Mojo Mom Podcast and Kidpower -- Skills for Safety and Independence

I am having a great time talking with my Courageous Parenting contributors on The Mojo Mom Podcast. We'll be mixing things up in this series, not doing all of the Courageous Parenting interviews back-to-back, but I hope to have everyone on before the book comes out. We are just putting the final manuscript to bed, so this is a big week, hooray!

I always love talking with my colleague and mentor, Irene van der Zande about the personal safety skills she teachers as the co-founder of Kidpower. Her training is amazing--I am doing my best to tell everyone about Kidpower, and I teach classes in the Triangle area as the Center Director of Kidpower North Carolina. I taught four Kidpower classes myself this week, which was a wonderful opportunity to get into action with kids in my community, after doing six intensive days of instructor training in Santa Cruz, California earlier this month.

So I encourage you to listen to the podcast, check out the international organization's web site, and consider getting real-life Kidpower training.

Listen to the podcast now:



Here is the description of this week's show, Courageous Parenting Series: Mojo Mom and Kidpower

How can parents teach their kids to be independent and safe? Kidpower personal safety skills are designed to do just that, for people of all ages. Listen in and learn how to "co-pilot" your kids (without becoming a "helicopter parent") as they take their first steps out of the nest.

You can register to get a free electronic download of Courageous Parenting when it is released in Spring 2010 by signing up on MojoMom.com.

Kidpower founder on How to Respond to Verbal Put-Downs

Kidpower founder Irene van der Zande shared ideas of how kids can respond safely to verbal put-downs, standing up for themselves while de-escalating the situation. Another great segment on The View from the Bay.

Irene is a chapter contributor for my forthcoming anthology, Courageous Parenting. You can sign up on MojoMom.com to receive a free electronic download of the new book when it comes out.

What the Party Crashers Can Teach Us About Personal Safety

Everyone is abuzz about the White House Party Crashers Michaele and Tareq Salahi. Some of the media coverage has been way overblown--former FBI Profiler Clint van Zandt just about blew a gasket on The Today Show last week talking about the unlikely, extreme things that could have happened. But whether you write this off as a reality-show publicity stunt, or consider it to be a serious breach of security, this incident does provide a great example that we can learn from in order to prevent real-life wrongdoing "party crashers" from crossing our own personal boundaries.

You see, the Sahalis got in by acting and dressing and acting the part--dressing to the nines, in fact. Michaele looked gorgeous in her formal bright red sari. I think that the fact that she had on such a specific dress for the state dinner to welcome the Indian Prime Minister really helped them get in. Most Caucasian, American women would not have such an outfit already hanging in their closets, so she clearly looked like she belonged at this specific event. By dressing so appropriately and distinctively, she was hiding in plain sight!

What else helped them get in? Today Maureen Dowd's column says:

"The Washington Post reported the Secret Service guard waved in the Salahis, breaking the rules, because he 'was persuaded by the couple’s manner and insistence as well as the pressure of keeping lines moving on a rainy evening.'"

This is how gate crashers and boundary crossers operate. If someone means you harm, if they came running at you with a gun, you would see them coming from a mile away and get out of there.

But if they follow a cultural script, they can not only get close to you, they can also get you to commit to the early stages of interaction. Once you have committed to the interaction, it's harder to reject the person later. Think about the steps leading up to a date-rape scenario. If a woman accepts a man's invitation to go out on a date, has dinner and drinks, maybe he's even paying, when they get to her door at the end of the night and he wants to come in and she doesn't want him to, it's harder for her to say "No" to him if he's persistent about coming in, because through her actions she's already committed to being with him up to that point. It's more difficult to turn him away, but not impossible, and this is exactly why we each need personal safety training, because predators count on their ability to twist cultural scripts and use them against us. We have to be prepared to abandon the "polite" script and ditch our previous "commitments" to change course when someone wishes to harm us.

