Hello!  One of the challenging aspects of parenting is to stay abreast of the newest, hip new thing.  It allows you to use the information to connect, educate, and understand your child’s set of issues for development.

This becomes more difficult as you age because either you think the hip new thing is stupid or you don’t actually know what it is.

So my first tip is to look for it; you can find it in the popular dress, music, books, television and movies.  What is a bit tricky is that it may not be obvious, it may be slightly hidden – words and phrases may not mean what you think so you have to investigate and use your listening and intuitive skills.  This is especially important when the lyrics of your child’s favorite song doesn’t make sense to you – you can ban him from listening to it – but it’s more useful and effective to get a handle on what is out there so you can discuss it with your child and at least get your “spin” on the whole thing into his brain and heart so he can make better, informed decisions.

The second tip is that due to the serious marketing population of our children, at least in the United States, there is a whole level of what is “cool” that is just propaganda and it is infused with information that is written by people way older than your child, so make an effort to look underneath the generally acceptable story to what may be a skew of energy.

You have to figure out how to manage the effect of propaganda on your child.  And this issue of what is popular in their environment is key.

The best way to manage propaganda is to go to its source and to have a way of giving a fuller, broader and more in-depth, bigger picture – this teaches mindfulness and can help your child in learning how to develop his critical thinking skills.  Through this development he can find a way to see through propaganda and make decisions that best serve his real needs throughout the course of his life.

Since it is part of child development for children, teenagers and young adults to be attracted to what is popular and hip in order to fit in and find their place in the world, then depending on your child’s age he is also going to be  working though different periods of fusion and independence with and from you, his parent.  It is through this process of fusion and opposition that your child discovers his unique perspective and position in the world.  That perspective is going to be his unique experience of biography, experience, and temperament.  Of course a typical goal of a parent is to guide his child toward a perspective that closely aligns with his own perspective.

The key to having a voice that is heard by your child is to maintain an honest, open communication pathway.  This includes discussion and presentation of how and why you see the world as you do, what other opinions are “out there” and what you would like to pass on to your child.   You want to do this with an openness to how you and your child may be different in  – biography, experience, and temperament.  When you are out of sync in one of these areas you can share your perspective but may find a dissonance in how your child views the world.  In order to maintain that open communication pathway you need to be open to the possibility that your child may at least, go through periods of disagreement and opposition to your perspective and at most, choose to live quite differently from you, and impart a perspective that this is his choice.

This issue is central to why it is important to teach critical thinking skills early your child’s development.

Hippies was a negative term applied to youth in the sixties generation.  Although it has mixed connotations both positive and negative, at the time, it distanced the youth from their parents..  Hipsters was a term in the forties for young people connected to the then new musical movement of jazz – it was a fonder term.  It was later revived, in the late nineties and early 2000s, a later, more positive term, to refer to a group that aligns with retro clothing, independent music, and innovative style.  And hypnotic distortion is the way in which pop culture can lull the youth into propaganda that distorts their true options and sets up an intangible thread of control over youth for marketing and materialistic reasons – regardless of the overlay of hipness.

Discover what is hip.  Find a way to connect to it and to your child.  Distill information that assists you and your child in determining whether propaganda is at the base of the hip, cool, thing.  Stay connected to your inner guidance and teach ways for your child to remain connected to his true source.  Then he can wear the cool clothes, dance the hip dance, and sing the latest songs while remaining connected to what truly matters within.

Maintain a clear voice and assist your child in finding his voice.  Sometimes this leads to your child setting his own trends and finding his way, hip, while not hypnotic or distorted.  All you need is love – that begins with self-love.  Offered in love and light, Beth