Motivational speaker shares wisdom with student, parents
The kids are having a noisy pillow fight in the next room. You tell them 41 times to stop it. They don’t. You stress over what you can’t do to make them stop.
It’s your 42nd time to look in that room. How do you respond?
Karen Vadino says use humor. Tell the kids it’s just not fair. You want a pillow, too.
They will be surprised and do one of two things: give you that pillow or lie right down and pretend they were sleeping all along.
“I’ve seen kids and parents with no sense of humor. I’ve laughed all my life. I’ve gotten in trouble for laughing,” Vadino said. “I have fun, no matter what is going on.”
A motivational speaker, humorist and trainer, Vadino, 47, spoke Wednesday to mountain area parents gathered at A.J. McMullen School in Markleysburg for the Explore and Educate Workshop of Uniontown Area School District and its Principal’s Advisory Councils. She spoke Tuesday for the district’s Uniontown city and valley parents. Workshop topics were “Parenting Through Laughter” and “Laughing: Just for the Health of It.”
Vadino’s wisdom comes from years in the social work and related fields while she has watched her niece and nephew grow from babies to young adults. She now travels the country speaking to parents, college students and youngsters in kindergarten through 12th grade.
She said she has the greatest job, laughing and feeling good and making others laugh and feel good. But she said her job has changed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Vadino said people thought it was no longer OK to laugh, but she has found it is imperative to laugh.
A school district counselor, Andrea Barchetti, warned the crowd they would need tissues for the presentation.
“You will laugh so hard you will cry,” Barchetti said.
And laugh they did.
Vadino imitated her parents, who gave her a strict upbringing. She said she does not advocate the slapping or use of a wooden spoon that sometimes occurred during discipline, but she acknowledged she and her sister knew their parents’ rules. She said when mom failed at her attempts toward correction, it was dad’s “do it or else” threat that got results.
“I thought ‘or else’ was a monster in the closet,” she said. “I knew ‘or else’ was bad because it always came at the end of discipline. When my parents said do something, you just did it as though you were waiting there for the honor and privilege to do it.”
She said children and adults are not so different from each other when it comes to the question of who did something wrong.
The common response is, “I don’t know.”
“‘I don’t know’ was the third child my parents didn’t know they had,” she said.
As for adults, she said she was sure that everyone would want to touch the podium if she said they could not. Challenged, she said those who did touch it would deny it because it is easy to do what you are not supposed to do.
Vadino said parenting comes with a lot of stress, and she applies a 10-minute rule to handling it. For example, she said, one parent may have spent the day at home and the other at work, but the two meet and clash unless they take those 10 minutes to get ready for whatever needs to be addressed.
The 10 minutes also helps in the struggle between saying yes and no to anyone from a 5-year-old or teen-ager to a spouse or boss.
Vadino said waiting 10 minutes to give someone an answer gives a parent a chance to understand that he or she must say no, a chance to practice saying no and a chance for that other person to forget what they even wanted in the first place.
She spoke about her niece and nephew, now aged 18 and 22, from whom she has learned a lot. In particular, the two taught her that a parent must never stop talking to children, because the children hear what is said, even when they pretend otherwise.
“Sometimes you have to learn a different language,” she said, demonstrating the snort response from her nephew at age 16 when she told him how proud she was of the person he had become.
She said children are also honest, relating the questions of her nephew at age 5 during a funeral. She said a 5-year-old knows when they are grieving or stressing that it is important to laugh and play and that the two seconds of music during a commercial is for dancing as though no one is watching.
Vadino said parents must talk and pay attention to their children and have a sense of humor. She stressed the need to laugh every day.
“Don’t wait until you are entirely happy to laugh because if you do, you may never laugh,” she said.