Irene van der Zande, founder of Kidpower, says “In our Kidpower personal safety workshops, we tell our students that they already know how to be nice and polite, but that they are safest if they make being nice a conscious decision rather than an automatic habit. We have them practice imagining that they are not sure a situation is safe even if the other person is very friendly, and then leaving or setting boundaries rather than getting involved with this person.”

Then there is what I think of as the moment of confusion, which the Salahis created by showing up looking so good and insisting that they belonged, all while there were many other people waiting in line behind them. So the Secret Service waved them in. When we are busy, distracted, emotionally triggered, inconvenienced, or not sure what to do, that moment of confusion can leave us vulnerable to doing things we ordinarily wouldn't do. Most of the time, when we aren't sure what to do, it serves us well to do the nice and polite thing and go along with what everyone else is doing. But this convenient mental shortcut can be used against us, as predators deliberately create the moment of confusion to create an opportunity to hurt a victim.

If I asked you whether you'd go to a private location with a stranger who approached you in a parking lot, what would you say you would do? You wouldn't go, right? Not in a million years, you might think. But what if a man came up to you, frantic, pleading, "Help me! My baby isn't breathing!" and ushered you to his car in a remote area? This is a powerful lure. In the moment of confusion, you respond to the idea of an emergency and the emotional trigger of a baby in distress, and if you don't stop to think about it, you might immediately follow him, especially if he emphatically and convincingly rushes you into it.

Now I am NOT saying that you should not ever help a person in distress, but I am saying that you should be aware of your surroundings and never lose sight of the context of what you are doing. In a moment of confusion, think about hitting a "pause" button in your mind. It can be a brief pause, but it can allow you to collect yourself, analyze the whole situation, and think about your response. You have choices: Can you call 911, or go to a populated store for help, or get mall security, rather than blindly rushing into a potentially dangerous, isolated situation? You can assess the environment: is this day, night, near other people or sources of help? What are your potential vulnerabilities and options? For young kids, by the way, I stand by the idea that adults should not ask kids for help. If this parking lot situation happened to a kid they should go find safety, such as a store, and tell the store employees what has happened. Then those adults can follow up and call 911 either because a baby really needs help, or there is a man luring people with a false story.

The moment of confusion does not always look so dramatic. It can be simple and fast. When I traveled to France this fall, I kept my awareness about me, especially when visiting major tourist sites that are known pickpocketing venues. We were in Notre Dame Cathedral one day, a crowded environment full of people milling around, and a situation where I knew to keep a firm hold on my purse, when a French woman approached me and asked me in French whether people had to pay to tour the church. I answered her quickly and kept moving to make sure I didn't get separated from my family. Later, I realized this could very likely have been a pickpocket set-up, with her working to divert my attention while someone else went after my purse, or my husband's wallet as he was distracted, too, making sure we did not get separated in the crowd.

Why do I think this was a deliberately staged moment of confusion? Because why would a French person ask an American tourist what to do in this situation. I was the one who should have been "lost." Also, everyone else in Paris took one look at me and immediately addressed me in English (even though I was trying to speak French!). In Notre Dame we were not in a situation where there was a ticket taker visible, and we weren't even near the entrance; we were well inside looking up at the stained glass windows. I'll never know for sure what this nice-seeming woman's intentions were, but I do know that her actions evoked that moment of confusion feeling in me. Fortunately, I did not allow myself to get too sidetracked, and I stayed with my family and we all held on to our belongings, too.

Personal safety expert and author Gavin de Becker talks about developing one's intuition and the key is to not only listen to your intuition, but to also ACT ON IT. If you don't have a good feeling about your date, the time to draw the line is early on, before you get in a private, more vulnerable setting. Gavin de Becker's books talk about early warning signs of trouble to watch out for. For example, if your date fails to hear the word "No" in any situation, that person is trying to control you. Knowing that, if your date pressures you to accept a drink you said you don't want, you can see that not only should you refuse the drink, but you can take that as a sign to end the date early.

