Now available this syndicated column by Dr. Caron Goode, author of Kids Who See Ghosts due out June 1st. Caron is the author of over 15 books including Raising Intuitive Children.

Kathy's Childhood Ghost

Kathy lives in Massachusetts and tells a story she remembers from age four. The story typifies what a child might imagine or encounter when left alone all day. Your children may relate similar experiences, and you might pay them no heed because you, like Kathy's mom, are busy. Yet the strange events so impacted Kathy that she clearly remembers the ghost forty years later. Was he a ghost or an imaginary friend?

Kathy was the youngest of four children, all of whom went to school during the day. Around age four, she was at home with her mom, who was usually taking a nap, making the beds, or tending house. Kathy occupied herself by watching television, and one day, this little boy, around the age of ten, was there with her. He appeared as he came from behind the armchair, and when Kathy's mom or sibling walked by, he would disappear behind it.

Kathy called him Peter. He was tall and thin with big ears and reminded Kathy of Mickey Mouse. He would pop out around the armchair and sit on the floor next to her. They would play and get books, which would fall from the shelves. One day a lamp fell off the table and broke.

If something in the house upset Kathy's mother, she would say, "Why did you do this," and she scolded Kathy. Kathy honestly said she didn't do it.

Mom would say, "Who did it?"

"Peter did it."

"Who's Peter?"

"Peter the ghost. He lives behind the chair right there."

When Peter heard people coming, he would say, "Gotta go." Then he'd get up, run behind the chair and disappear into the floor.

Kathy remembers that Peter seemed to be a resident of the house. He was Kathy's playmate for about one and a half years. Then her family moved when Kathy was five and a half. She never saw or heard from Peter again.

Prime Time for Ghost Friends

When a child sees a ghost or spirit for the first time, often they do so in their early years, when their brains are proportionately135% larger than an adult brain. The early years are a time of vivid imagination, extended brain functions, and easy shifting from one brain wave state to another. By interacting with the environment, a child's brain activates and develops only the potential networks that match or prove to be useful in his or her environment.

In the early years, between ages two to six, a child's brain cannot distinguish between conception/perception that is inner-generated and that which is outer-generated. In other words, there are no filters or boundaries of perceptions. To a toddler, people on television look the same as people in real life and so does the spirit of Grandmother who watches over her grandson. It is during this time of the unbounded and expanded brain that children are most likely to experience and develop relationships with invisible friends, ghosts, angels and fairies.

Brain Frequencies in the Early Years

I asked author Michael Mendizza to discuss children's brain-wave states and kids who see ghosts. Mendizza, along with Joseph Chilton Pearce, coauthored Magical Parent Magical Child: The Art of Joyful Parenting. He is also the founder of Touch the Future, a nonprofit learning-design center. Mendizza, explains, "If children sees a form or something that the adult doesn't see, they quickly learn to screen that out or hide it, because that's not normal in their parents' environment. The ghost is not part of what the culture reflects; it's not part of the bonding experience. It would be an unbonded experience for the child to see forms that the parent doesn't see.

"Bonding" refers to a shared meaning. I'm using the word "bonded" in the sense of shared meaning of "ghost" between adult and child. A parent and child are constantly rechecking in with one another to say, 'Do you understand? Do you see what I see?' That's part of renewing the bond of sharing a worldview, establishing the social network."

Mendizza explained, "We have these different brain frequencies as the brain goes through its stages of growth and development; it changes and adds higher frequencies or different frequencies to its brain-wave patterns, which correspond to states of perception. An interesting point is that if the adult culture saw what we call ghosts, the kids would grow up seeing ghosts too. If the adult culture doesn't see ghosts, then the child doesn't have a model to mirror."

"Psychic" Is Absolutely Normal

At ages 11 to 14, the brain goes through a major cleansing process and physically dissolves the unmyelinated potential neural connections that were available in the younger brain. If these potential connections weren't made, they are erased. The brain reorders itself and, at that point, most people stop "seeing."

Mendizza states, "What we call 'psychic' is absolutely normal for that early brain that has all these networks and is wide open. Then after the brain reorganization around age 11, because we have diminished our potential, we look back and say, 'Oh, that's psychic, that's extra, that's not normal.' But psychic, I'm saying, is quite normal."

But Not All Kids Shut Down After Age 11

In my professional work as a counselor and psychotherapist, I have observed that the pubescent years of changing hormones also opens or reactivates psychic ability in tweens. Were the talents always there? Did they just shut down for a while? Does a new intuition open for children between the ages of 9 to 12? I' cover tweens' stories of what they see and how they interact with ghosts next month.

I hope you see the importance of positive parental influence on a child's worldview and early development. When a child sees a ghost, he or she turns to mom or dad for support, problem solving, or a fix to the situation. How a parent responds will influence the child for the rest of his or her life. Yes, that is true for all life events, but how a parent handles kids seeing ghosts is especially critical because a child's integrity is in question, and the parent's integrity may be questioned by the child. Both parent and child deserve respect answers and ways to connect with each other and the world around them.

