Choosing to flood my child with joy

You are standing on a train platform. It’s late, and foggy. No one is around. It’s just you and your child at your side.

You hear footsteps at the other end of the platform. They approach steadily.

You crane your neck, squint your eyes as the adrenalin starts pumping. You scan your surroundings as the flight or fight reflexes kick in.

Your child is also anxious and scanning for clues. But it’s not the approaching stranger that’s making them nervous. It’s you.

As adults we take our cues from our surroundings. Our young children however get their information from our faces.

Dr. Stephen Briers uses the example above to open the chapter on mirror neurons in his book, "How Your Child Thinks."

"When presented with an ambiguous or unfamiliar situation, the first place most infants look for further information is in the faces of their caregivers," writes Briers.

While children don’t have life experience to help them assess their surroundings, they master reading faces very early on.

Mirror neurons take reading your face to yet another, deeper level.

These special neurons are what allow us to learn from others by simply watching. Some experts believe that not only do we learn how to jump by watching someone else jump, we also experience the thrill of jumping from watching someone jump.

This is something that I need to keep in mind when I’m tired and grumpy. Inevitably, my 2 year old is following close behind watching everything I do.

Lose my keys in a huff, in a hurry, and he is there. Throw something because I feel like I am going to snap, he is there.

"When we frown at our children, they feel the chill of displeasure; when we smile and laugh, we flood them with the sunlight of their own capacity for joy," writes Briers.

How do we know mirror neurons really do have these effects on our kids? All I have to do is consider the way my son's laughter makes me feel.

When he plays chase, he runs around shrieking and smiling until he drops. By the time he hits the floor, I'm also exhausted. I feel like I could collapse in a fit of happiness. I certainly lighten up from watching him.

Why not return the favor? He doesn't know the world of bills, contracts, narrow windows of opportunity and disappointment. Toddlers don't fill with fear at the sound of a stranger's footsteps on a train platform.

To them, the world is not a harsh place. What they know about emotions, they get from watching Mommy and Daddy's faces.

Splashing & laughing vs. litter & yelling

Last week, I wrote about almost coming unhinged by plans to mellow out and take a vacation.

It was after I got back though that I started to see the light.

I don't mean that figuratively. I am referring to the light on the lake near my home. I pass the lake everyday, at least twice a day. On the way to work, on the way home and on the way to most stores, I pass it.

It’s a beautiful lake. If you’re going to take a landmark for granted, it’s a nice one to have.

Sometimes when I drive by, I’ll see service vans, buses and kids’ bikes parked facing it.

Sometimes, I am smart enough not to pass it by.

One day last week, I pulled up to it and parked to wait for my wife and son who were 15 minutes behind me. I thought of my Chicago trip.

Last week’s column detailed the harried details of the trip that I tried to call a vacation.

I was so consumed with the preparations the vacation ended with me wondering, "Did I relax enough? Was I rejuvenated?"

I was still asking myself these questions as I sat parked in front of the lake. I watched the busyness in front of me. Kids were running back and forth to the water--the water splashing. The kids' parents were barely moving in their chairs.

My thoughts slowed down to about the speed of lazy toes in the sand. I felt myself relax a bit.

I backed off of the visual details in front of me. As a way of tamping down my thoughts, I tried to turn the scene into a two-dimensional work of art.

Instead of seeing people--my neighbors--reading books, sipping drinks and watching kids, my mind glossed over them, let them slip into the landscape. In other words, I zoned out.

As the picture in front of me flattened out, I felt myself relaxing a little more. The light quietly dancing on the ripples in the water caught my attention.

Instead of seeing the ice cream sandwich wrappers, beach towels and sunblock strewn across the hot sand, I saw sunbeams in cool water. Instead of parents yelling at their children to stay close, I heard the kids laughing.

Sometimes my wife requests vacations where we do nothing, just sit somewhere with drinks. I argue that I don’t see the point. I always think that sounds like a waste of time.

Now I see the point.

It's a way of letting things even out without you. Taking time to do nothing allows you to disengage, like turning the details of life into scenery. You can extract yourself--even if it's only for a little bit.

The one advantage to the cold

By Gene Myers

We are busy creatures of habit running on autopilot. Sometimes we are jostled awake naturally and sometimes we create our own distractions, like officious looking groundhogs placed strategically around the country in front of news cameras and men in top-hats.

Of course it's not our fault that we need a holiday built around groundhogs. It wasn't our fault that we perked up when we felt the nip in the air and raced to put pumpkins on our porches.

We were just looking for a change. But the next thing we knew, the holidays were gone and we were stuck in the middle of winter with no end in sight.

I suffered a similar kind of psychological fate last week when I caught a bad bug. You know the feeling you get when you are sick for so long that you can't even remember what it felt like to be healthy?

You suck on lozenge after lozenge through coughing fit after coughing fit. The pressure in your head won't release even though your nose flows like a river.

With every miserable trek to the bathroom I missed the days when it didn't hurt to move. I missed them a little more each time as the memory of moving about in the sun faded. My hopes focused on smaller and smaller victories with each new ache. My cold settled in.

Ahhh...the simple pleasure of being able to breathe while lying on my back! I started off logical: get rest and plenty of fluids. But soon I resorted to my own hokum rituals, like Cold Eeze, Airborne and chicken soup.

I was stranded in the middle of a cold that was so bad, I even daydreamed about going back to work! I know that sounds strange to say. At the first sign of a fever I was thinking, "Whoo-hoo! Sick days! I'm not getting dressed! I'm staying in bed! Daytime TV! No laundry!"

But by the end of my mucus-filled forced vacation, I was hankering for the days when I could do the dishes or head to the store without thinking about it.

I was ready to take breathing for granted again. That realization was the true beauty of being sick. The only silver lining in my winter of discontent.