So, we are happy to announce that NosVies has just delivered the prototype of its first baby: a children’s book, still warm from the printer, and it looks awesome. There is still some final tuning to do but it will be ready soon. We are also finishing a few other “friendly tools” to accompany our baby on his first journey into the new world.

Its twin brother (a parenting book) is also going to the printer in just a few weeks. And we are reserving the parental right to keep their names secret until their official “birth”.

What we can reveal is that it should be of great interest to any family with children. The team has been doing a fantastic job and working hard to bring these new and innovative products to the birth stage!

In the meantime stay tuned.

And if you would like to be notified when the books make their first appearance, please leave us your email address:

Speak to you soon

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Series: social entrepreneurship, helping others, contagious attitudes

The Net² (aka N2Y2 or NetSquared) conference is being held in California’s Silicon Valley May 29 and 30, 2007.
The goal of the conference is to speed up development of 21 social, humanitarian and ecological projects, mostly North American projects, selected for their potential to make the world a better place by using the Internet.

Some 350 people, including leaders from all walks of life, the media, investors, big business and non-profit organizations, will be putting their heads together to find the best way to help these 21 projects and will vote on how to distribute financial aid. You can follow the feedback of the conference on their blog

I won’t be able to take part in the conference. But I felt the urge to contribute something to this wonderful initiative and also to all the projects (selected or not) that are trying to make a social difference in the world. Helping others is very dear to my heart and I am so glad to discover every day new projects that either contribute to make a difference or build the tools for others to make a difference. But many projects lacks some tools to communicate and publicize their actions. So we are creating some visual supports that we allow them to use freely in their marketing efforts.

On this cartoon, I have been working for the first time with the graphic artist Benjamin Lefort. The goal is to promote the idea of leveraging the web for social changes. And Benjamin did a very good job. Thank you very much for your talent and patience with me.

I am inviting not only Net² and the lucky 21 projects that are getting extra help, but also any non profit organization to use this cartoon as flyers, poster and on their websites as they see fit or as a display. You can add your own organization logo. Simply include a courtesy link to NosVies.com if you use it on your site, so we can enjoy to see who uses it.
(You can get the high resolution version by clicking on the drawing above and just “save it” on your computer. Drop me a line if you do not know how to do add your logo and I will try to give you a hand).

So please, loyal readers and bloggers, spread the message to non profit that they can use our cartoon but also a couple of others here. And we are going to add more in the coming months.

And don’t hesitate to let us know about any other similar events being organized around the world so we can discover more projects and hopefully contribute to them.

PS: I’ve suggested to the Net² organizing team that they give some thought to an equivalent event in Europe, containing a mix of American and European projects to extend collaborations. So, if this idea grabs you, please get in touch and let’s thrash it out.

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Definition

The authoritarian style mainly enforces respect and obedience for instructions and orders through a mechanism of punishment. As a parenting style, it is structured, commanding and control-based.

Inflexible rules are usually very clearly expressed and must be followed to the letter.

Any “bad behaviour” or transgression entails certain sanctions, sometimes physical, or punishments designed to dissuade. Parents frequently use threats or raised voices to control children’s behaviour.

Children are never maltreated but love is taken as assumed, with no need to express or demonstrate it, and parents rarely express or show their feelings. Communication is also fairly limited. Answering back to an order or a decision is seen as a lack of respect.

Authoritarian parents are not very sensitive to their children’s specific needs or desires as individuals, expecting them to be and become what’s asked of them in terms of goals, values and beliefs.

Motivation

For authoritarian parents, the demand to behave prevails over the relationship with their children. The aim is to teach respect and to mould children through strict rules. It’s all about shaping them by permanently controlling their behaviour, teaching them through the repetition of precise instructions.

Children are seen as being incapable of thinking or deciding for themselves what’s right and wrong, and of acting accordingly. By imposing on them a well-defined mode of behaviour, “children will become good, well-brought-up boys or girls”.

My Own Experience

After my illusions about permissive parenting, I thought – to his detriment and to ours – that the authoritarian style was the only option in bringing our eldest child’s uncontrollable behaviour back into line.