Dr. Goode is a licensed counselor, author, speaker, and coach. She is the founder of the Academy for Coaching Parents International. (www.acpi.biz). She recently authored Nurture Your Child's Gift (2008), the award-winning parenting book, Raising Intuitive Children (New Page, 2009) and her newest book, Kids Who See Ghosts, guide them through their fears (2010) All books are available from www.amazon.com. Contact Dr. Goode by email: caron30@gmail.com for speaking engagements and seminars.

Boost your self image by conquering emotional eating. It's important to understand the difference between eating out of habit and emotional eating.

The easiest way to understand eating out of habit is to relate with the person who stops at the bagel shop every morning on his/her way to work. It's a habit. Or the person who comes home in the afternoon, walks through the living room into the kitchen, and opens the refrigerator door. It's a habit.

Break the habit and break the behavior. Take a different route to work. Find another activity in the afternoon to replace coming home. Or, if you do come home in the afternoon climb in the back window instead of walking through the front door.

Emotional eating is not so easy to identify for most of us have more training in ignoring our feelings than we do in acknowledging them.

So how do you know if it's emotional eating? You know by using the process of elimination. First you use a technique to handle habitual eating and if after doing so, you end up eating, then you know it's emotional eating.

The best techniques to handle emotional eating are awareness techniques such as:
Diets which makes one very aware of the specific foods

Behavioral modification such as putting the fork down between bites, eating slowly...

Calorie counting.
Food Equivalents.
Weighing Food.
Stop thinking techniques.

Any of these techniques are effective in breaking the eating habit. Weight comes off until... The "until" is an emotional stress at which point all the effort "goes out the door."

There are two factors that end the diet or whatever awareness technique that's being used:

1. To self berate: The individual gets very upset with oneself and begins to wonder if they have a "mental problem." They call themselves stupid, dumb, asinine... They believe that this one incursion has completely ruined all their past successes and may even gorge themselves to get even with themselves. In other words, they have become their own worst enemy through their own thinking mechanisms.

2. They are totally ill equipped to handle the stressful emotion. The disappointment or success that led to the emotion yields a stressful situation in handling the emotion. This is because most of us have been trained to avoid emotions, control them, or pretend they don't exist. Even success leads to emotion? Yes, the emotion is happiness, yet it's amazing how many of us don't allow ourselves to feel happy. "Don't be too happy, you'll set yourself up for the big let down," is just one of several beliefs we've acquired towards happiness.

We could write a book about all the other emotions such as upset, boredom, confusion, anger, frustration, depression... In fact I did--see the resource box.

All the good work achieved to lose weight is for naught. When we learn to treat ourselves lovingly instead of self put-downs and embrace emotion instead of denying them, losing weight is a natural process.

A progressive approach to losing weight involves asking important questions "What is missing here? Why are you not getting the results you've been promised?" It is clearly insane to keep dieting when the results are so poor. It's more important to gain a grasp on how to stop emotional eating—eating emotional stress than it is to read the scale. Besides focusing on the scale doesn't empower you to be a better more enlightened person, whereas learning how to overcome emotional eating empowers you in all aspects of your life. If you're a sales person, you'll be a better sales person. If you're an assembly line worker, you'll be a better assembly line worker; a mother, a better mother... Overall, you'll build self worth and find that what you really want to eat is far more nutritious and less in quantity than you ever before imagined possible.

Stronger, better, smarter...
When will they let us out of the secret warehouse where bionic women are stored?

I ran across this in the March 2008 Women's History issue and thought it was worth repeating

She was "a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man." She was Anne Hutchinson. The year was 1637. The place was New England, a New World where the constraints of the Old World were, at once, being thrown off and reaffirmed.

Anne was accused by the ministers of Newtown, Massachusetts Bay Colony of speaking against the church. She was called in for questioning. The governor (judge) in his opening statement to her charged, "You have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex..."

This was a very delicate situation for a woman in 1637. If she was too ardent in asserting her understanding of the law she would be emphasizing her responsibility when she was found guilty, and a guilty verdict was pre-ordained. If Anne Hutchinson was to survive, she had to convince these men that she knew her place and had done everything possible to stay in it. The best verdict she could hope for was banishment to the wilderness, a frightening thought made more so by the fact that Anne was pregnant.

The court, led by the governor of the colony, was overtly chivalrous throughout the proceedings but refused her request that her accusers, the ministers, take an oath to tell the truth (two of them were sworn in before the final vote on her guilt was taken).

Anne Hutchinson was banished to the wilderness for presuming to take the leadership role in her community and in her religion that her latter years proved she was suited for. She did not die in that wilderness but was followed there by a group of supporters, including her husband, and was instrumental in establishing the colony of Rhode Island.

It is interesting to note that when her child was still-born, the ministers of Newtown reopened their attacks from their pulpits, claiming her dead child as greater proof, from God himself, of her guilt.

