This weeks Love Letter to Parents Nurturing Our Well-Being

Welcome Spring! The much-needed rain has gifted our area with a blanket of green, and the clear sunny skies ahead are inspiring us to bring in the new season with a positive and hopeful mindset. If we choose to notice, many good things are happening within our community. Most are the result of shared human efforts and fueled by good intentions. This weekend’s Love SLO and March for Our Lives are exemplary ways of our community coming together to do good things. And, whether we’re showing our tiger pride at school events or our SLO pride by working together, our collective actions contribute to or affect our community well-being.

This Weeks Love Letters to Parents: Positive Solutions from Tragedy

We are grateful that the Today Show chose to highlight SLOHS’s REACH Club this morning as being one of the many groups working on positive solutions to the issues they face (stress, anxiety and depression, social pressure, feeling included and managing isolation, etc.). Stressed-out teens: Schools take new approaches to avert tragedy.

This weeks Love Letter 2 Parents: Kindness Changes the Brain

All across the country, we saw kindness being displayed in many forms this week. As campuses came together, students, teachers, school staff and community members honored, spoke up, and advocated for change. The messages shared were not just about guns and legislation. Underlying speakers’ words were messages about coming and acting together, looking out for each other, showing and raising awareness for mental health needs, and wanting to change conversations about the issues of our day.

This weeks Love Letter 2 Parents: Conversations on Humanity

We’ve been thinking about a lot.  We’ve been fortunate that many others are thinking and writing about the state of humanity and the changing roles, attitudes, understandings, and perceptions about what it means to be a woman or man today.

This weeks Love Letter 2 Parents: What does it mean to be a warrior?

A warrior isn’t necessarily someone who is fighting a physical battle with brute strength, swords and metal armor.  A warrior can be someone who fights emotional battles and conquers them using their intrinsic power. Our social and emotional defenses can be stronger than our suit of armor or physical strength. There are days and situations that require us to summon our inner warrior.  Each and everyone of us is fighting a battle or set of battles.  Some may be hidden deep within our archives of the past and others may be out in the open for all to see. overbearing on our everyday lives. It may be a friend’s pain of losing a child, maybe a partner’s/spouse’s shame over a hidden past, maybe a wrong you witnessed but didn’t speak up to, or maybe it’s fighting a battle unknown, a battle you feel compelled to fight that is unnamed.

This Week's Love Letter 2 Parents: Love Heals

We have read plenty about how today’s teenagers are plagued by more distress (anxiety, stress and depression) than any generation on record. As adults, we know to put our oxygen masks on first and to practice self-care. “Self-love” is what we’re calling it in our homes.

This Week's Love Letter 2 Parents: Got Your Oxygen Mask?

Every airplane ride begins with a very important plea- when the oxygen masks are released from above, place yours on first, before putting one on your child.  The first time we flew as parents, the oxygen mask instructions took on a whole new meaning.  How could we think of protecting ourselves before our beautiful children?

This Week's Love Letter 2 Parents: Showing Up Is Our Power

The heart pumps blood to itself first before it can take care of the other organs in the body because that is what it needs to do to survive. As busy parents, we need to remind ourselves that practicing self-care is not the same as being selfish. Self-care is essential to our quality of life! She talked about mindfulness, neuroplasticity, and positive coping skills as tools for relieving, managing, and preventing stress. Most importantly, she reminded us to care for ourselves, in the ways that we care for our family and friends. And, when we trip and fall, what will we say to ourselves as we get back up?

This weeks Love Letter 2 Parents: Extroverts and Introverts Sharing the Classroom

"School seems to be a lot easier for an extrovert.  Walking around campus and saying hi to people, participating in class seems to come natural for someone like an extrovert. Introverts have to work very hard at putting themselves out there. The extrovert doesn’t have to think too hard to raise their hand or say hello to someone they don’t know well.  Also, something I never really thought about was how hard I have to work to be different than what I’m naturally comfortable with.  It’s good to learn to put myself out there, pat myself on the back for trying, and maybe help others be aware that we’re all doing our best." —Anonymous High School Student

This Weeks Love Letter 2 Parents Speaking the Words to Open the Door We can’t tell you how many times we’ve felt like our feet landed in our mouths while trying to connect and have conversations with our kids.  The irony is that, each time, we were working hard to formulate every word and convey our desires to connect. Yet, despite our good intentions, our attempts still backfired.

