So you've accepted your Parental Quest to make a joyful family and point your child toward a happy life. High five! But what does that mean? If you were Bilbo, you'd need at least to know that you were going to cross some perilous mountains and steal some treasure from a fire-breathing dragon. The quest is not to go to the ocean and find buried treasure. A lot more details would come up along the quest, but you'd want at least a basic idea of what you were trying to do, or weren't trying to do. Here are the basic ideas for your Parental Quest. There will be more details to learn later:
1) What you are trying to do: create a relationship with your child in which your child feels like the most important thing in your world. Your child will feel respected, loved, valued, comforted, encouraged, and confident. This relationship will also make YOU feel supremely happy. This relationship is the treasure that you will find. As you mature, you will realize that it is more precious than gold.
2) The perilous mountains you will cross are the months and years of changing your priorities. Putting down the video game controller and leaving your computer to value your child and play with her/him is a simple example. Making a child feel important means treating him/her as important--more important than other priorities. Like climbing a mountain, this takes time, energy, determination, and perseverance.
3) The dragon you must slay is your own untamed emotions. The metaphor breaks down a little here, because you don't really slay your emotions. Rather, you learn to manage them or tame them. But the point is that you can't have joy at home if you're breathing fire on your family. If you want to find the treasure, your family must feel safe: physically safe from spanking, hitting, etc., and also emotionally safe from yelling, belittling, ignoring, and abandonment. And you're the one that can create that atmosphere in your home by your daily choices.
I must tell you that your Quest may be challenging. The mountains may be steep, and the dragon may be crafty and difficult to tame. You may feel discouraged at times. But no one can take up your Quest but you. It is yours alone, and YOU CAN DO IT! And incidentally, the treasure is SO worth it!
Sunday, April 1, 2012
A Parent's Quest- Part 1: Embracing your Quest
In life, we make choices. It's unavoidable. The one thing we don't get to choose is if we make choices or not! Even choosing to NOT make a choice is a choice. The result of making a choice is that a new set of choices presents itself. Those choices also bring new opportunities for choice into view. Choice after choice, we shape our lives, inwardly and outwardly, such that over time we have become the people we have chosen to become. This is the unavoidable responsibility that we each bear: that we have chosen our way. Presumably, you're reading this because you've made the choice to create a family. Likely, you've made the choice to have children. You're reading Joyful Families because you are choosing to search the internet for ideas that can create greater happiness in your home. I'm making the choice to reach out over the internet because I care about families and especially about children. If we both choose well, the future will be brighter with happiness--and future happy choices.
Children start out their lives without choice. They depend on their parents to make choices to benefit their lives. By the time children gain the ability to make choices, their parents have already helped shape their lives and souls in such a way that certain choices are easily visible for them, but other choices may not be apparent or seem within reach. By the age of 5, children enter the school system. They are not at all equal. Some are prepared academically, socially, and emotionally to succeed in that arena. Others are prepared in only one or two of these areas. Still others are not prepared in any of these areas. They are expected to sit down, manage their emotions, and learn. That choice may seem out of reach for some of them. These unfortunate children begin to fail, and it may be years before they learn to develop the skills that can help them to choose success. It is clear that parents have the responsibility to give their children a good start in life, with their faces toward choices of joy.
But how do we do that as parents? Mostly we are already doing the best we know how to do. If we have preschoolers, how do we know if we are preparing them well before age 5? If we have school-age children that are struggling, what are we supposed to do about it? What actions can we take to increase the likelihood that our children will succeed and that our families will be joyful? May we suggest the following steps:
1) First off, accept the quest to be the one to take positive action. It puts our child at risk to assume that someone else--a spouse, an ex-spouse, a teacher, etc., will be the one to choose help our child. It is especially a mistake to assume that our child will spontaneously figure out how to choose to be different. We're the adults. We have a much bigger ability to choose. Let's agree that "It's up to me."
2) Take an honest inventory of our family. Are we creating joy? If I were a child, would I like to live in this family? Would I feel encouraged, loved, and understood? Would I feel frightened or angered or hurt by the way I was talked to or treated?
3) Make a list of things that could be improved in your relationship with your child and spouse, if any.
4) Make a choice. Choose at least one thing on the list and start working on it! Day by day, you can make choices that will open up more happiness and improved future choices to you and your family. You can do this!