As parents, the action part is incredibly important. If you have a bad feeling about a babysitter, coach, or any person who has a major and controlling role in your child's life, it is really important to take those intuitions seriously and follow up on them by getting more information about what is going on, if possible, and removing your child from that situation if necessary, even if it's embarrassing or inconvenient for you.

Most people are good and most of the time acting nice and polite serves us well and keeps us on the right track. But the White House party crashers remind us that just because someone looks the part, acts nice, and insists that they belong, that does not automatically mean that they deserve an open door into our lives.

Sign up now on the MojoMom.com home page to receive a free e-book of the new Courageous Parenting anthology, edited by Amy Tiemann and featuring a chapter written by Kidpower founder Irene van der Zande, when the book comes out in March 2010!

I feel like Forrest Gump walking through the history of Overparenting

Remember how Forrest Gump walked through famous scenes in history, perhaps not even realizing it at the time? That's how I feel after reading Nancy Gibb's Time Magazine cover story about The Case Against Over-Parenting.

I was happy to see the article since I am hard at work editing the forthcoming anthology Courageous Parenting that aims to give parents the background and skills they need to reverse the tide of overparenting. I agree with some of Nancy Gibbs' analysis, but disagree with other significant aspects of it. Since I have a lot to say on this topic I'll write a series of blog posts. But I want to start by considering my relationship to the recent history of overparenting.

A theme that has defined and will continue to define my life is that I am on the leading edge of Gen X. Born in 1968, I have come to accept my fate playing Jan Brady to the Baby Boomers' position as Marcia: the Boomers are older, more popular, and certainly more powerful. They get there first and set the trends, and we Gen X often get caught in their wake. Overparenting may look largely like a current Gen X phenomenon but I think it has roots in Boomer parents due to their incredible power as a market. When Boomers were teenagers, being a teenager became not only cool, but the lucrative youth market was born. When Boomers started having kids, the market for new baby products and parenting advice took off as well.

Pamela Paul's book Parenting Inc. does a great job of shining a light on the billion-dollar baby-industrial complex, but you only have to walk the aisles of any baby store to see how many gadgets and safety devices there are.

Hard to believe that thirty of forty years ago we didn't even have car seats!

My encounters with modern parenting started even before I had my daughter. From 1996 to 1999, I taught high school in San Francisco, and many of the kids were children of high-achieving Boomers. Teaching was a fantastic experience, but there were definitely signs that parents expected the best for their kids. I was pretty surprised to see that seniors were applying to a dozen or more colleges, when ten years earlier, we typically applied to a handful. The goal went from getting in somewhere good to having a huge array of options to choose from. Some parents were also clearly overinvolved with being their kids' friend and didn't always know how to set the necessary limits for their teens.

Even before then, I had a near-brush with one of the burgeoning trends in parenting. As a Stanford neuroscience graduate student, I was doing research into brain development and I was very interested in critical periods of learning. This became popularized in "zero to three" interventions. Around 1995 I even considered creating a video series that would have predated Baby Einstein. Inspired by the very cool work of neuroscientist Patricia Kuhl, who investigates early language acquisition, I thought about trying to create a video series that would teach babies and kids languages that were very different from their own, such as Japanese for English speakers or vice versa.

On the one hand, maybe I missed out on a multi-gazillion dollar industry, but considering the fact that the Baby Einstein videos didn't actually work, I am not too sorry about taking a different path. I will say though, that being a scientist I would have tested the results to make sure that the products worked! In the meantime, if you want your baby to learn another language I'd recommend hiring a babysitter who is a native speaker.

So, I do believe that marketing is an underlying root cause of overparenting. As our lives were actually getting safer, we were being sold new "problems" in order to sell us new "solutions." By the time we were being sold the BabyPlus Prenatal Education System, I started to pull my hair out, as I wrote about on my CNET blog, (Parent.Thesis) This marketing of overparenting is not only ridiculous, it's offensive to me. There are so many true problems facing families that it is a shameful waste of time, money and attention to try to give your kid a "head start" in the womb. Hopefully one good outcome of the current recession is we can let the most ridiculous stuff go.

