Building stronger families.
This is the tagline on Tracey Serebin’s business, A Child’s Voice, but by no means is she alone in that mission. On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama devoted part of his address to Congress to parenting and the role it plays in furthering our education goals as a nation.
“In the end, there is no program or policy that can substitute for a parent, for a mother or father who will attend those parent-teacher conferences, or help with homework, or turn off the TV, put away the video games, read to their child,” Obama said.
Who could disagree? Certainly not Serebin, who thrives on helping parents and children improve their communication. However, this family dynamics and communications specialist sees a way to link what she does with the national -- even global – mission.
“While President Obama is working on [the nuts and bolts of] reinvigorating the economy, we’re going to fall anyway if everyone is living their lives in fear,” Serebin said in our recent interview. “But what if Michelle Obama put out inspiring messages to keep everybody centered and balanced? What if she were working on a campaign of hope to mothers?”
If the First Lady made an effort to gather up mothers who would like to give back and talk about positive parenting and send them out in droves, she could count Serebin among the happy recruits. Essentially, this would be support for fostering harmony and hope inside the household to work in tandem with the larger role government is playing.
If even half the societal energy that’s been expended bashing the mother of the octuplets could be harnessed and funneled instead into solutions that tap mothers who want to extend their love of mothering outside of themselves and their households and contribute it to the greater good, we’d be getting somewhere.
In the aforementioned speech, Obama called for a more conscientious focus on higher education. As he well knows, government can and should go only so far in making that happen. What if a teenager is excited about a future using his artistic gifts, but his parents are steering him to a business-centered education at a school that is not a good fit for him? Will he finish school or become one of the dropouts Obama cited? If he finishes, will he be happy and productive on the business track or disinterested and unproductive?
This is where Serebin’s brand of coaching comes in.
“There is a lot of talking to children instead of with them,” Serebin said. “I just visited a high school where they want me to give a workshop to help parents transition kids into college because there’s a lot of fighting going on.”
Serebin’s approach is to start with finding out the child’s big dream, as opposed to picking a college first. A parent might have visions of their alma mater, for instance, but it might not be a logical fit for the child’s long-term plan.
“If you figure out their big dream, then you have to figure out the best environment to succeed in getting there,” Serebin said. “You want a place that will nurture their gifts and talents and take them to that dream.”
If people like Serebin were called in to deal with uncommunicative families more often, I wonder if life coaches like me would eventually see our client pool dry up. I often get the 30- or 40-something adults who were steered from their passion to something more “practical” by parents or other (usually) well-meaning folks who projected their own fears on to impressionable children. Imagine if those people were made aware of what they were doing earlier in the process.
Of course Serebin’s work extends beyond the purely vocational aspects of guiding children, but it is this piece that seems particularly pertinent given the ideas President Obama just expressed and the extraordinary challenges this economy presents.
“We’re all being bombarded with negative messages [from the media] right now,” Serebin said. “There’s so much negativity and fear. Yoga instructors teach from a place of higher consciousness. That got me thinking, how do we change the messages we’re sending out?”
Maybe by being acutely aware that our adult behavior is being absorbed and modeled by children. Maybe by asking for help when we need it and even when we’re not sure if we do. Maybe by latching on to the possibilities presented by a President and First Lady whose parenting of young children is an example to an attentive nation.
“This country needs and values the talents of every American,” Obama said in his speech.
Building stronger families where those talents can flourish is at the heart of it all.
Nancy Colasurdo is a practicing life coach and freelance writer. Her Web site is www.nancola.com. Please direct all questions/comments to FOXGamePlan@gmail.com.
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