A friend asked re: Attachment Parenting International’s Eight  Principles of Parenting, “I wonder what this would look like for teen years? I'm curious about the equivalent [8] principles and what they might look like? Any thoughts are appreciated.”
The API’s Eight Principles in full are here: http://www.attachmentparenting.org/principles/principles.php
In brief:

1. Prepare for pregnancy,  birth and parenting
2. Feed with love and respect
3. Respond with sensitivity
4. Use nurturing touch
5. Ensure safe sleep, physically and emotionally
6. Provide consistent and loving care
7. Practice positive discipline
8. Strive for balance in your personal and family life

So how would these apply to parents of teens? Pretty much the same with a couple of tweaks.

1. Prepare
Read books. Talk to parents who have children you like and relationships you wish for with your kids. Consult with a therapist; clear out your own baggage and run situations past a neutral third party.

2. Feed with respect and love
Hopefully, you’ve been doing this all along. Incorporate more education. Explain why what they eat is important. Educate your kids how processed food is engineered to appeal to our natural desire for fat, sugar and salt. Follow their eating rhythms. Model good food behavior yourself (have an issue there? Back to the books or therapist or self-help group for you!)

3. Respond with sensitivity.
Teens can be confused and confusing. Their behavior can cause us and them embarrassment. Perhaps they were going for glamorous, not strip club, but they are still working out the fine points.  Ask questions and don’t feel like you need to know everything. Be OK with being the structure they need to push away from.  Remember their brains are reorganizing (yes, go research that) and their bodies are morphing. They don’t know who they are any more than we do. That Martian who replaced your kid is just as startling to them. Love the beautiful being in the midst of the chaos even if you aren’t sure what’s going on in there.

4. Use nurturing touch
We don’t touch our teens enough. Our kids need to know that they can get nurturing touch (a basic need of the human body) without being in a sexual situation. One great side effect of binge watching together was the “puppy pile” on the couch; it was fine to get some mom or dad snuggle time while we wasted a snowy afternoon in front of the TV. Keep kissing your kids good night and hugging them, even if it becomes a joke.

5. Ensure safe sleep, physically and emotionally
Teen sleep patterns can be different from the rest of the family. This has a physiological basis and is one of the main objections I have to high school. Teens naturally stay up late and sleep in. Trying to wrangle their bodies into a more societally acceptable rhythm is costly to their health. There are ways to make sure your kids are in the house and unable to be on their devices after a certain time (when mom and dad need to be sleeping so they can function). Use your parental controls on those devices and let your kids read all night, write all night or craft all night, but not text and watch porn all night. Then let them sleep in.

6. Provide consistent and loving care
This is what you have always strived to do. If you’re having troubles with that, get thee to therapy.

7. Practice positive discipline
Talk it out. State what is objectionable. Ask why it happened. How can the wrong-doer make amends? How do we move forward? Wonderful learning happens when mistakes are made.

8. Strive for balance in your personal and professional life
As that old chestnut goes: children learn what they live. As parents, we need to earn the respect and admiration of our children; after the age of nine or ten they start catching on if we’re being hypocrites. Are you the kind of person you want your child to be? Again, it’s all about you, the parent. Are you taking good care of yourself? Are your needs getting met? Are you aware of places in your life where you need some help? Are your behaviors and values in line with what you are asking of your teens’ behaviors? Are you walking your talk? Are you treating your children with the same respect you ask from them?

These principles apply to teens as well as babies. We must assume that our child is asking for something important in every behavior they exhibit. If there is something amiss then we need to look to our supports for help. And, in their twenties we get to learn how to be parents to grown adults. Very exciting stuff ahead!

Originally published as a health article in Allen's Creek Living magazine

It used to be a mystery: why do humans need to “waste” eight hours (one third) of everyday sleeping? Sleep is so essential to our mental health that if we don’t sleep we go crazy; sleep deprivation is a form of torture. And it is not just our mental health that suffers.  My clients who track their blood pressure find that their blood pressure is higher after a night of inadequate sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation has been found to contribute to increased hypertension, chronic heart disease and diabetes. So what is it about sleep that is so essential?
Researcher Maiken Nedergaard, MD, DMSc, and her colleagues at the University of Rochester have solved a big part of the puzzle. Our brains have a cleansing system that operates more efficiently while we sleep. This cleansing system (called the glymphatic system) bathes the brain in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) under a higher pressure than was previously understood.

Sleep changes the cellular structure of the brain. Nedergaard and her team discovered that when we are sleeping, the space between our brain cells expands so that a greater volume of the CSF can flow into the brain. The CSF flushes waste products out of the brain and into the blood stream where they can be removed from the body.

One of the substances removed by the glymphatic system is beta-amyloid protein. Researchers believe that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by an excess of beta-amyloid proteins in the brain, so they are looking at the relationship between sleep and the development of Alzheimer’s. For those more interested in productivity than health it’s important to note that people who are drunk outperform people who are sleep deprived.

Individuals can vary in their need for sleep. Many people insist they don’t need a full eight hours of sleep to perform and feel well. Excessive sleeping may indicate poor health.  Some researchers believe that we don’t need to get our eight hours in one continuous episode; we are able to get the benefits of sleep in segments that include napping during the day. But all agree that about eight hours of sleep total are essential to optimal health and performance.

Or as Nedergaard says, “We need sleep. It cleans up the brain.”