I was walking out of my hotel in Leavenworth, a crazy little town in the mountains of eastern Washington State designed to look like Bavaria, when I met the most remarkable characters.

A lovely woman carried a small pocket dog inside her coat, heading for a comfort break. I couldn’t resist. Her dog was so cute I called out to them both and as she approached, the woman told me all about this little canine cutie-pie named Chee Chee Rodriquez.

Chee Chee was a rescue dog, mistreated by a brutal owner who broke many of her teeth and a few bones in her face. She is smaller than most small cats. The shelter workers who rescued her called this amazing lady, Kathy Ketchum, who is quite familiar with traumatized creatures since she works with traumatized children. Kathy said yes to Chee Chee and a star was born.

Chee Chee is about to receive her certificate as an assistance dog. Kathy takes her to nursing homes and to schools with troubled kids where they work their magic. And magic it is, guys. These two beautiful people – one two-legged and one four – attract others like magnets, for how else to explain my calling out to them? When I travel I keep to myself.

It was then I noticed the rainbow over the mountain. Kathy winked and said, “it’s actually a double rainbow”, and as we watched, it formed its full arch. The rainbow got brighter as Kathy told me two important truths she passes to children and that I share with you now.

First, she tells them that if they are judged, it’s only their “wrapping” that others see critically. When she was young, she had polio and a walker. When the teasing got too much for her and her heart was breaking, her father told her, “It’s just your wrapper they are judging. Imagine it’s your birthday party and you’ve received two gifts. One is beautifully wrapped with colorful paper and a beautiful big bow and the other is a brown shopping bag. Naturally, you’ll open the pretty one first, figuring that it holds the best present. Inside is a $5 bill, which is pretty good. Inside the brown paper bag, though, is a $100 bill waiting just for you. So you can’t tell the gift by its wrapping. Always look for the gift inside, regardless of what it looks like.” She tells the kids she meets that they hold that $100 bill inside themselves, waiting to be discovered.

Then she told me that she teaches children how to be the most popular kid at school. “If you see a new child, go talk to them. If you see a shy one, invite them to your table and introduce them to your friends. If someone is being bullied, stand up to the bullies and put your arm around the one being picked on. Give them the gift of your acceptance and protection. Invite all the misfits to your lunch table, and soon you’ll be the most popular kid in your school. My two nieces took my advice and each became Homecoming Queen two years in a row.”

All the while she softly spoke, Chee Chee looked me square in the eye.

The rainbow became so big, so double, it became surreal. I began to wonder if this woman was real, with her magic dog and angelic presence. We finished our conversation and when she hugged me goodbye I felt a warm sensation in my heart as real as my heartbeat itself.

If you know any children who are hurting, please share Kathy’s stories. Our most important job as adults is to offer hope to others who are losing theirs. Children are so vulnerable. The hurts they sustain often last a lifetime and can derail them from their life’s purpose. Reframing their situation as Kathy’s Dad did for her can bring them back from the brink.

Parental Over-involvement

By Marilee Jones

When we step into a young person’s life and dominate, making the decisions and deflecting responsibility, we actually hurt their path into adulthood.  Childhood is the time of experimenting, when roles are tried on and discarded, values tested and changed, when failure is a healthy option and the best teacher.  Just as keeping a child hidden away from the world to protect them only hurts their socialization in the end, becoming overly involved in their college process robs them of the chance to know themselves better, to have faith in their own choices, to develop the legs that must hold them in the world.

By Marilee Jones

If you want to assess the quality of your own life, take a step back and observe your child’s.  Chances are, they are so busy with every spare moment taken up with homework or extra-curricular activities, enrichment activities, the Internet, texting or twittering.  Our kids are the busiest young people on the planet, struggling to live up to adult expectations, participating actively with adults in all aspects of planning daily life.

I call this generation “human doings” instead of “human beings” because so much of their awake time is spent doing things.  We’ve trained them into the belief that we value them for the product they produce, the goals they score, the grades they earn, the attention they attract, the colleges they get admitted to.  We no longer seem to value their just ‘being’.

America is an action country and New York is its extreme.  In many circles, you are only as good as your last success and success is always based in action.  Because we want to help our kids get ahead, we expect them to win win win and we all know that winning takes preparation time.  Action is good and necessary for our overall happiness, but action without rest, without experiencing, is not the complete human experience and is the reason we live such stressful lives.

