Parenting Skills That Improve Child Behavior
Grow Your Super Powers!
THE PARENTING GUIDE : CHAPTER 1
What Does It Take To Do A Good Parenting Job?
Just like any job, raising children comes with a list of requirements. These requirements allow for a positive parenting experience, beneficial to everyone. But while anyone may muster up some of these traits, it is mastering them that will turn them into parenting super powers.
Parenting Super Powers
Broken down into six broad but driving categories, parents can easily visualize and assess how they put their powers to work, everyday. Once developed and used properly, these super powers can create positive effects in children’s characters, habits, self-discipline, self-esteem and view of the world they inhabit.
SIX PARENTING SUPER POWERS
PARENTING SUPER POWER # 1
PATIENCE
A Basic Need To Improve Parenting Skills
This passive action holds the key to making good decisions and it is the essential ingredient for the next six requirements. Imagine “patience” as the force to draw from to feed sensitivity, attention, communication, motivation, consistency and even courage. From caring to creative thinking, patience is at the root of all that is positive and good. While lack of patience is a quick starter of negative, violent, frustrating or even evil situations.
Learning To Be Patient With Ourselves
Patience brings balance and harmony. It allows us time to think before we react. It may buy us enough time to find our original reactions absurd, petty or egotistical; the typical immediate reactions triggered by our ego’s defense mechanism.
By being patient with ourselves, by allowing ourselves the time to think, to get things done, by not demanding more of ourselves than we can achieve, by avoiding comparisons to others or impossible ideals, we build our own self-esteem, while we learn to exercise that same patience with others.
It takes patience and self-control to watch children make their own decisions and sometimes fall. But it is also patience that will afford us the chance to watch them get back up on their own.
Patience answers a thousand questions. Patience comforts, listens, counsels and guides children in the discovery of their natural talents. Patience feeds their curiosities and motivates them to explore what intrigues them, to play what pleases them, and to practice what they want to master. In exercising what they’re naturally inclined to, children find a medium for expression and a platform for success. So, patience is both supportive and empowering.
Patience can go a long way in achieving the health and happiness parents want for their children and for themselves. Children are great teachers of patience and it can be learned together, but with a different set of expectations. Let patience be your guiding light and the source of all your parenting powers.
PARENTING SUPER POWER # 2
SENSITIVITY
Put Your Empathy And Ethics To Work For You
Sensitivity can only exist as a result of empathy and a healthy code of ethics. Sensitivity may require sympathy or sternness. It is in deciphering the most effective approach in each situation that sensitivity comes in.
Sensitivity To One May Cause Insensitivity Towards Another
Governed by the best intentions, parents may be very quick at asking children to share their toys. But “when” and “how” to ask this of a child, requires serious sensitivity.
Giving children time to first receive their new gift, open it, discover it, play with it and make it theirs, will propel them to share it as the next natural step. Push them too early and you’ll be robbing them of that experience. The request will naturally cause anger and resentment because it is ahead of the child’s natural process.
Children must be ready to share their toys, or not only will they resent their little siblings as the cause of this early request, they will also resent the people asking. They are getting mixed messages. They received a gift that they did not make their own before being asked to pass it on. The request makes children feel that their feelings are less important than their siblings’.
A more sensitive approach would be to let the receiver receive. Younger siblings, who need to learn that they weren’t born with instant access to everything, can usually use some limits in that area that will benefit them in the future.
Light with sensitivity the way to sharing, so that children may ultimately incorporate it as a rewarding experience of their own.
Exercising Sensitivity
Sensitivity builds trust and reinforces bonding. When children feel understood and respected, they feel confident with who they are. Awareness of their limitations will put you more in tune with their personalities and help you find the best way to communicate with them.
Knowing what affects your child, even in common circumstances, such as feeling tired or cranky, will help you better deal with each situation. Most children get cranky when tired and it is a parent’s job to make sure children get the sleep they need. Finding a way to get the child to sleep would be the sensitive solution; expecting the child to behave, would be asking for more than the child is prepared to endure.
As parents become more sensitive, they get to know the requirements that are most dissonant with their children’s personalities. Sitting for hours at a time could be termed torture for hyperactive children, while participating in a class theater piece could be overwhelmingly uncomfortable for an introverted personality. Only sensitivity can tell you when children are ready to expand past their limitations.