This weeks Love Letter 2 Parents: Living, Learning and Parenting with Courage & Strength Monday’s MLK, Jr. holiday gave us time to reflect on Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachings on respect, empathy and love. In today’s 24-hour news feeds, our kids are exposed to disturbing events, diverse perspectives and different attitudes- things that our parents could shelter us from, if they chose. Teens must filter through the flood of information that comes from social media and critically comprehend what is valuable and what is not.

This weeks Love Letter 2 Parents Welcoming the New Year with Courage and Self-Compassion Happy New Year!  Bringing in a New Year means saying goodbye to old and welcoming the new. During the winter break, our families took the opportunity to step outside the comfort of the familiar- one traveled to a new city, the other back to a place that was once home.  Both needed courage- courage to try something new and unknown and courage to face a new reality. The beauty (and fortune) of both was that our journeys and challenges weren’t faced alone. We each shared our experiences with loved ones by our side.

This weeks Love Letter 2 Parents 

Creating a Culture of Care

“Life is amazing. And then it’s awful. And then it’s amazing again. And in between the amazing and awful, it’s ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That’s just living heartbreaking, soul healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life. And it’s breathtakingly beautiful.” L.R. Knost

This weeks Love Letter 2 Parents How Are You?

In asking, do we really want to know or do we take the time to find out how someone really is? Do we avoid asking someone how they are or dread being asked? If so, why? Do we not want to know or does listening take us off our path? Perhaps we don’t want anyone asking us how we are, so we don’t ask others. Maybe we don’t ask because we don’t have (or can’t make) time to really find out. Perhaps, we don’t feel we have the time to deal with our emotions when asked or doing the asking. Maybe, we’re keeping busy to cope and answering honestly would mean stopping in our tracks or having to feel and think beyond or deeper than our “to do” list.

This weeks Love Letter 2 Parents Rolling with the "Unplanned" Holiday Time

If we’re honest with ourselves, the beloved and highly anticipated holiday season can be overwhelming, if we let it. When an unfortunate roadblock presents itself, especially when we don’t feel we have the time to diverge from our planned path, how do we handle it? 

This weeks Love Letter 2 Parents In Difficult Times Our True Character is Revealed

Boy, we are exhausted and feeling pulled in so many directions.  Many of the directions are beautiful and fulfilling and many are emotionally draining and physically taxing.  We decided to take a deep breath, appreciate the blue sky, and take time to be grateful.

This Weeks Love Letter 2 Parents: Learn from Struggle or Failure, You First Need to Struggle or Fail

We overheard a high schooler reminiscing about her middle school days and offering great advice to her younger self: Make sure to relax, don’t stress so much, enjoy your friends, and take in the opportunity to learn about yourself while learning new subjects. Figure out ways to take it all in, while not overwhelming yourself with perfection. Focus on doing the best you can, while learning how (and not forgetting) to care for yourself and others.

This Weeks Love Letter 2 Parents Parenting by the Seat of Our Pants

Parenting teens in today’s world is very much a “learn by doing” (or by the seat of our pants!) experience. As we approach the time of year for giving and receiving, we started wondering about the things we give to our children and families. After all the publicity for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday and the push to buy and give, we paused to reconsider what are absolute needs. We reminded ourselves of the difference between giving others “presence” and “presents,” recalling how fun it was to have “game nights” and “movie nights” (and how much easier they were to plan!) when they were little.

This weeks extra Love Letter 2 Parents Creating Stillness in the Chaos

Tryouts for winter sports means relief and excitement for some and heartbreak and disappointment for others. Upcoming finals usually means stress, and we know it comes in all shapes, sizes and colors. Freshmen may be feeling this kind of stress for the first time and may not understand it or know what to do. Whatever they are feeling or however they are manifesting stress, it is common for kids to feel like it is them (a character flaw rather than a compound set of issues). They may see it as their issue and theirs alone rather than a common set of feelings shared/felt/experienced by many and intensified at this time and under these circumstances (tryouts, grades, time change, college applications, etc.).

This weeks Love Letter 2 Parents Wisdom From Our Past

Wooden’s words are simple, profound, and apply to us all. Teens often feel they do not have much control. They also may not know how to handle situations when they actually have control. These days, they likely do not realize how much influence social media use has on their thoughts and feelings and that they have the capacity to exert more control over its influence. Whether they’re a star on the athletic  team or a student sitting in the back of the room, not wanting to be seen, Wooden’s words may be hard for a teen to grasp. Yet, it feels like an important idea to help them understand for it could add significant value to their lives. (As a parent, how often do you recite the serenity prayer?)