Mark Bertin, MD and Your Child’s Resilience and Independence

I’m so excited about this year’s Change for Good Summit: Building Resilience in Anxious Times. In case you don't know about our summit--it's free and online so you can access it in your own time and space. This year it focuses on anxiety. Grace and I have been interviewing some really amazing people who have some really amazing information and insights to share and I can’t wait for you to get your hands on all of it!

My interview with Mark Bertin, MD has really been sticking in my mind and I’d like to tell you why. If you have kids, work with kids, or ever where a kid, you need to hear what this guy has to say.

I love hearing the stories of other physicians who, starting from a strong background in science and conventional medicine, have had the intellectual curiosity to explore ideas and modalities that are not generally included in the purview of conventional medicine and, finding them beneficial, have also had the courage to bring these ideas and modalities to their practices.

Dr. Bertin is a neurodevelopmental pediatrician (meaning he specializes in children’s developmental issues, such as learning problems, ADD/ADHD, and autism spectrum disorders) who has integrated mindfulness concepts into his practice, when families are open to them.

Dr. Bertin started studying and practicing mindfulness for himself. After personally experiencing its amazing benefits, and, as more and more studies proved its effectiveness, started offering mindfulness ideas and practices to his patients. He has written four books so far: How Children Thrive: The Practical Science of Raising Independent, Resilient, and Happy Kids; Mindful Parenting for ADHD; The Family ADHD Solution; and co-authored Teaching Mindfulness Skills to Kids and Teens.

I also really like ideas that simplify complex topics and/or bring together and show the commonality of seemingly disparate concepts, like how the Vedic model of a human integrates all the practices in body, mind, and energy medicines, or how consulting with your inner wisdom simplifies choosing the right way to eat, exercise, or treat your illness. Dr. Bertin points out another such idea that simplifies parenting and unifies many ideas in child behavior and development: Executive Function.

If you haven’t heard of executive function before or are not quite sure what it is, Dr. Bertin explains it very well:  “In essence, executive function’s job is to integrate what we encounter in life with what we know and then decide how to respond.” Excellent executive function has been correlated with improved health, wealth, happiness and success. And, just like you can do exercises to build your biceps, you can do exercises to build your (and your child’s) executive function.

Executive function can be thought of as your inner manager. It helps you manage your

·         Attention: focusing when needed, shifting when needed

·         Actions: self-control and learn from mistakes

·         Tasks: helping you organize, plan, prioritize, and manage your time

·         Information: your ability to organize, remember, and retrieve it

·         Emotions: your ability to experience them without necessarily acting on them and

·         Efforts: helping you persevere, sustain, and work efficiently.

I hope you can join us in the summit and hear what Dr. Bertin has to say about how to de-stress your parenting while improving your child’s resilience, independence…and chances for a happy, successful life. Invite your family, friends, teachers…anyone you know who has or works with children. The Summit airs in late November. Watch for the registration email in your inbox come mid-November. 

How Do You Raise Your Kids to be Happy and Healthy?

If we want to make the world a better place, we have to fill it with happier, healthier people. That means you and your children.

If you are already wounded, sick, angry, disillusioned, depressed, apathetic, anxious, or in any other way disempowered, know that healing is always possible. The physical, psychological, and energetic medicines are getting pretty good at what they do. You just have to search out what you need. But, despite all their combined power, prevention is still the best medicine.

To that end, good parenting is the most important job there is for making a better world. And, just as the healing professions have made a lot of progress in the last thirty years, so have the ideas and practices that make for effective, humane parenting. One of the best places I’ve found that puts the best parenting ideas and practices together is Hand in Hand Parenting (https://www.handinhandparenting.org/).

They believe in setting developmentally appropriate limits while staying deeply connected to your child. They also believe parents need good support for all they do. One resource for you is their parent club (https://ml233-db3bdb.pages.infusionsoft.net/). They offer an impressive suite of classes and services for parents and families. Much of their material is free, while one-on-one consulting, on-line, and in-person classes are very reasonably priced. They even have trained professionals in many communities around the country (and in 23 countries around the world (https://www.handinhandparenting.org/who-we-are/certified-instructors/)). For example, Michelle Pate is the local instructor here in the Seattle area (https://www.handinhandparenting.org/instructor/michelle-pate/).

I have looked over their material extensively and am impressed. Having helped raise four children of my own to adulthood and worked with families in my practice for 33 years, I know how important parenting is and also how difficult it can be to find good information and help that you can trust. How do you know that what you are doing to help your child learn to deal effectively with life is going to result in them growing up to be humane and strong? It takes a couple of generations to prove that a particular construct and resulting techniques actually work.

If you’ve ever been at your wit’s end with your kids, if you’ve ever been exhausted, worried, uncertain of how to help your child through this behavior or developmental stage, Hand In Hand parenting could be your new go-to resource (https://www.handinhandparenting.org/sitemap/). And they have over thirty years’ experience, so they know their ideas work.

Check them out. See what you think. I hope you are as impressed with them as I am. And, please, give yourself the education and support you need in order to do this most important and challenging endeavor: stewarding big souls in little bodies into adulthood.