Children start out their lives without choice. They depend on their parents to make choices to benefit their lives. By the time children gain the ability to make choices, their parents have already helped shape their lives and souls in such a way that certain choices are easily visible for them, but other choices may not be apparent or seem within reach. By the age of 5, children enter the school system. They are not at all equal. Some are prepared academically, socially, and emotionally to succeed in that arena. Others are prepared in only one or two of these areas. Still others are not prepared in any of these areas. They are expected to sit down, manage their emotions, and learn. That choice may seem out of reach for some of them. These unfortunate children begin to fail, and it may be years before they learn to develop the skills that can help them to choose success. It is clear that parents have the responsibility to give their children a good start in life, with their faces toward choices of joy.
But how do we do that as parents? Mostly we are already doing the best we know how to do. If we have preschoolers, how do we know if we are preparing them well before age 5? If we have school-age children that are struggling, what are we supposed to do about it? What actions can we take to increase the likelihood that our children will succeed and that our families will be joyful? May we suggest the following steps:
1) First off, accept the quest to be the one to take positive action. It puts our child at risk to assume that someone else--a spouse, an ex-spouse, a teacher, etc., will be the one to choose help our child. It is especially a mistake to assume that our child will spontaneously figure out how to choose to be different. We're the adults. We have a much bigger ability to choose. Let's agree that "It's up to me."
2) Take an honest inventory of our family. Are we creating joy? If I were a child, would I like to live in this family? Would I feel encouraged, loved, and understood? Would I feel frightened or angered or hurt by the way I was talked to or treated?
3) Make a list of things that could be improved in your relationship with your child and spouse, if any.
4) Make a choice. Choose at least one thing on the list and start working on it! Day by day, you can make choices that will open up more happiness and improved future choices to you and your family. You can do this!
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Ponder Question #3 What is a parent's role in helping children?
How you perceive your role as a parent has a lot to do with how you act towards your child. Some people think of themselves as a military sergeant whose job is to get those kids to obey immediately and stay on a rigid schedule. Others think of themselves as a bacon provider who brings home the money, and the kids are on their own after that. Others think of themselves as an employment trainer, whose primary job is to teach their child to work. Others think that they are supposed to keep their child happy at all times, thus buying and doing whatever it takes to keep a smile on a face. There are many other mindsets, each with advantages and disadvantages. Each mindset reveals something about the values and beliefs of the parent. What is your idea of your role with your child? What does that say about your values and beliefs? What are the advantages and disadvantages of your mindset? Would you want to change it? Can you change it? How much of it did you inherit from the way that you were raised by your parents? How did that work for you as a child? And possibly most important, how is following your mindset affecting your child? Is it creating current and future joy in the family and with your children?
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Ponder Question #2 How does your agenda reflect your child's agenda?
One of the signs of real love is when you can understand what's on the other person's agenda and put it on the top of your own agenda.
As parents, we have important things on our agenda. We need to keep the house clean, pay bills, fix food, wash clothes, and do scores of chores. These things aren't necessarily what we want to do--they're required to keep the home in working order. In addition, we have an agenda for our child's behavior: no burping, no fighting, no bad words, yes on doing chores and homework and on minding their please and thank yous. Our agenda is important.
Children also have their agenda. We'll discuss two major headings on their agendas. 1) They need to discover how the world works, and how people work. Like little scientists, they can only find good information by doing experiments and repeating these experiments over and over to see if the results are consistent. If put into words, the experiments might have titles like, "If something is dropped from a high place (such as a high chair) does it always fall down? Does it make a sound? Does it stay in one piece or splatter?" and, "If mom tells me to do something (or not do something) what would happen if I disobeyed?" and, "What is around the corner and down the street?" 2) Second on their agenda is mastery, in which they master the skills of how to get things done, using the information gathered in the above experiments. Examples are, "I need to learn how to get my own clothes on and off without help from anyone", "I need to learn how to be a leader in getting other people to help me do stuff," (this is often mislabeled as manipulation) and "I need to be able to make my own choices and decisions in life." There are hundreds of examples more.
Just like the adult agenda, a child's agenda isn't frivolous or meaningless. They can't build a solid life without good information and the mastery of many skills. They stick to their agenda like glue. That's when your one year old repeatedly drops mashed potatoes on the floor, and your two year old repeatedly disobeys you and your three year old keeps going exploring down the street--and on up through the years. Just imagine how unlucky the child would be who never learned that gravity pulls things downward, or to be able to say 'no' to a pushy person, or to make a decision, or to have enough bravery and curiosity to look around the corner. The things that children are learning are foundations to a healthy life, and are very, very important.