Sensitivity can only be exercised with patience, with calm and clear observation of others and ourselves. Fueled by patience, sensitivity propels us towards wisdom, journeying from knowledge through true understanding.
“Don’t talk to strangers” doesn’t mean “don’t get in the car with strangers”. “Don’t take candy from strangers” doesn’t say anything about “French fries”. If the rule was not explained properly, children can only take it literally. Because that is all the information they were given and the fundamental reason for the rule was never explained. Does “Why” sound familiar?
GOOD PUPPY Child Cognitive Behavioral Tools are designed to aid parents in the management of children’s behavior. In order for good behavior to stick, children need to be able to reason new rules into their character. So, new rules need to be in accord with their emotions. Children question rules, not because they mean to defy authority, but because they are trying to understand them in order to incorporate them. New rules need to be explained clearly and with sensitivity, so that children may apply them in different situations.
PARENTING SUPER POWER # 3
ATTENTION
Giving Children What They Need
Like the warmth of the sun, think of attention as the nurturing energy radiating from your eyes. Now think of your emotions as the frequency selector. Some stations are harmonious and empowering, while others exude negativity and limitations. Before you focus your attention on your child, your spouse or even yourself, check the station you’re tuned into, since that’s what you will be broadcasting.
Tuning To The Right Channel
If you don’t like what you feel or hear in your head, chances are, neither will anyone else. Change the channel. Gain control of your frequency. Don’t allow every piece of media, angry driver or stressed boss to pick your emotions for you. Play some classical music, get some fresh air, take a cool shower, hug a tree; do whatever centers you and turns you to a positive channel. Tune yourself and your attention will be beneficial to yourself and everyone around you.
Negative Attention Seeking
Children need attention to grow and they will ask for it until they get it. This continuous need for attention can be draining on parents, who might withhold it because they are busy, tired or just distracted. The disappointment children feel when ignored, frustrates them, turning them into nagging individuals. Parents, who sometimes, even unknowingly, ignore their children’s pleas, suddenly find themselves tuned to WHINNY 99.
This ritual eventually becomes a standard family dynamic. A child does not actually plan this out to get those results, as it is usually suggested with the cliché “negative attention seeking.” Children don’t look that far ahead, they live in the now. That’s why it is so difficult for them to deal with not getting attention when they need it. Not getting it now, means not getting it; and in so many ways, children are right.
Giving Children The Attention They Need
You can’t give a plant today, the sun it needed yesterday. You can give it sun, but cloudy days will forever remain cloudy, affecting the plant’s growth. Children need sunlight, love, physical contact and attention, everyday. For children, quality counts, but consistency is crucial.
Make sure you connect with your child. Talking to them while doing something else does not make the child the focus of your attention. You will either find them competing with whatever it is you’re focusing on, or you’ll frustrate them and lose their attention.
A mother helping her child with homework while cooking, gets upset when the child gets distracted. Yet, the mother hasn’t even looked at the child once, because her attention has been on preparing dinner. Ironically, it is often paying attention to our own doings that can spare us from these frustrating and hurtful dynamics. Children learn by imitating, so if parents do it, children will too.
Consider how phones and electronics have captured the focus of both children and adults, deteriorating communication by removing eye contact, focus and attention. It’s up to us to be the example we want our children to follow. If we want them to communicate properly, we need to communicate properly ourselves. If we want healthy consistent behavior, that’s what we need to give them. If we want their attention when we talk to them, well, we need to give them the example ourselves. Their characters, self-esteem and capability to build healthy relationships, depend on that.
GOOD PUPPY Child Cognitive Behavioral Tools help children get attention for good behavior; assuring them a positive response to their needs, while building their confidence and self-esteem through daily accomplishments.
PARENTING SUPER POWER # 4
COMMUNICATION
Avoiding Judgements And Taboos To Build Children’s Trust
Patience, sensitivity and attention become a two way street in communication. From “what” to say to “how” to listen, communication is the lifeline of the family unit. A family that communicates well, builds healthy, solid bonds that provide children the safety they need to develop healthy self-esteem. Avoiding judgments and taboos creates a trusting environment that allows children to openly discuss their feelings and ask questions freely.
