set?

Ask, and you shall receive. Ask a bad question, and you will receive a bad answer. Ask a good question, and you will receive a good answer. Ask a better question and receive a better answer. A bad question is: Can being a parent be any more stressful? A good question is: How can I survive being a parent? A better question is: How can I successfully navigate the stresses of parenthood and thrive?

That day in 2015, on Ruth’s porch, the questions she asked about her sixteen-year-old son’s future high school graduation and who in the future would walk her fourteen-year-old daughter down the aisle were both good questions. But on that day, with the starkness of the raw emotion in play, those questions would only increase the stress. On that day, we had to keep our minds focused on getting through each minute, one moment at a time.

Eleven Million Bits

In the last decade or so, through cognitive and behavioral neuroscience research, we have learned enormous amounts about how the human brain works. With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain imaging and brain mapping, we have learned that the brain takes in approximately eleven million bits of information per second. Each of us is a data collecting machine, vacuuming up information at broadband speeds. The cable broadband internet provider in my home has an upload speed of five million bits of information per second and a download speed of sixty-five million bits of information per second. My broadband service downloads information at a rate of thirteen times faster than it uploads. Think about streaming a