A high percentage of parental mistakes involve pushing the parent's agenda and ignoring the child's agenda. Whenever we find ourselves saying, "NO!" repeatedly, or snared in a struggle for power, it is a good bet that we haven't been sensitive to our child's agenda. This can be solved by figuring out their agenda and putting it high on our own agenda for them to learn what they are trying to learn, and master what they are trying to master. When our agenda reflects our child's agenda, we help them progress. We eliminate much of the negative in our relationships. We create a relationship in which our child feels that we are on his/her team.
Sometimes this is easy. It doesn't take much to put a ball or teething toy on the high chair so that baby can throw it down repeatedly (and we pick it up repeatedly). They get to learn about gravity, and we don't have to clean peaches off of the floor as much. Both agendas are at work, and it actually takes less time and effort to play this game than to keep cleaning up the floor. For the child who needs to practice making his/her own choices, it's easy to say, "It's time for jammies. You get to pick which ones to wear. I wonder what you'll pick tonight!" The child gets to practice making choices, and you get the night routine moving: both agendas again. It's actually easier to do it that way than to ignore the child's agenda by saying, "Go get in your jammies," and then spending 10 minutes arguing about it, as your child practices making choices by choosing not to get pajamas on.
Sometimes it's not so easy, and actually takes a little time and energy to put our child's agenda high on our agenda. For our little explorer, we might have to take a 30 minute break and go for a walk around the corner, stopping to observe the ants and the construction workers along the way. This small gift of love to our child will make a big difference in the relationship and in the mental health of both parties. Plus, in the end it really is easier to do this than it is to have a 30 minute freak-out when the child goes missing. And what about our little contrary child who wants to disobey everything we say? In this case, it only takes a little mental energy to figure out how to let him/her practice saying "no" in a way that works for our agenda, too. Here are two examples to get you started. 1) Play Simon Says. In the game, your child has permission to disobey you anytime that you don't say "Simon Says." 2) Be playful. When it's time to pick up toys, you might say in your silly voice, "Oh, no you don't! I know what you're trying to do! You want to pick up these toys. But you better not. You better not touch these toys and put them away. Ooh! You put one away! Stop that right this minute!" etc. Your kid will probably be laughing and the toys get put away.
Figuring out what is on our child's agenda and placing it on our own agenda takes practice. It's something you can master. Yes, even as adults we keep on mastering skills and learning things throughout our lives. All you have to do is just keep doing it over and over! Pretty soon it gets easier and you get better at it.
When you place your child's agenda on your own agenda, you will have a happier child and you will find greater satisfaction than ever in your parenting. You and your child will have the feeling that you are a team instead of rivals, and your child will master social and other skills more quickly and fully. Your family will be more joyful. So...how does your agenda reflect your child's agenda?
As parents, we have important things on our agenda. We need to keep the house clean, pay bills, fix food, wash clothes, and do scores of chores. These things aren't necessarily what we want to do--they're required to keep the home in working order. In addition, we have an agenda for our child's behavior: no burping, no fighting, no bad words, yes on doing chores and homework and on minding their please and thank yous. Our agenda is important.
Children also have their agenda. We'll discuss two major headings on their agendas. 1) They need to discover how the world works, and how people work. Like little scientists, they can only find good information by doing experiments and repeating these experiments over and over to see if the results are consistent. If put into words, the experiments might have titles like, "If something is dropped from a high place (such as a high chair) does it always fall down? Does it make a sound? Does it stay in one piece or splatter?" and, "If mom tells me to do something (or not do something) what would happen if I disobeyed?" and, "What is around the corner and down the street?" 2) Second on their agenda is mastery, in which they master the skills of how to get things done, using the information gathered in the above experiments. Examples are, "I need to learn how to get my own clothes on and off without help from anyone", "I need to learn how to be a leader in getting other people to help me do stuff," (this is often mislabeled as manipulation) and "I need to be able to make my own choices and decisions in life." There are hundreds of examples more.