Winning Your Children’s Trust
In the darkness of ignorance on any subject, children will choose whom to ask based on past experiences. If they are judged because of their questions, ridiculed, ignored or avoided, children will find a different source of information. An eldest child may find an uncle or a cousin; a younger child may defer to an older sibling. Children are looking for someone that can help them interpret and understand their new experiences and they are quick to learn where to go for what. Today, there is no less judgmental guru than the Internet, leaving parents a short period of time to win their children’s trust.
The GOOD PUPPY Child Cognitive Behavioral System was designed to improve communication. From its empathetic design which children can understand before they can read, to its charts, tools and games to aid in the recognition and verbalization of emotions. The system itself acts as a translator or aid in communication. The systemic approach to behavior, based on privileges and bound by pre-established consequences, gives children peace of mind, promotes bonding and builds trust.
PARENTING SUPER POWER # 5
MOTIVATION
The Driving Force To Good Behavior
Have you ever heard of people who can’t find a reason to get up in the morning? That is a serious sign of depression, or serious lack of motivation. As our interests in life change, so do our motivations. But every action begins with an incentive that generates the motivation to do it. From going to work to working out, without a paycheck or incentive, we wouldn’t get off the couch.
Creating The Right Incentives
Giving children everything, leaves them wanting nothing. Allowing children to work for what they want, gives them incentive, motivation and the satisfaction of accomplishment, while building confidence and self-esteem.
While parents’ motivations tend to be long-term, such as picking a preschool already thinking of college, children can’t think that far ahead. Their future is relative to their life span. Five-year-olds cannot think fifteen years into the future. A week to a child may very well feel like a month to an adult. Children need more immediate gratification because it is relative to their memory and their perception of time itself.
The GOOD PUPPY Child Cognitive Behavioral System includes an array of tools to create the right short-term and long-term incentives for both introverted and extroverted personalities. The system helps parents understand personality types in order to discover children’s talents and limitations and create the correct incentives.
PARENTING SUPER POWER # 6
CONSISTENCY
An Essential Parenting Skill
Consistency creates stability and is a key factor for building the solid structure children seek. Imagine that structure as an invisible house. If you tell the child that the door is here, the window is there, and where the walls are, the child can imagine the invisible house and play along. The clearer you make that invisible house, the easier it will be for children to adjust to it and find their place within it. If you start changing the position of the walls, the door and the window, children will not be able to keep re-imagining the house in order to follow the changing parameters and, eventually, the house will crumble.
Sending Children A Consistent Message
Both rules and consequences need to be consistent for the message to be clear. If there is a limit, let’s call it a “wall”; that “wall” needs to be acknowledged, always. That’s what makes it real. If you only notice it sometimes, that child is learning to walk through walls; and sometimes, he will hit solid ones.
Ironically, consistency in behavior, which is what parents expect from their children, is learned at home from consistent behavior from parents.
The GOOD PUPPY Child Behavioral System keeps the family playing under fair, preestablished rules and consequences. All it takes is consistency to implement and maintain a healthy structure, clear to all. Children love the game and will help keep parents in check and following the simple rules.
PARENTING REQUIREMENT # 7
COURAGE
Letting Our Heart Guide Our Parenting
Laying dormant among patience and confidence, courage dreams of waking up. Courage wants to prove itself. Courage wants to let us know who we really are. In making its presence known when overcoming challenges, downfalls, fears and limitations, courage propels us to grow.
Rising Above Our Selfish Needs
In quiet stillness, courage speaks its loudest words. In letting go of rituals to let children learn them on their own, in encouraging independence to make children self-reliant, in giving respect, space or privacy, courage soars. In so many aspects and in so many ways, courage comes in to move us forward and help us overcome ourselves, our fearful or selfish wishes or choices.
The word “courage” itself stems from the Latin “Coeur”, meaning that it is the “heart” that empowers us. Parenting is a test of courage, a test of the heart. It is this same force that moves us to protect our loved ones, or to overcome our own obstacles, handicaps or inhibitions, for our children and for our own growth.
The GOOD PUPPY Child Behavioral System prompts both children and parents to expand their awareness of themselves and each other. Challenges become opportunities, limitations highlight talents, anxieties vanish, fears fade, and courage gets a super sidekick!
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
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