Got Hair? Try a Tria!

One of the more charming effects of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the extra hair a woman sprouts in all the wrong places. Most often this hair is found on the face, but for me it also grew on my legs. Nice long, thick black hair, from my ankles to my backside, front and back. Getting into a bikini was an all-morning chore. I say 'was' because after about the age of 24, I got sick of dealing with it, so I rarely put on a bathing suit.

But all women have hair where they don't want it, and now there is a permanent cure! It's a nifty little gadget called Tria. It removes hair using laser technology, put right in your own hands. There are a few laser hair removal systems on the market right now, but this one got the best reviews I could find. One caveat, though -- it will only work on fair skin with brown hair (rather than blond or white). There is a sensor that must be used on the skin first to test and see if you have the right skin and hair type, and only when you pass the test will the Tria turn on. If you fail, it won't turn on, period. So darker complected women will not be able to use this.

I and my two daughters are using it, so far with good results. On my lower legs, after one treatment, I would say that 1/2 of the hair was gone, and that treatment took about 1/2 hour. After that amount of time, the unit must be recharged. Among the reviews I read, some users complained that the treatment area (the small area from which the laser is activated--the yellow part in this picture) is too small. Personally, I think it's fine. I just settle in with an episode of Law & Order and have at it. In my estimation, with all the hair I have, it may take 25-30 treatments in total to zap all the fuzzies, or 12-15 hours. This seems a small trade-off for permanently getting rid of my 'coat'. Heck, I can find a way to waste 15 hours any week of the year!

You can certainly pay full retail --$449--if you're rollin' in the dough, but for those mere mortals out there, I would suggest looking for a 'gently used' unit on eBay or Amazon. Just look for one that was bought by one of those women who found the treatment too tedious and gave up after using it a few times. If you can just be patient with the process yourself, your persistence will then pay off. I bought ours for $280, and I can always sell it when we are done. Tria says it will last for 300 charges, which is more than plenty for all of us, and probably for the next person who buys it, too.

If I'm feeling ambitious, I may post some before and after pics. I didn't take a picture before I started, but pics at this stage would still give an idea of the effectiveness.

For more info, visit the Tria website.

Disciplining the Young Child

"We have reared a generation of brats. Parents aren't firm enough with their children for fear of losing their love or incurring their resentment. This is a cruel deprivation that we professionals have imposed on mothers and fathers. Of course, we did it with the best of intentions. We didn't realize until it was too late how our know-it-all attitude was undermining the self assurance of parents."

This is an oft-quoted passage from a Redbook interview with Dr. Benjamin Spock in his later years. The irony of this statement is that Dr. Spock himself, in his book, "The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" had advocated the relaxation of parental authority and the affirmation of a child's self-worth. In fairness to him, generations of parents raising children up until the 20th century were not terribly enlightened, and his philosophy was intended to right some of the historical wrongs of parenting. But while many of his ideas were good, his philosophy also ushered in an era of permissive parenting that has swung the pendulum so far the other way that it has completely transformed society. Overall, I believe that we've done a disservice to our children and to ourselves by adopting an approach to raising children that is too permissive. Understandably, we worry that discipline will alienate our children. However, I believe that good discipline, understood and applied properly, will endear us to our children and help us transition to being a mentor and friend as we release our children into the world.

This may sound strange, in light of how some view discipline. Many of us think of it this way: our child does something wrong in direct defiance of the rules, we naturally become angry, and punish the child--we take away TV for a day, ground them, or we may even lash out at the child -- spank them and send them to their room until we can regroup. But this isn't good discipline -- often it's just blowing a gasket, and it's usually counterproductive.

Here is my own definition of true discipline, as it should be applied:

"The process by which a parent wisely and lovingly uses whatever effective means he chooses, to discourage undesirable behavior, and redirect his child's actions to those which are desirable. This process is rooted in love for the child, with the practical aim of getting the child to conform to the rules governing his household, and of society later; it is done for his own welfare and to ensure his own happiness in life, and never out of sheer anger or cruelty."

I daresay we begin laying the foundation of a good relationship with our kids from the moment they emerge from the womb. The push-me-pull-you for the parent is to provide structure in a child's life from that moment forward, without alienating them in the process. While much of this structure can take the form of positive reinforcement, for most kids some discipline is going to carry a far more influential message when the chips are down. I wish this weren't the case, and for those few compliant children very little true discipline may be required. Most others, however, are going to test you regularly.