I very quickly realized that you had only to frighten children enough to get them to obey. A raised voice, grimaces, threats, punishments, it was all grist to the mill in getting them to behave the way I wanted.

I also concluded that this style was pretty well adapted to children with behaviour problems, such as being too impulsive, aggressive, disrespectful and so on.

I had difficulty being consistent in carrying through this style, but I did it for my son and my wife, who had had to overcompensate for my permissive style.

After long discussions with my wife, watching programmes and readings books, I understood how much children need a fairly strict framework of rules and routines. It reassures them, even if it frustrates at the time.

After a few months of following the structured style, Ilyan became a friendlier, spontaneously more obedient little chap, without losing any of his curiosity and energy.

Over the years, with four children imitating one another, I’ve fluctuated quite a bit between the permissive and the authoritarian style, as the stakes became higher for us as parents.

I think the authoritarian style should have a place only in certain specific situations, because sometimes you need to be able to say a categorical “no” for your instructions to work. Without overdoing it…

In fact, I’m still searching for a style that suits me. It’s probably the democratic style, which we’ll be describing very soon.

The Consequences of the Authoritarian Style in Psychologists’ Eyes

Positives: The children of authoritarian parents tend to be reasonably successful at school and exhibit few behaviour problems.

Negatives: -Children’s ability to decide for themselves isn’t recognized. They tend to be more depressive, with problems of self-esteem and often relationship problems.

-Some may feel intimidated by authority.

-Feeling stifled, others may later rebel more violently and, as a reaction, embark on courses of behaviour contrary to their upbringing. They may also be more prone to the influence of dangerous behaviours like drugs, alcohol, petty crime, etc.

The authoritarian style is the style of societies where children aren’t seen as distinct, independent identities. It is generally prevalent in Western societies, which hand down their knowledge and values from one generation to the next by imitation: “Do as I do, I’m the expert, I know better than you, you’re going to obey the values we’ve been obeying for generations.”

The idea of “family” has changed a great deal. Education is opening up to help children adjust and take their destinies into their own hands. The highly controlling and full-on punishment approach is evolving toward something more complete and constructive.

Series on Parenting styles

Series: social entrepreneurship, helping others, contagious attitudes

Nowadays there are numerous programs for both men and women who have decided to give a helping hand to young people who are in trouble or simply facing their future alone.

Through a dynamic relationship, they are sharing their experience, their know-how and their worldview with youngsters.

Call it sponsorship, mentoring or coaching, whatever name it’s given, it’s a tangible, proactive, human relationship first and foremost – a partnership that exists to point to other possibilities in life, to provide new breathing space, to help find new ways out of a rut - a partner who explains and always listens patiently.

After all, when you’re bent on becoming an athlete, a surgeon, an entrepreneur, an artist or a craftsman, what’s more inspiring, what’s more real than talking to one? What’s more motivating than to meet people who have overcome difficulties and succeeded against the odds in unsympathetic environments?

This is an approach that interests me a lot. Certainly, I gave from the time to time courses to children in fairly underprivileged areas and coached the members of my teams in the professional realm. But I’ve never taken someone under my wing to guide – other than my own four young children, of course!

In the meantime, I’d like to make my contribution to all forms of mentoring through our drawings with Clement. If you like them, e-mail them, print them, post them up!

Help get them circulating, especially around social associations and social entrepreneurs who help others to come to grips with their lives, to explain what you do, recruit mentors or raise funds. 

This is also the desire and the project shared by my fellow Daniel Bassill, who is working to bring together mentor associations at the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in Chicago in mid-May 2007 in order to enhance the renown and impetus of such institutions.

Dan focuses on building the infrastructure that supports the growth of volunteer based tutoring/mentoring programs in inner city neighborhoods.

While he brings people together for conferences, he also draws people to a library of information at http://www.tutormentorconnection.org, and has organized a blog exchange, that encourages people like me and you to become active in building a network of volunteers, leaders, donors, etc. who will all work toward building this needed infrastructure. Check his blog as well.

Dan suggested that we do this cartoon for the conference. He’s hoping that other graphic artists and infomantics specialists will be inspiried by what we have done, and will find ways to use their own talent to draw volunteers and donors to tutor/mentor programs throughout the world. We wanted to do a series of illustrated post on mentoring anyway so this is just the perfect opportunity to spread the message through a wonderful initiative.

