Maternal gatekeeping is similar to a football team’s goalkeeper as they will both protect their territory. It is usually described as a set of mother beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors to control and encourage or discourage fathers as they care for their home and children fully. Their shared norms continue to shape mothers into primary caregivers and establish their role as gatekeepers in parenting. In this regard, a mother might negatively affect a father’s involvement in child-rearing through their “gatekeeping” behavior.
This type of behavior could appear early in the family, especially in the transition to parenthood when both couples need to designate their parental roles. As a gatekeeper, mothers can either show restrictive and negative behavior or positive and facilitative behavior toward fathers. A father’s engagement in child-rearing will depend on what kind of gatekeeping behaviors a mother will show. Restrictive and negative behaviors will decrease fathers’ engagement in child-rearing tasks while positive behaviors will reinforce and encourage fathers in these tasks.
Puhlman and Pasley designed three dimensions of behavior as an indicator of maternal gatekeeping:
Control
Mothers attempt to hold a leadership position with the highest decision-making power concerning family functioning and supervise father-child interactions intensely. For instance, when mothers make fathers interact with children, they set the rules and watch them. Other behaviors include making the family schedule, managing finances, and coordinating leisure activities based on their preferences and desires.
Encouragement
Mothers gradually lead fathers to increase or maintain their participation and interaction with children. For example, mothers encourage fathers to spend individual time with children, provide fathers with helpful feedback during interactions with children, and use supportive or appreciative language.
Discouragement
This pertains to the extent to which mothers are disheartening and critical toward fathers and their involvement with children. It can be a mother interrupting a father’s time with the child, dissuading fathers from interacting with the child, redoing tasks completed by fathers, and some forms of nonverbal communication (e.g., eye-rolling, scornful looks).
Conditions that instigate maternal gatekeeping
Not all mothers will become maternal gatekeepers; the behaviors mainly transpire when certain characteristics and circumstances are experienced. First, mothers tend to develop gatekeeper behaviors when they perceive their marriage life as less satisfying or stable. Conflict and ambivalence are two aspects that can trigger maternal gatekeeping. The more conflict and ambivalence in the relationship that a mother experiences, the higher the possibility will be for a mother to develop a gatekeeper behavior to seek emotional connection from their children due to estrangement from their partner.
Second, mothers with higher perceived parenting self-efficacy might form gatekeeper behaviors. Mothers that view themselves as more confident and skilled at parenting would be more likely to experience frustration when a father’s care for or engagement with their children in ways that they disapprove of. A mother’s fear of their partner’s poor parenting skills could fuel their gatekeeper behaviors.
Finally, mothers with poor psychological functioning (e.g., neuroticism, anxiety, and depression) have a higher tendency to become a gatekeeper. Psychological problems might hinder mothers from actively encouraging a father’s involvement in child-rearing because of the lack of energy and motivation, as well as the inability to regulate their negative emotions. For instance, depressed mothers are likely to view themselves negatively and probably feel a stronger sense of parental inadequacy, leading to gatekeeper behaviors.
Tips to minimize gatekeeping behaviors
Eventually, we all know that gatekeeping behaviors are not deliberate and purposeful actions shown by mothers. The conditions and circumstances are factors that drive mothers to develop their gatekeeping behaviors. The practices below can help mothers minimize or even avoid gatekeeping behaviors.
Use open and honest communication
After becoming parents, communication becomes increasingly important. Some communication skills can be practiced daily, such as practicing “I” statements, avoiding name-calling or putting down the other person, and softening tones when speaking. Keeping open, honest, and objective communication is not always easy, but it is worth the work and investment.
Have mutual respect
Identifying and respecting each partner’s contributions is essential to improving a couple’s relationship. Some respectful actions can be practiced routinely, for instance, acknowledging others and saying thank you, addressing mistakes with kindness, and valuing each other’s opinions. There may be times of frustration towards the other person’s behaviors, but keeping respect for each other will help make everything run more smoothly and pleasant.
Have your “me time”
Every parent needs to have time only for themselves. Sometimes, you have to focus on your own needs amidst complicated and demanding parenting life. You can do your “me time” activities, such as meditation, sleep, and journaling.