As we already know, children are born a blank slate in many ways. While they do have their own unique temperament that will not change much over a lifetime, their habits, attitudes and overall approach to life are very malleable in the early years. A child learns about life by observing and emulating the actions of those he sees around him. He will also act upon any stray, seemingly clever idea that he finds rolling around in his little head, and regardless of the inspiration that may drive him, he acts in a state of partial or total ignorance of what is expected of him, depending on how old he is. Then he sits back to observe the results of what he's said or done. 'If I do this, what will happen?' is the burning question in his mind, all day, every day.

All of this is fairly obvious to most of us. However, many parents fail to realize that by far the most important thing in a young child's learning process is the parent's consistent response to the question above. Why? Because learning the mechanics of any activity is far less complicated for a child than learning the appropriateness, advisability and acceptability of the same. The only way he will be successful at figuring that part out will be to observe your response--he has only a rudimentary conscience at this age, which is woefully inadequate for this task He really and truly is relying on you to mold his conscience and good judgement, and it's your job to build in the detail for him by tailoring your responses to reflect how you want him to behave, and how you want him to feel about his behavior.

We tend to think that a child this age doesn't want to be corrected, but they certainly do. They want to learn what is right or appropriate, just as they're anxious to learn everything else. At this age, biting or hitting, taking away a toy, or other actions of which we as a society disapprove, is a neutral or perhaps beneficial action as far as the typical self-focused toddler is concerned, and it will remain that way for him until he is lovingly informed otherwise. It's your response that teaches him that it's wrong, according to the standards of the world around him. A sharply negative response at this very early stage will make it clear that an action would not be advantageous to repeat, and if the response is applied consistently, this attitude will be cemented in your child's little moral compass pretty quickly. Naturally, a positive response will encourage the repetition of an action. These two ideas comprise the well-known reward-response concept--nothing new to see here, so let's move it along.

When it comes to discipline, try to view each instance of your child's disobedience as part of a long process of experimentation and/or testing, with correction or affirmation on your part, towards the larger long-term goal of developing conscience and character. Each event represents a chance to work towards that goal, so consider all of it constructive, whether you're applying positive reinforcement or discipline--both are good and necessary. This viewpoint is different than trying to simply get your child to stop doing something that you don't approve of, or trying to get him to adopt a good habit over the short-term. What I'm suggesting is taking a much more expansive view of how your day-to-day interactions with your child affect him.

Personally, I routinely imagined my children as adults, living out the moral standards and good habits that we were establishing when they were very young. I imagined them recalling how I taught them many of these things, and how grateful they were that I loved them enough to go to the trouble. I always found these thoughts very inspiring as I faced issues with my kids each day. Like the time I stood there looking down at my adorable two-year-old daughter with a giant hunk of hair in her bangs cut down to the scalp, listening to her try to convince me that she didn't do it. I thought ahead to the good that my response right then would do for her down the line. So her first effort at telling a bald-faced lie was met with the kind of response that keeps her very honest to this day. (I know you're wondering what I did, but you'll have to wait for my essay on selecting the right method of discipline that will do the job.)

Viewing the long process this way will help you to stay objective enough to carry out true discipline in a calm, even loving way, and this will have a very profound effect on how your child sees you. If you begin making your responses to your child loving, but consistent and authoritative at a young age (in the second year, generally) he will be reminded daily who is in charge of his life until it becomes a very natural state of mind for him. This knowledge will also make him feel safe and secure in his world, and it will cause him to look at you with respect, standing you in good stead when willful disobedience becomes part of his behavioral repertoire.

Having gone through the whole process myself, I now enjoy a loving relationship with all three of my young adults. We have had very little rebellion and dissension over the years, and ours is a peaceful household. I adore all of them, and likewise they count me among their closest friends. I can think of no better testimony to the efforts we have made to carefully think through how best to mold the characters of our kids.

Clean Your Plate!

How many times did we hear this phrase as kids? And how many times have we said it to our kids? Well, here is my advice (even if you don't want it):

Stop saying that. And stop insisting on it. We're making our children fat.

In the early years of motherhood, I did say this to my kids. But after a while, I realized that I was placing an arbitrary amount of food on their plates, an amount that I thought was correct, and then expecting them to eat it all, as if I knew better than their own bodies what they needed, and as if they would starve if they didn't eat very bite. It didn't seem fair to me when I thought of it that way.

