Raising Able Children: how to nurture capable confident young people

The trouble with positive parenting is it takes longer than the quick-and-dirty methods of reward and punishment, manipulating, bribery and praise. These are mild to extreme forms of bullying a child into doing what we want.

And do we really want to raise automatons who will work for money and avoid punishment? Or do we want to learn how to motivate children from the inside out?

More patience, finesse and planning are required to use family meetings, encouragement, family dinner and chores, and natural and logical consequences to allow toddlers, school-age, tweens and teenagers to learn to make good decisions.

Parenting is THE most difficult, challenging and rewarding task most of us will do in our lifetime, with the longest lasting consequences. It requires time and more patience than I ever thought I’d have. Parents are establishing the foundation for a person,  and a relationship with that person, for life.

And look how many of us do it — by being too strict or too lenient, and through manipulation that is unrelated to what’s going on.

If you constantly use time-out, withholding electronic/gaming time, financial incentives, and grounding, you are using your power, size and strength to quickly manipulate your child/teen into behaving as you want him to. This will bankrupt your relationship in the long run and demonstrate to your child that bullying works.

When I learned positive parenting skills, I was sceptical that encouragement, family meetings and natural and logical consequences would get my kids to do what I wanted.

Those strategies didn’t always get the kids to do what I wanted.

However, they provided the oil to make our family machine hum with positive energy, love, humor, teamwork and patience. It laid the groundwork to nurture their self-confidence, self-esteem and develop independent people who make good decisions and with whom I have a good relationship with now that they’re in their 20s. Giving up reward and punishment and praise changed our relationship for life.

Our relationship is not perfect. I was not the perfect parent. If such things exist, please contact me!

Meanwhile, go to my free tip sheets on encouragement and family meetings. Buy my book , read it. Get your spouse to read it and start using the techniques. Learn and use the Three Rs of natural and logical consequences from Jane Nelsen, Ph.D. — Related, Respectful and Reasonable.

This is bully preventing, non-violent parenting. It takes time and planning. You can do it.

This entry was posted on March 7, 2011 at 8:57 am and is filed under Bullying, conscious parenting, Family meetings, mutual respect. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: bully prevention