In addition to overt marketing messages, this decade's rise of 24-hour news media on cable and online meant a rise in selling fear. CNN.com is one of the worst major news offenders in my experience, in that they sometimes post a story in a headline position which is not new news at all, but rather a scary story from the archives that they are revisiting. I am talking about stories along the lines of this CNN.com post from yesterday, with Nancy Grace talking about a cold case from 1989, Cold case: Toddlers vanish from park. But sometimes CNN.com posts this type of story in a headline position on the home page without clearly labeling it as a cold case. Doing so is irresponsible. Child abductions are fearful occurrences of mythic proportions. They can't help but pus the anxiety buttons and get any concerned parent's adrenaline flowing. But the truth is that THANKFULLY, these incidents are much rarer than you would think based on how heavily they are reported. With genuine new tragedies such as Shaniya Davis' recent rape and murder shining a light on human trafficking, I really wish the news media would stop dredging up decades' old cases for sensational purposes. When I think about web site clicks I can't help but think of lab rats conditioned to push a lever, and I will admit that I am as conditioned as anyone!

So we have consumerism and the marketing of problems and solutions, news sensationalism, and what else...oh yes, the Decade from Hell. Let's face it, the past ten years have been scary and anxious. Terrorist attacks, resulting wars, the economic meltdown...we haven't had much of a break from fear and anxiety. And for eight years, the Bush administration manipulated our fear as consciously as any marketer or news producer.

We're only now waking up from that nightmare, if we're lucky, and as parents it's crucial that we wake up. We need to become conscious of the effect that we have on our children. If we are fearful people, our parenting is going to get out of whack. I believe we're seeing that already, as we limit our kids' exploration of the world to the point where they are missing out on important developmental experiences. I want my kid to be able to walk the neighborhood, to go to a slumber party and summer camp, to spend time with other families and get to know other people. [For ongoing conversation on this topic, check out Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Kids blog.]

Now in order to do so, she'll need skills, and I need the skills to teach her, and that's what we're addressing in Courageous Parenting. In the meantime you can check out the websites of Kidpower for real-world safety training and resources and iLookBothWays.com for online safety training that I highly recommend.

As far as waking up and being conscious of our effect on our children, I have been blessed with a daughter who has been my greatest teacher from day one. When she was a baby I swore she was a Yoda-like Zen master (but much cuter). Then, she taught me how to be in the moment. Now that she's older, she has an almost psychic sensitivity to what is going on in my mind, what I am thinking about and worrying about. When I am stressed and worried, it is mirrored in our relationship and her behavior. It amazes me that she will often voice worries that are currently on my mind even if she and I haven't talked about them yet. So my personal experience has shaped my world view on parenting. There are challenges to face and things to be fearful about. True fear requires attention and action, as author Gavin de Becker has taught so well. But unfocused worry is toxic static that pervades our lives.

It's time we start thinking about the costs of overindulging ourselves and our kids even as we overprotect them, and adopting worry as a destructive habit. My hope is that in our new decade we can turn a fresh page in parenting. I'll be doing that both metaphorically and literally and I invite you to join me.


Sign up now on the MojoMom.com home page to receive a free e-book of the new Courageous Parenting anthology when it comes out in March 2010!

HOW to raise a Free-Range Kid

Last Sunday The New York Times explored the question "Why Can't She Walk to School?" looking at the modern trends that have resulted in many kids leading highly-supervised, sheltered lives. The article tells one story about a well-meaning neighbor who drove a 7-year-old girl home from a playdate only five houses down the block, on the same side of the street. We are starting to talk about these issues and how we might change, thanks in large part to the Free-Range Kids movement started by writer Lenore Skenazy. I appreciate Lenore's work and the feeling that it's time to turn things around, empowering our children to explore the world. After all, that is the work of growing up, isn't it?

However, there is an incredibly important piece to this puzzle that calls for more attention: the information and skills that parents and kids need to develop, in order to let kids experience more freedom.