Children are born with a natural hunger mechanism that works beautifully without our interference. When they are hungry, their little tummies growl until they feel it necessary to ask for something to eat. When they are getting full, they begin to eat more slowly, and their little brains become distracted by other things -- TV, the dog barking outside, the booger in their nose. It's at this point that we get impatient and say, "You're not getting down until that plate is empty". But why should we do that? If the child were truly still hungry, they would certainly eat! Believe me, no normal self-serving, self-focused, completely self-absorbed child will let themselves go hungry, and every child is truly self-serving, self-focused, and completely self-absorbed. Every single one. Children stop eating and become distracted when they are FULL. To insist that they continue to eat past this point is to short-circuit this natural hunger mechanism, getting your child into the destructive habit of eating past the amount of food the body is calling for.

I see this all the time in my part-time waitress position. I work in a hotel that offers an all-you-can-eat buffet for breakfast. And our guests do just that. I see entire families of overweight parents and kids load their plates with an amount of food that I could not eat in an entire day, and then when there is food left on the kids' plates (of course), the parents insist that they eat it all. As if these already-overweight kids would starve if they didn't. Other parents will sit with their three-year-old long after the rest of the party has left, coaxing, cajoling and deal-making to get the kid to eat a few more bites, when the child has clearly lost interest, because he's full.

If your child has lost interest his meal, the correct thing to say is,

"Are you full?"

If the child says Yes, there are two possible outcomes. Either he is genuinely full and will be all set until the next meal (or a snack if needed), or he is not really full and is going to pester you very shortly for more food. Annoying, yes, but hardly something to worry about. If your child seems to make a habit of quitting before he's full, let him quit, but do not allow more food until the next meal. It won't take too many times feeling hungry for several hours for your child to get out of the habit. And, no, he won't shrivel up and blow away in the process.

Many parents would object to this line of reasoning out of concern that their child will not get the nutrition he needs. I'm sure I can't be the only one who has noticed this, but our country is one of the most well-nourished places on earth. A malnourished child living in the typical loving household would be extremely rare. Also, keep in mind that the main thing your child needs in his diet is simply calories. Granted, not all calories are created equal in terms of nutrition, but with a modicum of variety the average child will get the trace amounts of all other vitamins, protein and minerals he needs. Somehow, generations of human beings before us managed to lurch into adulthood without worrying about how much protein and vitamin C they were getting. They simply ate a variety of whatever food grew locally, and their bodies handled the rest.

Another thought I have on this subject is to allow your children to ask for their meal whenever you can, rather than tightly scheduling meals and insisting that they eat on your timetable, even if they're not hungry. Again, this encourages eating when the body is not calling for it. When my children were small, before they were in school, I always let them come to me and say they were hungry before I gave them breakfast or lunch, even at that tender age. The result is three healthy teenagers who are not overweight. They do struggle from time-to-time with various aspects of eating. There is so much junk food out there, and sometimes it's hard to say no to the latest sugar-loaded coffee drink. But the tools I have provided them give them an advantage in breaking short-term bad habits.

I think that if my kids were asked about one regret of their childhood, they would probably say that they regretted that our meals, especially dinner, were not more formal, and I have to say I agree to some extent. Most of the time I make a dinner and leave it on the counter or stove for them to come and get when they're hungry. With our busy schedules, sports activities and homework, this has given them the freedom to eat on the go, whenever they are ready. Yes, we did sacrifice the kind of formal meals that many families use as a focal point each day, but we have always found many other ways to come together, and our family is very close, so it hasn't been so bad.

And I stopped worrying about how much they eat many, many years ago, and let them call the shots. Our youngest boy was a bit chubby for a while around the age of 11-12, and he was getting self-conscious about it. So I watched how he ate, and found the weak spot -- I encouraged him to be careful with his afternoon snack. Not to completely pig out on every carbohydrate in the pantry, but to take a break after a few minutes of eating, and see if he got full, remembering that dinner would come soon. I also suggested that he limit his trips to the deli to buy soda (I don't keep it in the house generally). I told him that if he could make just those two changes, he would easily lose the weight. And he did! Now he is a trim (almost lanky) 17-year-old, getting more muscle daily as he matures. Now he swims without a T-shirt.

Do your child a kindness, and get out of the habit of making him clean his plate. Give him less food to start with, and allow him to ask for more. If the smaller amount is all he wants, that's fine. Let him judge when he is full. As he gets older, let him call the shots on his eating as much as you can. If he does develop a bad habit, don't badger him about it. That will only make it worse. Always approach a topic like that as if you were on his team, and if he indicates that he wants to lose weight, brainstorm with him for ideas on how to drop some weight. And do it in a friendly, encouraging way. Allowing the natural hunger mechanism to work as it should will serve your child for a lifetime, helping him not avoid the many health problems that plague the overweight person down the line.