to elicit a response from you.
Anticipate that their behavior may get worse before it gets better. This book provides a positive parenting plan. Learn the strategies and follow them, even when your children complain and tempt you to fall back into old patterns.
From caterpillar to butterfly
Some parents in my workshops protest when I suggest a different approach, saying “That’s not me. I feel fake.”
You may feel phony at first. That’s expected. New habits take time to practice and internalize. View it as a long term experiment to create new habits, and have patience. Mark Twain said, “It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it 100 times.”
Quitting smoking, going on a diet and learning new parenting skills require a commitment to develop new responses to whatever triggers you to smoke, overeat, or revert to old ways of dealing with your children.
To succeed at new parenting practices, make a commitment to become more conscious to replace old habits with new behaviors.
Start with small achievable goals. Think back to when you started a new job. You allowed yourself to be a beginner for three to six months and to get acclimated to new routines.
The same can be said for adopting a new parenting approach, with ambitious goals: to create a democratic family environment and develop teenagers who will make good independent decisions.
What kind of parent are you?
Parents typically either set too many limits, or too few. The trend in the new millennium is towards over-protection and befriending children. Strive to set fair limits and share power in a democratic home.
Here are four types of parents.
Democratic – parents and children have rights and responsibilities, with the parents as the leaders. Parents encourage age-appropriate independence and foster responsibility through family meetings, chores, the use of natural and logical consequences, and encouragement. This approach can develop resilient and responsible youths with healthy self-esteem.
Permissive – parents grant children rights and freedom without responsibility, possibly by sacrificing parental rights. Parents have difficulty saying “no” to children, which can create entitlement and self-excess-teem (exaggerated self-confidence). These children could be: given too much power in the family; left on their own to navigate; or spend the majority of time under the care of others. Parents may feel guilty and indulge their children.
Overprotective – also known as helicopter parenting. Parents attempt to shield children from life by constantly intruding in the children’s domain. Overprotective parents may show pity; give tacit permission for the child’s lack of self-control; hold the child to lesser standards and hesitate to set limits. Some parents of children with special needs may use a diagnosis to justify over-involvement. Overprotection can create entitlement, set up a lifelong expectation of special treatment, and infantilize the youth.
Authoritarian – parents rule by domination, “father knows best” and corporal punishment. Typically, fathers have all of the rights and responsibilities. The children and mother must obey, without question or input, or face physical punishment, intimidation and/or verbal abuse. This approach can develop bullies and rebellious children and teens.
Avoid trying – do it
It’s easy to try something new. Imagine that I’m in front of you now, trying to pick up this book. “It’s just so heavy, I can’t get my hand around it, it’s just impossible.”
When implementing a new strategy, don’t try it. Instead, embrace it 100 percent, do it, and stick to it.
Do or not.
There is no try.
Jedi Master Yoda
Star Wars
Imagine the whole family is in a stage drama and your new behavior is dress rehearsal for the new role of a positive parent. Learn the lines and recite them with 100 percent conviction. Eventually, the lines will come naturally and create new results.
Give the new approach time to sink in. Positive family relations require practice, feedback, trying again and time. For me, it required reading, taking an 8-week class in a circle on old folding chairs in a church basement and talking about how to be different, and waking up to how my actions influenced my children’s behavior.
You can’t control your children’s behavior. You can only control your response to them. You will learn new behavior in this book.
Younger children will respond faster
This book is intended for parents of children from age 2 to 22. If your children are between ages 2-11, adopting these strategies will lay the foundation for tolerable, even enjoyable teenagers. If your children older than 12, there’s hope. Expect change to take longer.
Even Hercules mows the lawn and does dishes
Kevin Sorbo links his success to the work ethic cultivated while growing up in Mound, Minn. Born in 1962 the fourth of five children, he learned early on about teamwork in the family’s modest home.
“One brother would be washing the dishes, another would dry the dishes, another put them away in an assembly line formula,” Sorbo said. Other chores included vacuuming, shoveling snow (“It’s long winter in Minnesota,” he said) and mowing the lawn. “Yard work is something I enjoy doing anyway. It’s kind of a Zen moment,” Sorbo said.
He appreciates the benefits of home jobs. “Family chores are a wonderful way to prepare for what’s going to happen out in the real world. You learn how to be part of a cohesive team. If you learn how to get along with your brothers and sisters, you can learn to get along with anybody,” he said.
Sorbo had a paper route. “From 8 years old until about age 16, I got up at 4:30 a.m. and delivered seventy-five papers on a bike in 20-degrees below in the winter. I put my money away and learned responsibility very early. I bought my own car with the money – a 1967 powder blue Mustang.”
That work ethic has stayed with him. As an actor who constantly sells himself for the next role, he said, “I can’t give up when things don’t go my way. You’ve got to use every time you get rejected as a learning experience, otherwise you go crazy.”
A junior high school biology teacher, his father used encouragement to motivate his family. “My father held the family together with soft thunder,” Sorbo said. The children received a monthly allowance of 50 cents.
His