Born into a family of Unitarian ministers in Weymouth, Massachusetts in 1744 the future wife and mother of presidents is considered to be the first American feminist. Abigail Adams came from an enlightened religious background, and learned the importance of logic and moral influences. Her religious and moral leanings brought her to condemn slavery and to write letters her husband, John Adams, urging that he "remember the women" when the Declaration of Independence was being shaped.

Abigail Adams was not a public activist and treasured the quiet contemplation of her home and garden, but her letters to her husband show that she was a thoughtful woman working behind the scenes for what seemed obvious to her even then: equality and fairness in dealings between all people. Not all of her choices were ones we would make today but her consideration of important questions of her day and yet in ours makes her an invaluable measure in women's history.

In order "to honor and recognize Harriet Tubman for her important role in the history of Tennessee and the United States," March 10 of each year has been designated by the US Senate as Harriet Tubman Day. March 10 is the day Tubman died in 1913. It is also right in the middle of Women's History Month.

"Harriet Tubman was one of the most remarkable people our country has ever known," Tennessee State Senator Ophelia Ford, D-Memphis, said. "She became known as the 'Moses of Her People' for her tireless efforts to help slaves reach freedom through the Underground Railroad. Historians estimate that as many as 100,000 people escaped slavery on the Underground Railroad between 1810 and 1860, and Harriet Tubman was a part of that effort."

Harriet Tubman was an advocate of equality for women as well. She was a member of the National Federation of Afro-American Women, the National Association of Colored Women, and the New England Women's Suffrage Association.

In 1896 Harriet Tubman was the speaker at the first meeting of the National Association of Colored Women.

Leta Stetter Hollingworth was born on May 25th 1886 but her influence on how we see women reaches into today. Unlike Abigail Adams and women of that earlier time, Leta Stetter entered the University of Nebraska at the age of sixteen, completing her Masters studies and beginning work with "mental defectives." She received her Ph.D. in June of 1916.

Hollinsworth's main work was with "gifted children" but the one that makes her stand out in women's history is her study of the psychology of women, with emphasis on the issues of intelligence and intellectual ability. We can thank her for the tested and proven (though still not always accepted) fact that women are not mentally incapacitated during menstruation, and, with possibly wider reaching importance, disproving the idea that women were not able to excel or reach the highest achievements and would have to settle for mediocrity because of an assertion by assessors at the time that women lacked variability: Women were pre-programmed for a certain narrow range of behaviors.

Leta Stetter Hollingworth empirically tested the "menstrual madness" hypothesis and proved that women's performance of cognitive, perceptual, and motor tasks was similar to that of males, even during menstruation. She also carried out a large study, examining 1,000 male newborns and 1,000 female newborns, and found no greater inherent similarity in female capabilities or skill range than in males.

Women were not allowed in the first, Helenistic, Olympic sports. Some interesting dates to recall:

• 1567 Mary Queen of Scotts is believed to be the first woman to play golf in Scotland (first country of golf)
• 1811 first women's golf tournament is held at Musselburgh, Scotland
• 1851 Amelia Jenks Bloomer recommends the practical pants for women athletes, the bloomer
• 1856 Catherine Beecher published the first exercise manual for women, advocated a system of calisthenics designed to make women's bodies stronger and healthier
• 1884 Maud Watson is the champion at the first women's singles competition at Wimbledon
• 1900 Women compete in the Paris Olympics in golf, tennis, and croquet
• 1924 Figure skating is the only sport open to women at the first Winter Olympic Games
• 1928 Women finally compete in Olympic track and field events

  And in the sports category of most often overlooked significant achievement:
  

• 1931 Virne Mitchell, pitcher, becomes the first woman in professional baseball. She strikes out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrigin an exhibition game. Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis bans women from the sport later that year.

"Woman as Inventor: Shall She Be Given a Representation at the Columbian Expositions"

Thanks to Mary Lockwood, the District of Columbia's member of the Board of Lady Managers and James DuDubois, editor of Inventive Age, that headline went out for the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. There were so many women who signed up to show their inventions in the Women's Building that a special "Inventions Room" was opened and up to 335 inventions (by one visitor's account) by women were showcased. There was, as one might expect, criticism of the "scientific" value of women's inventions but given the limited education and generally non-existent funding for such exploration this number is amazing, even if it is considered that far fewer than 335 were actually listed in the catalogue.

The Tracy Gravity Safety Elevator (Yes, that was an elevator invented by Harriet Tracy.) was one of the sensations of the exposition… Most of Tracy's inventions were shown in the Men's Building.

Other Women Inventors in History:

Isabella Helen Lugoski Karle (1921- ) is a American physical chemist who invented new methods of X-ray Crystallography.

Kevlar was invented by Stephanie Louise Kwolek and was first marketed by DuPont in 1971.


Sarah E. Goode invented the folding cabinet bed (sometimes called the "Murphy Bed"), a space-saver that folded up against the wall into a cabinet.

The windshield wiper was invented by Mary Anderson in 1903 to help streetcars operate safely in the rain.

And last here:
In 1809, Mary Dixon Kies received the first U. S. patent issued to a woman. Kies, a Connecticut native, invented a process for weaving straw with silk or thread.

Look into what women have created. You might be surprised.