What is a life lived well?  In addition to action, it always includes rest, contemplation, reverence and fun.

Now consider that many of our kids live their lives in kinetic energy, all action, doing, producing, with little rest time or time to think.  The problem with constant activity is that there is no time for creativity, imagination, even happiness.  Because they can get so out of balance, it isn’t long before some kids begin to get sick.

This chronic action state has serious consequences for our culture.   More on this later.

From the Inside…

By Marilee Jones

Can Our Parental Help Really Hinder Our Kids?

So many parents today are completely mystified about the college admissions process, and for good reason.  If we didn’t go to college, or if we studied in another country, we might find the college admissions process to be intimidating.  If we attended college, we probably remember a simpler admissions process, one unaccompanied by box loads of view books, monthly emails and phone calls from eager admissions staffers and student interns working to establish brand loyalty earlier than the competition.  Our own admissions process consisted of hearing about colleges from friends/older siblings/adults, taking the SATS at the last possible minute with no preparation, filling out and submitting the application to a college.  Most often, our parents were not involved because we Baby Boomers and Gen Xers lived in Kid World, rarely intersecting with the adults around us.  We applied, we got in, we enrolled. Pretty simple.  Not a lot of angst about choice of school.  Most of us applied to colleges in our own local areas in the era before so many colleges became ‘national’.

Now we are witnessing our own child getting mail from colleges, maybe from test-coaching businesses, years in advance. Our child might be disinterested or scared or out of the house doing extracurricular activities to get into college, too busy to even think about choosing one.  We might be choking with the thought of how we’ll pay the tuition- especially now when banks have limited lending – or how we’ll live without our child around or how fast our life is moving now.  Our child, in turn, is practicing their independence and may be making life very difficult for us in characteristic teenage fashion.  No wonder we want to take charge.  Taking charge just feels better than having life happen to us. In desperation, we wonder how can we help our child get the edge…

This is where the trouble begins and boundaries get crossed.  This is when we feel pressure to intervene, to make the process of applying to college as easy as possible for our child, because we can’t bear to see them hurt, anxious or more stressed.  We can figure out what to do.  There is always a means to an end, right?

Unfortunately, being overly involved in your child’s life and taking too much responsibility for your child’s college application process can actually be harmful to them.  While you think you are being helpful to your busy child by making all of the phone calls to college admissions offices, and managing the application process, the admissions personnel on the other end are drawing a range a conclusions about your child, and all of them are bad.  For example, when they hear only from the parent, they can assume that the student isn’t interested in their school (not good in this competitive climate), or that the student doesn’t know how to prioritize (too busy to talk to us?  Not right for us), or that the student is too passive and connected to parents (not ready for college).  In addition, by stepping in to ‘help’, you are sending the message to your child that they are not good enough/smart enough/mature enough to apply to college on their own.  It undermines their confidence at the very time they need to gather their strength to move through this difficult passage.  Worst of all, by taking the actions your child should be taking, you are training them to be passive when colleges are actually looking for whole healthy people with intellectual curiosity, drive to answer questions, curiosity to ask previously unasked questions.  Colleges are looking for people poised for success, who have already developed baseline skills to prepare them to handle a rigorous professional life, people with the emotional intelligence and social competence to work hard while having professional longevity and joy in their career.

Sadly, we see many parents so committed to their child having an outstanding college application that they miss out on some of the joy of raising children.  They fear that unless their child keeps up with their over-scheduled friends they will lose out in college admissions and not be admitted to a good school.  The tragedy here is that not only is this not true, but the very cornerstone of a healthy relationship between parents and children – quality time – is often dropped in the rush for perfection.  Arranging the finest opportunities for their children is not a parent’s best opportunity for influence, just as shuttling children between activities is not quality time.

Nothing will create children poised for success in college and in life more than the knowledge that their parents are absolutely and unconditionally in love with them.  This love and attention is best demonstrated when parents serve as role models and family members make time to cherish one another.  The most valuable and useful character traits that will prepare their children for success arise not from extracurricular or academic commitments, but from a firm grounding in parental love and guidance.  It’s about raising happy, well-adjusted adolescents for whom there will be the right college, not trying to force a child to become someone they are not just to get into a college they will hate while making the parents look good.