I asked my mentor, Kidpower International Executive Director Irene van der Zande, to co-author a response to the NY Times piece with me. Kidpower has just celebrated its 20th anniversary, and has provided personal safety training to over a million people worldwide. I am very proud to play my part in bringing Kidpower training to my home state of North Carolina. Here are our thoughts about the vital skills component needed to raise a Free-Range Kid:

How to Raise a Free-Range Kid

The Free-Range Kids movement is making an impact, leading parents to realize that most important question they should be asking is not whether or not to allow their children to walk to school, but how to prepare their children to do so safely and successfully.

If we lock our children up too tightly in a misguided attempt to protect them, they lose out on the chance to develop the capabilities they need to grow into competent, independent young adults. However, just letting children go on their own in the hopes that they will know how to protect themselves from potential dangers puts them at unnecessary risk.

The reason that parents feel so unsafe that they are driving children home from play dates down the block is because they need better information about how to teach their kids to navigate the world independently. This is why Kidpower International has worked tirelessly for twenty years to teach personal safety skills to over one million people worldwide. Our approach is skills-based, success-based, and never uses fear as a motivation. Instead, we practice role-playing the safest choices in a wide variety of situations.

Parents tend to focus on fears of kidnapping, but there are many more common child protection issues that are related to the scenario of walking home from school: crossing guards, safe sidewalks and roads, and the significant yet often ignored issues facing millions of children who return to empty houses, where they are left unsupervised until their parents come home from work.

It is too easy to forget the downside of not letting our kids develop independent skills. Kids may be so protected from situations in which they have to say “no” to bad things that they do not have many opportunities to say “yes” to good things. What they need is plenty of opportunity to practice, little steps at a time, in situations that are safe to explore.

Sleepovers, summer camp, kid-organized sports games, experiences with babysitters, visiting family, and community service outings can all be steps to independence if we give our kids the skills to handle these activities without hovering over them.

When we keep our eyes on the future, the path toward independence becomes clearer. When you look at a ten-year old girl, you can picture her in six years, getting into a car to go on a date with a classmate whom her parents might not know well. This is actually a high-stakes situation, one in which she will need to be able to assertively state what she wants, be prepared to take care of herself, and even be ready to ask for help if things go awry.

We want her to be ready for dating when that day comes, and the practice steps along the way don’t have to be scary. Independence may not look just like it did when we were kids. The days of Mom shooing kids outside to let them roam, saying, “Come home when you hear the dinner bell ring” are probably over.

But that makes it all the more important for parents to look for opportunities to practice. Parents of younger kids can teach children how to state what they want by ordering their own ice cream cone or slice of pizza. We can consciously make a plan to teach our kids how to walk to a friend’s house or school, rather than being complacent in our habit of driving everywhere. We can preview the route, walk with them at first, and talk about ways they could get help if they needed it. Then we can take the brave and conscious step of letting them do it on their own.

We will never eliminate uncertainty from life, but there is an answer to that worried parent’s question, “How can you argue against ‘just in case’?”

We can tell children and ourselves, “We are going to practice until you are ready to do this on your own!”


Irene van der Zande is the Executive Director of Kidpower International. Amy Tiemann, Ph.D., is the author of "Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family" and Center Director of Kidpower North Carolina.

Police pick up ten-year old boy for walking to soccer practice alone

Last week I had just interviewed Kidpower founder Irene van der Zande for The Mojo Mom Podcast, talking about teaching kids skills that enable them to navigate the world independently. The next thing I knew, one of my neighbors told me that her ten-year old grandson who lives in Mississippi had been stopped and picked up by the police because he was walking to soccer practice alone.

The soccer field was at the elementary school about a half mile from his home!

Here's an excerpt from the Columbus, Mississippi local news coverage:

William made it as far as Seventh Street North, near what used to be Barnhill’s Buffet, when a Columbus Police Department cruiser stopped the boy. The officer was responding to several 911 calls made by people who had seen William walking the sidewalks alone.