Use our cartoons, add your organization logo on it in the upper left corner if it helps, just credit us back for it with a link to our site. If you need help to add your logo, just email us.

Send us other ideas for cartoons that might strengthen your mentor mission. And give us all some inspiration and tell us about your experience as a mentoring organization, as a mentor or as a protégé.

Update: In the French version of this blog post, I have added some links to mentor organizations and I got feedback that people applied to mentor kids thanks to the post. Since I became n#1 in google on the search “motivating people to become mentors”I am going to add some links here as well. There are many great mentoring organizations but I am going to list a few main ones. Please contact me to recommend more in areas not covered.

-  Mentor.org regrouping hundreds of organization in the USA

- Big Brothers Big Sisters: very successul national mentoring organization in the USA and in other countries as well

- European Network of Children and Youth Mentoring Organizations: with a long list of European mentoring organizations

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Today we were fortunate enough to have one of our cartoons chosen to appear on tv: Toute une Histoire (The Whole Story) on France 2, the main French public tv channel,  at 1:50 p.m., presented by Jean-Luc Delarue.

The programme’s subject is “Do you have to separate to save your relationship?” Taking a little break from each other so you can start afresh, separating so you can find each other again, keeping a healthy distance from each other… These are expressions we’re all familiar with!

Our cartoon depicts a young lady suggesting to her partner they sleep in separate rooms. At first it was for the sake of comfort, then it became a philosophy: space to breathe, joie de vivre, rekindled desire, the key to a lasting relationship.

Clément’s keen eye has done it again! The Réservoir Productions team seem to have done a lot of loving. A big thank you to Julie Grangeon and her editor-in-chief for their confidence in us.

Please don’t hesitate to write in with your opinion and experiences relating to our comments.

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Series: Loving your children is special

Ah!! Our latest little addition, how we love her!

You must have noticed. We love them so much they become our No. 1 topic of conversation!

It’s very simple. Not content just to live with them on a permanent basis, we talk about them all the time to anybody and everybody. And we go into detail about everything last little thing they do. Anything! They’re exceptionally gifted and the whole world has to know about it.

We love them so much we’re just bursting to tell everyone else how marvellous and irresistible they are. It’s impossible not to drop into the conversation the fact that they’ve started doing this, that or the other… before other children of their age, naturally!

“Hey, you know what? You’ll never guess what she did this morning! Bla bla bla bla bla…”

We love them so much we bring up tiniest little detail we think is out of the ordinary. We discuss it, question it, describe what’s happening and give reports of how it’s developing, sometimes even when we haven’t been asked to.

Ah!! Our little darlings, we love them so much we talk about them a lot.

Too much sometimes?

Possibly… But then we love them so much!

Please don’t hesitate to share your ideas on the subject and – why not? – tell us all about your children.

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Thanks to the magic of the internet, today we are doing a joint post with the Dr. Karen whom I’ve only known for a few weeks. We bumped into one another through our cartoon series on the “Our Love Life” and we decided to collaborate on a common post. Karen writes the main content and we do a summary and also the creative cartoon. The topic we agreed upon was suggested by Karen: trying to change the other in a couple.

In her article, Dr. Karen speaks about the expectation that some people have upon entering into a relationship. She says that some people believe that he or she will be able to change the traits of the other person — whether the traits are undesirable, somewhat irritating, or just a new behaviour they’d like the mate to have.

However, to maintain such an expectation is a recipe for disillusion and frustration. You can invest a lot of time and energy into trying to change someone but most of the time, even if it works for a little while, the original behaviour will return, in one form or another.

Change can be done but only if someone really wants to. Yet, it is a difficult process and, therefore, people often don’t change. Certainly, trying to get someone else to change is even harder, as well as inappropriate.

Enjoy the cartoon and share your thoughts and stories with us. To read the full article, go to Dr. Karen Sherman’s blog

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Definition
The permissive, or indulgent, style of parenting came to the fore in the 1950s and 60s. Its goal? Freer, better-adjusted children who shape themselves while learning from their experiences.