Maternal gatekeeping is a common phenomenon for all mothers, especially first-timers. Mothers can learn how to control their gatekeeping behaviors, especially the restrictive and negative ones. By having control over these behaviors, a mother can keep the father fully engaged in child-rearing as it is essential in practicing positive coparenting to help in their child’s development.
‘The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.” –Bill Copeland
Setting goals is the first step you can take if you want to live a life with a direction and a sense of purpose. Goals refer to the desired results you or a group of people plan to achieve.
According to Locke and Latham, who have incorporated nearly 400 studies about the concept of a well-developedgoal-setting theory (1990), goals motivate people to build strategies that will enable them to perform at the level required by the goals. Accomplishing goals leads to a higher level of satisfaction and further motivation. However, unaccomplished goals could lead to frustration and lower motivational levels.
The goal-setting theory shows that goals are more effective for most people when they include a deadline for completion. Deadlines serve as a time-control mechanism and increase the motivational impact of goals.
Consequently, being aware that a goal has a timeframe would encourage a person to invest more effort in achieving it. In contrast, if plenty of time remains for attaining a goal, a person is likely to slow down when it comes to filling the available time.
Designing The Life You Want
It is not easy to design your life without setting goals, and the first step is to establish a personalvision statement. Ask yourself: “In five years from today, where do I want to be?”
To answer the question, you have to identify your strengths, list your skills, and make a positive declaration of your abilities.
Although strengths reflect your value and make working towards a long-term goal easier, identifying your weaknesses is equally important. Weaknesses help you evaluate your abilities and limitations. You can use it not to shrink your goals but to help you make improvements.
Break your goals into smaller goals you can accomplish daily. For example, to finish 10 books a year, you need to break this goal into small habits, like reading a number of pages each day at a specific time or finishing one book per month.
You can also categorize your goals:
Academic goals: What knowledge and qualifications do you want to achieve?
Career goals: What do you plan for your career, and where do you want your career to take you?
Financial goals: What do you aim to gain at a given point in your life?
Creative goals: What progress do you want to achieve creatively?
Physical goals: What activities do you want to develop your skills in?
SMART personal goals
An effective way to make goals more powerful is to make themSMART goals. A SMART goal is easier to achieve because it is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
For example, instead of saying that your goal is “to travel around the world,” which is a long-term goal and seems hard to achieve in a small period of time, you can say that you want “to travel to 10 countries around the world by September 2025.”
Don’t forget to enjoy the journey toward reaching the goal and take your time to savor having the goal done. If the goal is significant, reward yourself for achieving it, and it can encourage you to set more goals in the future, stay motivated, and build your self-confidence.
Setting personal goals can be quite challenging. If you are interested to know more about what you should consider when establishing personal goals, read this article aboutsetting personal goals.
The holiday season means spending more time with loved ones and practicing family traditions for many people. Since the worldwide COVID-19 outbreak, end-of-year gatherings and celebrations alongside school and work have been conducted virtually due to lockdowns and social restrictions. This year, family holidays and celebrations may return and show resemblances of normalcy as the world is slowly entering a post-pandemic era.
This is evident in the case of family trips. A recentsurvey by the Family Travel Association and NYU School of Professional Studies saw that family trips are making a comeback, with 72% of participants saying that they would take a flight for a domestic trip while 40% would fly for an international trip with family. As more people are likely to opt for in-person gatherings with family, doing it during this era can still be challenging. Not only do families need to remain cautious and follow the health protocols, but they also might bring along some habits of overly depending on digital technologies.
It is undeniable that some find it difficult to balance between their digital and real-life; oftentimes, the former spills over the latter, taking up family time. This means one might end up reducing interaction and socialization with family. Moreover, even though digital technology has been around for many decades, the pandemic has forced its integration into people’s lives, potentially disrupting family relationships.
Reconnecting with family
To maximize quality time with family and rebuild closeness during this holiday season, families can try to disconnect virtually and connect more in reality. Here are some ways to do just that.
Decide on a no-screen time together
Phone etiquette such as not using phones at the dinner table has been around for some time now. This is a fundamental rule that allows you to disconnect as a family. By keeping devices out of sight, everyone can be fully present with other people around them and avoid distractions like endless pop-up notifications. Make necessary adjustments and hold everyone’s end of the bargain up in lessening their use of devices, especially during a trip to fully enjoy time together.