The officer drove William the rest of the way to soccer practice, and then went about the business of tracking down [William's mother] Lori Pierce.

He caught up with her at her son’s soccer practice and proceeded to read her the riot act regarding the safety of her child and potential criminal liability she could have faced had anything horrible happened.

“He told me I could have been charged with child endangerment,” she said. “I was so shocked.”

Although Pierce is quick to point out she never felt anger toward the officer nor the police department, the stern warning given to her by the policeman concerned her deeply.

I feel for today's parents, I really do. I have these questions myself--how much freedom can my child handle? How much leeway do I give her? And importantly, I think we need to consider the cost of letting them grow up without life experience.

William's case seems like a slam dunk to me: of course a mother can analyze the situation and decide that her ten-year old can walk a half mile alone. William wasn't in distress. He had a plan and a cell phone. His Mom was going to meet him at practice in a few minutes. But what do we do when well-meaning neighbors start calling 911?

It's no surprise that William's story was reported on Lenore Skenazy's Free Range Kids blog. Last year Skenazy caused a stir by allowing her nine-year old son to ride home alone on the New York subway.

I am not going to tell you how you should feel about the Skenazy family's experiment, but the media firestorm that ended up labeling her America's Worst Mom was an overreaction if I've ever heard one!

At the time, Skenazy wrote about the conflicting feelings of today's parents:

Even as the stations (and Web sites and Web logs) were having a field day with the story, people kept pulling me aside to say that they had been allowed to get around by themselves as kids, and boy were they glad.

They relished those memories — and thanked their parents! — and then in the next breath they admitted: They would never let their kids do the same.

Why not? Has the world really become so much more dangerous in just one generation

The world hasn't gotten so much more dangerous, but we have evolved a keener sense of awareness and stricter standards of child safety and supervision. I generally think that this is a good thing. But the problem is that we have few clear societal guidelines or consensus about how to implement safe judgment about when to let our children operate independently. By "locking them up," metaphorically speaking, we may feel that they are safer, but by doing so we may deprive them of essential life experience that can only be gained by doing.

Remember the story of Sleeping Beauty? After it was said that Aurora would die on her 16th birthday after pricking her finger on a spindle, her well-meaning father had all spinning wheels destroyed. So when the witch showed up on Aurora's birthday with the spinnning wheel, what did Aurora do? She was immediately drawn to the spindle and pricked her finger. (Magical intervention allowed her to fall asleep rather than die.)

I am NOT saying that we should let our kids experiment with dangerous things (such as drugs or alcohol), but I am saying they need life skills and chances to operate independently and exercise judgment, within generally safe parameters.

We're confronted with what I call "The Paradox of Parenting," which can be summed up by the classic quote: "Good decisions come from experience...experience comes from bad decisions."

That's why I am so proud to be working with Kidpower, which teaches parents how to give those skills to their kids, so that kids can get experience by exploring the world with safety and confidence.

So what do we teach in Kidpower? Just today I was sent this excellent graphic that illustrates our Kidpower Tools to Live By (follow link for full-size text!). Check it out and think about what the world would be like if all children and adults had the training that empowered them to call on these skills. You can find more information and free resources at www.Kidpower.org

Mojo Mom Podcast and Kidpower

I am pleased to welcome my friend, teacher and mentor Irene van der Zande as my guest on this week's Mojo Mom Podcast episode, Mojo Mom and Kidpower.
Twenty years ago, Irene founded Kidpower, a grassroots organization that has grown to teach personal safety and self defense skills to over 1.2 million people worldwide.

Listen to the podcast now:



I believe so strongly in Irene's work, that I have become an instructor and brought the Kidpower program here to North Carolina. What I love about Kidpower is that it gives people of all ages the skills they need in order to navigate the world with safety and confidence. I don't blame parents for being confused about how to teach their kids these skills--most of us parents have not been taught this vital information. Kidpower steps in to fill that knowledge gap with high-quality training. To me, Kidpower is a much-needed antidote to "helicopter parenting."