Just like the adult agenda, a child's agenda isn't frivolous or meaningless. They can't build a solid life without good information and the mastery of many skills. They stick to their agenda like glue. That's when your one year old repeatedly drops mashed potatoes on the floor, and your two year old repeatedly disobeys you and your three year old keeps going exploring down the street--and on up through the years. Just imagine how unlucky the child would be who never learned that gravity pulls things downward, or to be able to say 'no' to a pushy person, or to make a decision, or to have enough bravery and curiosity to look around the corner. The things that children are learning are foundations to a healthy life, and are very, very important.
A high percentage of parental mistakes involve pushing the parent's agenda and ignoring the child's agenda. Whenever we find ourselves saying, "NO!" repeatedly, or snared in a struggle for power, it is a good bet that we haven't been sensitive to our child's agenda. This can be solved by figuring out their agenda and putting it high on our own agenda for them to learn what they are trying to learn, and master what they are trying to master. When our agenda reflects our child's agenda, we help them progress. We eliminate much of the negative in our relationships. We create a relationship in which our child feels that we are on his/her team.
Sometimes this is easy. It doesn't take much to put a ball or teething toy on the high chair so that baby can throw it down repeatedly (and we pick it up repeatedly). They get to learn about gravity, and we don't have to clean peaches off of the floor as much. Both agendas are at work, and it actually takes less time and effort to play this game than to keep cleaning up the floor. For the child who needs to practice making his/her own choices, it's easy to say, "It's time for jammies. You get to pick which ones to wear. I wonder what you'll pick tonight!" The child gets to practice making choices, and you get the night routine moving: both agendas again. It's actually easier to do it that way than to ignore the child's agenda by saying, "Go get in your jammies," and then spending 10 minutes arguing about it, as your child practices making choices by choosing not to get pajamas on.
Sometimes it's not so easy, and actually takes a little time and energy to put our child's agenda high on our agenda. For our little explorer, we might have to take a 30 minute break and go for a walk around the corner, stopping to observe the ants and the construction workers along the way. This small gift of love to our child will make a big difference in the relationship and in the mental health of both parties. Plus, in the end it really is easier to do this than it is to have a 30 minute freak-out when the child goes missing. And what about our little contrary child who wants to disobey everything we say? In this case, it only takes a little mental energy to figure out how to let him/her practice saying "no" in a way that works for our agenda, too. Here are two examples to get you started. 1) Play Simon Says. In the game, your child has permission to disobey you anytime that you don't say "Simon Says." 2) Be playful. When it's time to pick up toys, you might say in your silly voice, "Oh, no you don't! I know what you're trying to do! You want to pick up these toys. But you better not. You better not touch these toys and put them away. Ooh! You put one away! Stop that right this minute!" etc. Your kid will probably be laughing and the toys get put away.
Figuring out what is on our child's agenda and placing it on our own agenda takes practice. It's something you can master. Yes, even as adults we keep on mastering skills and learning things throughout our lives. All you have to do is just keep doing it over and over! Pretty soon it gets easier and you get better at it.
When you place your child's agenda on your own agenda, you will have a happier child and you will find greater satisfaction than ever in your parenting. You and your child will have the feeling that you are a team instead of rivals, and your child will master social and other skills more quickly and fully. Your family will be more joyful. So...how does your agenda reflect your child's agenda?
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Ponder Question #1 What are your child's eyes telling you?
A master mechanic will listen to a car very carefully. A master greenthumb will carefully look at the leaves of a plant and feel the soil. They know better what to do after gathering information. As a parent, if you hone your observation skills, you will greatly improve your success. Your child's eyes hold a wealth of information about her emotional state. Observe those eyes closely. Then notice the rest of her: her face, her shoulders, and all of her body language. Connect with the feelings you see there, and your heart will help you know what to do.
We'll let Craig tell a story here: "There was a pivotal moment in my life that happened back when we were parenting from a position of power and control, but had started to try to change. One of our children had done something to displease me. I decided to show him who was boss, and scolded him angrily and dragged him over to the corner, ordering him to stay there until I said he could leave. It was a kind of mistaken parenting strategy that I had tried many times in an attempt to make him be the way I thought he should be. For some reason, on this day, I looked into his face and registered what I saw. He was deeply hurt, and he was deeply angry. My stomach fell. I knew he wasn't just pretending to be hurt to manipulate me. Instead, I could sense deep in my heart that I was creating a dark relationship with my child. What I was doing was wrong and hurtful to him. I was filling him with anger and resentment, and I knew that these feelings would erode our relationship unless I figured out a way to be a better parent. The haunting memory of his eyes helped cement my resolve to keep trying to be the parent that my child deserved. After a lot of work and a lot of help from God, I am happy to say that this child and I have a warm and happy relationship."