Do activities together as a family
As everyone is disconnected virtually, the next step is to engage them in an activitythat can serve as quality family time. Initiate a discussion with each family member to suggest an activity that everyone can do together. This can include making holiday cookies, going Christmas shopping, praying together, spending one-on-one time with each child, and playing games with fun rewards and penalties. This can also be a good opportunity to pass down family traditions you grew up with and create new ones with your family.
Disconnect from work
Before going on holiday, it is important to finish work before leaving and make sure there are no unfinished tasks. This allows you to have peace of mind, rest properly, and return to work with better performance and productivity. However, some professions might be difficult to disengage from fully, even when on a holiday. In this case, try to dedicate a certain time to checking your email instead of keeping up with emails every time they arrive. It would be best if you also communicate this with people at work and your family to avoid unnecessary conflicts.
With the prevailing engagement in the virtual world for both parents and children, the family needs to intentionally put effort into balancing time spent online and the time spent to connect face-to-face. The holiday season can be the best moment to make up for lost time, have real conversations, and bring relationships closer by properly enjoying and respecting offline time together.
Before the widespread use of technology, people were actively engaged in physical activities at work. For example, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a lamplighter would need to use long poles to manually light each of the town’s lamps at night and extinguish them when morning comes. As technology developed over time, the need for this type of manual labor disappeared and more desk-based jobs appeared which introduced sedentary behaviors such as sitting for a prolonged time, and thus people started to move less. The integration of these behaviors continued to increase during the past several decades and has become a lifestyle.
Much research reported a strong association between a sedentary lifestyle and cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, and cancer which are actually the leading cause of death worldwide. As one of the sedentary behaviors, prolonged sitting is also found to be a risk factor for the mortality rate attributable to these diseases as well as other diseases that have an indirect association with prolonged sitting. Despite these detrimental effects on health, a 2020 study found that people are still sitting too much, with variations in sitting time across countries, ranging up to 9.5 hours per day.
Rezende, L., et al. found that the life expectancy of an individual could be increased by up to 3 months on average by reducing sitting time. This benefit seems smaller compared to those gained by eliminating physical inactivity, obesity, and tobacco smoking. However, reducing sitting time might play an important role in promoting an active lifestyle, bridging sedentarism to higher physical activity levels.
Sit less, move more
The shift to working from home in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in working longer for many employees. According to a survey of 2,800 workers by Los Angeles-based staffing firm Robert Half, 45% of remote employees regularly worked more hours during the week than they did before and nearly 70% worked on the weekends. Feeling burdened by prolonged work, people found it difficult to allocate time for physical activity.
WHO released a physical activity guideline that delivered a salient message: “sit less and move more”. Based on this guideline, adults aged 18-64 years should accumulate at least 150-300 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity such as brisk walking or biking. They could also shorten the time by half if they practice vigorous-intensity physical activity such as jogging or swimming.
While it is important to follow these guidelines to achieve health benefits, physical activity doesn’t mean constant movement. Even a little bit of effort can come with health benefits. For example, grabbing a glass of water every hour during work can break up your sitting time.
Standing as an alternative
Unlike sitting, mortality rates decline at higher levels of standing. People who stood more than 8 hours per day had a significantly lower all-cause mortality risk than people standing for only 2 hours per day or less. Therefore, the standing may be a healthier alternative to prolonged sitting time.
In terms of energy expenditure, sitting burns only 80 calories per hour while standing could burn 88 calories per hour. The difference seems to be insignificant but standing helps blood sugar levels return to normal faster after a meal compared to sitting. This process is facilitated by the contraction of certain muscles in a standing position which triggers the production of substances that help use and store fats and sugars.
People can also stand while working by using a standing desk to incorporate more movement. However, it is also important to note that standing for a long time also has its side effects such as lower back and leg pain as well as fatigue. It is recommended to not stand for more than 2 hours continuously and to shift to sitting periodically.
As prolonged sitting time is associated with higher risk mortality, moving around during work helps employees reduce the risk and live longer. People with desk-based jobs could also use standing desks as an alternative to sitting. However, it is still recommended to do regular physical activity for a healthier life.