Kidpower has training centers across the U. S., Canada, and around the globe. The Kipower website is also chock-full of quality resources for you to explore, including articles and their own People Safety Podcast.

Her is a photo of me demonstrating a high-elbow strike at Kidpower instructor training in Santa Cruz last January. Most of Kidpower skills are everyday life skills, such as identifying trouble and maintaining a safe distance from unsafe people or situations. We do also teach physical self-defense skills that allow escape from an emergency. It is empowering and satisfying to realize that you have that capability! (Further proof that mojo comes in many forms!)

Mojo Mom and Kidpower North Carolina

Mojo Mom author Amy Tiemann brings Kidpower self-defense training to North Carolina

Last spring I began to ask myself "What's next?" after Mojo Mom. I was hoping to get a book deal for a revised edition, which has worked out miraculously well so far, but I still wanted to peek over the horizon to start something new.

The answer was that I still hope there will be a ton of writing in my life, and much more to do as "Mojo Mom," but I also felt a calling to bring child safety and self-defense training to my community. Before I was Mojo Mom, I started an endeavor I called Spark Seminars, in which I taught self-defense strategies to parents, which they would then pass along to their kids. The kernel I started with was knowing that if parents could become their children's most powerful safety advocates, a lifelong discussion and culture of safety awareness would develop within families. I wrote my own curriculum, based on my years working with teenagers teaching psychology, and studying about influence, coercion, and other principals of social psychology. I knew that all too often, the weapon used by abusers to get us to let our guard down was our own "niceness," and that kids needed to develop awareness and boundary-setting skills, as well as physical self-defense skills. Parents needed to learn how to identify situations that needed extra scrutiny, as well as how to think about issues such as how to choose a babysitter or school for their children.

I really enjoyed teaching these parent seminars, but back in 2002, the time was not right in my life for this project. I thought I was creating a teaching job, but it came along a marketing and outreach job that I wasn't prepared to do. So I put that on hold and wrote the original Mojo Mom.

But like all true callings, the cause of child safety and abuse prevention came back into my life. I decided that instead of working alone, it was time to team up with Kidpower, an internationally-respected safety non-profit I knew of from my time living in California. Kidpower has an excellent Everyday Safety kids' curriculum as well as physical self-defense training and adult education.

Kidpower was started by a Mom in 1989, and since then the training has reached over a million people worldwide. Kidpower is both solid and constantly innovating, revising their training every year to make it even better. That's the kind of organization I was eager to team up with!

So for the past two years, I've been working in trips to California to do Kidpower instructor training. I've taught practice classes, and recruited a co-teacher here at home. I spent another week at training this month, and now we are really ready to launch Kidpower North Carolina.

The great thing about Kidpower is that we're teaching life skills, giving kids the tools and confidence they need to move safely in the world. Our training is always positive, success-based, and age-appropriate. To me, Kidpower is the antidote to "helicopter parenting." Most parents weren't taught safety skills themselves, much less how to teach these skills to their kids. So no wonder we don't always know how to let our kids go when the time comes. That's a gap in parent education that I want to fill with meaningful information. (Similar to what I did with Mojo Mom, which I thought of as writing the "missing manual to motherhood," so there's a theme developing that connects these projects!)

We will be offering a winter series of public Kidpower workshops over the next month. Starting January 31 and running through March, on Saturday afternoons we'll be offering a Parent-Child Workshop for kids grade 1-3, then grades 4-6, then a Teenpower class, and finally in March, a Parent Education night. The Parent Education seminar addresses issues that are relevant to parenting kids of all ages. I will be personally teaching each of these workshops.

So if you are in the Raleigh-Durham area, I'd love to have you join us for a training! Check out our schedule, and you can reach me through kidpowernc@gmail.com if you need more information.

You can also see photos I posted from this month's Kidpower instructor training at our brand-new Kidpower North Carolina Facebook page.