Parents put few limits on their children’s behaviour. They are watchful and attentive. They spend a great deal of time with them, explaining things and discussing everything. Children are not forced to follow a precise model of behaviour. No rules are imposed on them. There’s no planning or strict routine.

Bad behaviour from children is overlooked and everything that comes from them is lovingly accepted.

They are spared any upset, opposition or confrontation wherever possible.

Motivation
This parental approach is adopted out of a fear of rejection, either because permissive or indulgent parents have an anti-confrontational style or because they fear their children will harbour negative feelings towards them.

At the heart of the permissive or indulgent style of parenting is the idea that love and attention to children’s needs are what matter most.

This love and attention are more important than any limits and rules: children will have all the time in the world to discover and incorporate these as they grow up. In the meantime, such a permissive style of education will make children feel unique and they will be better adjusted as a result.

My Own Experience
This was the style I most aspired to for my children. I cherished the hope that by telling them things and explaining things to them, my children would simply “self-regulate” and fulfil their potential.

I have to admit that with our first child this method soon failed. He steadily turned into a rampant tyrant, unsatisfied most of the time.

I later learned that this style was more suited to children who are rather shy and reserved, and needed freedom and few constraints to develop – which wasn’t at all the case with our eldest boy, who was naturally open and outgoing!

This type of child needs a more structured education with clear limits – an approach that avoids hysterics and loss of emotional control in children, who otherwise become more and more demanding without really being happy either.

The Consequences of the Permissive Style in Psychologists’ Eyes
Positives: Children have good self-esteem. They are free, creative, open and rarely prone to depression.

Negatives: Children tend to get weaker high school results during adolescence. They tend to be more aggressive in their social relationships, never having learned to deal with limits and frustration, all the more so if their parents have tolerated aggressive behaviour.

Having had too much help, they may lack maturity and for the same reason, may prove to be less responsible and independent.

Some psychologists think the permissive style was a valid option for the 1950 and 60s. After years of strict and stern education, the need for freedom and the space to breathe were very real.

But today’s less supervised children generally are open to a whole host of resources and possibilities. Without clear limits, they may feel lost and confused. Left to their own devices, they may well make some really bad choices without realizing it.

Next up, the authoritative style of parenting. See you soon!

Now, with hindsight and experience, we can see that our discussions were the product of would-be parents with no experience or expertise in the subject.

A tender mixture of dreams, demands, childhood memories and adulthood desires. First child, first grief! Oddly enough, our little one didn’t quite behave the way our theory had envisaged!! Since then our discussions have been livelier…

I couldn’t find my own style as a father. I aspired to be the ideal father. But I was totally powerless before our first babe, who took full advantage. The more inches I gave him, the more miles he’d take. My wife took a more pragmatic line and had to make up for all my ditherings.

I had to come down to earth and find my own style. Not without effort on everybody’s part…

Since then, through my own experience, reflections, enraptured observations of our four children and copious amounts of reading, I’ve studied the four main styles of education that parents can adopt. Each of these styles has its effects. Powerful effects. Profound effects.

How to educate – in other words, how to teach a child to become an adult living in society – should be better explained to parents.

It would enable each of us to adopt the style that suits us best – to find the most natural, most authentic style for us. Nothing should be left to chance where such an important subject is concerned!

There are two main parameters in the four main parenting styles:

1) parents’ demands on their children in terms of mature behaviour and respect for the rules

and 2) parents’ sensitivity to their children’s needs and how they respond to them, recognition of their children’s individuality and the way they express their love towards them.

The four parenting styles are: the permissive or indulgent style, the authoritative style, the democratic style and the disinvested style. They are determined by being more or less sensitive to children’s needs and more or less demanding in terms of their behaviour.

These are pretty big categories, of course, and parents may recognize a bit of themselves in several of them, depending on the situation. In some couples, the father and mother may even consciously or unconsciously adopt different styles.

In any case, it prompts us to truly ask ourselves what style of parenting we want to adopt, fully aware of the decision’s likely implications for our children.

In our upcoming articles and illustrations, we invite you to explore these different parenting styles in detail and their effects on your children.

Meanwhile, don’t hesitate to write in with your own experiences about discovering parenting styles.