Searching for happiness and how to live a meaningful life is a question that philosophers, theorists, and psychologists, are trying to answer for decades. One of them is Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who saw how World War II affected people’s lives. He realized that many adults around him found it hard to live contentedly after they lost their material wealth, homes, jobs, and security due to the war. This led him to begin his research on what makes a life worth living.
He found that, although money can help, it can’t make people indefinitely happy; he then tried to find the answer by researching human motivations, contentment, and fulfillment. His research arrived at the conclusion that people are at their optimal happy and productive selves when they experience a state of flow. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is when a person is so immersed in their activity that they ignore outside stimuli like time and their basic needs; the only thing that matters at the moment is what they are doing.
Though Csikszentmihalyi started his research with artists, painters, and musicians to understand their creative process and motivation to do something that will unlikely bring fame or fortune, he stated that everyone can experience the flow state. He further described that experience as the state of doing things just for the sake of doing it. People don’t need external motivation to do something; they are doing it because of the positive feeling that the activity can give.
So, how exactly does flow affect someone’s happiness? Csikszentmihalyi stated that activities that involve some play and work are the best opportunity to reach a flow state, and through that, reach happiness as well. He explains that happiness is a state of mind, one that is affected by consciousness regardless of what happens outside of themselves. One of the ways to change one’s consciousness is through getting into the flow state.
Csikszentmihalyi continued his research on finding the link between flow and happiness by doing research on teenagers. He found that teenagers with high flow spent more time doing activities like hobbies and sport. Participants of the research also reported greater success in school, social relationships, and long-term happiness. The result of the research showed that the strongest predictors of long-term happiness are as follows: one’s presence in the flow state, ability to be sociable, how active one is, and the positive feeling one has towards themselves.
Flow is something that cannot be forced or does not happen whenever one feels like it. However, some people with a high level of conscientiousness and openness to experience are more likely to experience the flow state. Here are some ways you can optimize your chance to enter the state of flow.
Minimize distractions
Flow is a state of mind with internal motivation, so it’s very important to minimize and reduce external distractions. Research has shown that to enter the flow state, it’s necessary to have an undivided focus for around 10-15 minutes and eliminate all the external distractions. So, make sure that you put away your phone or disable all your notifications as this might be one of the biggest external distractions. This also includes clearing unnecessary items from your surroundings and having a quiet environment to help you be hyper-focused and immersed in your activity.
Internal distractions can also be a hindrance. If you have too much on your mind or you are anxious about something, it will be harder for you to enter the flow state even without external distractions. To avoid this, clear your mind by writing down your thoughts and feelings every day in a journal or doing some meditation. It will help you to understand your thoughts and feel better so you can control possible internal distractions.
Have a specific goal
To reach a state of flow, you need to have a clear and specific goal on what you want to achieve. Without a goal in mind, you will most likely do things simultaneously or switch between tasks that shift your focus and get you distracted easily. This will prevent you from reaching the state of flow. Having a goal will keep your mind from wandering and minimize your internal distraction to reach the state of flow.
Though having a clear goal is one of the important aspects to reach the flow state, you also need to remember to enjoy the process and moment while doing the activity. It is important to remember that the activity you want to get into should be something that you like and enjoy doing. Being in a flow state can give you a positive experience by enjoying the present moment when you are completely immersed in your work.
Balance skills and challenges
Csikszentmihalyi explains the state of flow as the right balance between a person’s perceived skills and the challenges that they face. If a person faces a challenge that is higher than their skills, they will become anxious and stressed. If a person’s skill level is higher than the challenge, they may get bored and become distracted. A flow state can only be achieved when the challenge is enough to make you interested while providing a challenge to your current skills without being too hard.
Aside from that, Csikszentmihalyi also described the opposite of the flow state called apathy. It is a state when you do an activity that presents no challenge and requires no skills to do it like watching TV, browsing through social media, and other mindless entertainment. When someone is continuously involved in this activity, it can become harder for them to reach the flow state.
To experience flow in everyday life will not only give you positive emotions but can also be intrinsically rewarding and helpful for an individual’s journey towards self-actualization. The more you experience flow, the more you want to replicate these feelings. This can help you to not only have positive experiences through it but also make you happier.
Flow is an innately positive experience. If you are having trouble reaching the state of flow, try to minimize distractions, and have a specific goal in mind, and keep challenging yourself. Being in a state of flow will help you have a more meaningful life.