Fearless Friday!

Today is the MotherTalk Fearless Friday blog event in honor of Arianna Huffington's book On Becoming Fearless...In Love, Work and Life. I admire Arianna as someone who has continued to reinvent herself throughout her life, found her voice, and created a powerful platform through The Huffington Post and her books. She was a delight to talk to as you will hear in our The Mojo Mom Podcast conversation.

I felt a real sense of sisterhood with Arianna as I read her book. One of the earliest potential cover designs for Mojo Mom featured a woman diving off a cliff into the unknown, much like the cover of the new paperback edition of On Becoming Fearless. It wasn't the right concept for Mojo Mom but the version on Arianna's book works, as the diver soars, almost flies, into her future.

Motherhood was a leap of faith for me, as I had little knowledge of the transformations that lay ahead. I learned how much I didn't know. Stripped of my arrogance and my comfortable old sense of self, I rebuilt from the ground up. Fearlessness was a major lesson during this journey, and I say that not even having tackled the teenage years yet! The stakes are higher as a parent, and this teaches us the lesson that there are more important things than being liked, or popular. The people-pleaser tendency is still in me, but it is quieter and more readily over-ridden. Every mother learns that to keep her child--and all children--safe, sometimes you have to stick your neck out and be prepared to come across as "the only crazy mother who is willing to talk about __________"

I am about to start a new project that was nurtured by courage. One thing I have learned about myself is that I am drawn to knowledge gaps and creating projects to help fill them. That's what I did with Mojo Mom, writing the book I had wished I had had as a new mother.

My next project is to take on the topic of child safety and abuse prevention. To embark on this path, I am planning to bring Kidpower training to my home state of North Carolina. I want to make abuse prevention and safety skills part of the normal, everyday parent education curriculum. Sexual abuse in particular can be a charged and confusing topic for many people, starting with the fact that most parents have little to no background on the subject. We heard the old canard "don't talk to strangers" as kids, and as limited and inaccurate as that advice may be, it may be all that we know to pass on. My goal is to expand parents' toolbox of knowledge, skills and resources, and to empower families to discuss these issues with their children on an ongoing basis.

It feels great to be joining the Kidpower community, which has trained over a million people worldwide over the past 20 years. Their training creates a safe, upbeat, success-based learning environment. Kidpower has chapters thorghout the United States as well as a major international presence. I encourage you to visit the Kidpower website to learn about their online resources or locate a Kidpower center near you.

Mojo Mom is back...and my podcast WILL return

I am back from my trip to California, a day late and a dollar short. My flight home from San Francisco through Chicago was cancelled on Tuesday night, and my replacement flight through Dulles airport was not a sure thing on Wednesday. I ended up on a flight to Greensboro NC that took off at 7:30 pm--originally scheduled for 12:30 pm! This was one of my most difficult traveling experiences in a while, with weird hangups at every turn, such as the power going out in the San Francisco Airport Hyatt hotel as I was packing to leave at 5 am on Wednesday morning. That was really spooky. The emergency lights came on in the hall, but my room's window looked out on an interior atrium, so it was pitch black and I couldn't tell whether the lights were out in the whole city. Fortunately it was just our hotel, so I got a glow stick, packed and high-tailed it out of there.

But after reading about the JetBlue passengers who were trapped in their airplane on the runway at Kennedy Airport for 8 hours, I can only count my blessings!

My Kidpower instructor training was fantastic. It was a jam-packed 5-day experience that allowed us to work with a number of elementary students, who were very understanding about the fact that we were in training. You can expect to hear more about this evolving project as the year goes on. This training gave me my teaching mojo back, which feels wonderful.

You can also expect The Mojo Mom Podcast to return. Recording the show is fun and easy--I love talking to Sheryl and my guests. There is not too much post-production on the show, but it always ends up taking a couple of hours, which I just have not had recently. Between family commitments, weather, work and travel, I am just doing my best to keep up these days. But you can count on a new podcast episode in the next week.