Anytime that you look at your child and connect with the feelings you see there, you will get crucial information that will help you be a better parent. In the example above, just think how much better it would have been if we had made that connection at the moment the child misbehaved. Then the problem could have been resolved more quickly and with less fallout. If the child had been acting out angrily, we might have said, "You're angry. Let's figure out how we can solve this problem." If the child had been trying to get attention, we might have said, "We haven't been doing anything fun for a while. It's time to play a game." And the list could go on of responses that might have been helpful, depending on what the child's eyes were telling us at the moment.
In order to know what to do as a parent, you need to connect to your child. Notice carefully. Then follow your heart. So...what are your child's eyes telling you?
We'll let Craig tell a story here: "There was a pivotal moment in my life that happened back when we were parenting from a position of power and control, but had started to try to change. One of our children had done something to displease me. I decided to show him who was boss, and scolded him angrily and dragged him over to the corner, ordering him to stay there until I said he could leave. It was a kind of mistaken parenting strategy that I had tried many times in an attempt to make him be the way I thought he should be. For some reason, on this day, I looked into his face and registered what I saw. He was deeply hurt, and he was deeply angry. My stomach fell. I knew he wasn't just pretending to be hurt to manipulate me. Instead, I could sense deep in my heart that I was creating a dark relationship with my child. What I was doing was wrong and hurtful to him. I was filling him with anger and resentment, and I knew that these feelings would erode our relationship unless I figured out a way to be a better parent. The haunting memory of his eyes helped cement my resolve to keep trying to be the parent that my child deserved. After a lot of work and a lot of help from God, I am happy to say that this child and I have a warm and happy relationship."
Anytime that you look at your child and connect with the feelings you see there, you will get crucial information that will help you be a better parent. In the example above, just think how much better it would have been if we had made that connection at the moment the child misbehaved. Then the problem could have been resolved more quickly and with less fallout. If the child had been acting out angrily, we might have said, "You're angry. Let's figure out how we can solve this problem." If the child had been trying to get attention, we might have said, "We haven't been doing anything fun for a while. It's time to play a game." And the list could go on of responses that might have been helpful, depending on what the child's eyes were telling us at the moment.
In order to know what to do as a parent, you need to connect to your child. Notice carefully. Then follow your heart. So...what are your child's eyes telling you?
Sunday, June 19, 2011
How Can I Be A Better Parent?
The fact that you're reading this post means that you are to be congratulated. You are taking your most important responsibility seriously. You are trying to be a good parent. You can do this! We wish that we could just wave a magic wand or teach you three easy steps to parenting. The reality, however, is that parenting is complex. It takes time to grasp a new way to see and understand your child and what s/he needs. It took us years to feel that we had completed our parenting shift. We hope you will be patient with yourself as you seek a parenting transformation. You CAN break out of the negative cycles that you inherited from your parents, keep the good, and pass on to the next generation an opportunity for greater happiness.
That said, here is where to begin. The gist of being a good parent is to be able to 1) accurately and compassionately sense your child's emotional state, 2) figure out what s/he needs, and 3) provide it--and do these three things fairly consistently. It's like trying to be a mind-reader and heart-reader of your child. The truth is, none of us are completely aware of what we ourselves are thinking, and we are often challenged at figuring out our own emotional needs and knowing how to get those met. Doing this for another person is even more challenging than doing it for ourselves. It's basically a guessing game based on watching our child's facial expressions and body language, and decoding our child's unique way of being. Then we connect with our hearts to our child's emotional state. We try to understand what it feels like to be him or her at this moment. Then we use our adult brains to figure out how we might help our child. This might sound like a lot, just like if we had to describe driving a car or even walking with all their steps. Luckily, the more you practice, the better you get, and the easier you can do it, and after a while you sometimes do it without even thinking about it. On this blog, we will post a lot of examples for you to think about. We'll post questions for you to ponder. Every time you think about parenting, you're developing your capacity to be a better parent! So think about parenting often, and visit us often, and watch yourself transform your parent/child relationship into a joyful bond.
That said, here is where to begin. The gist of being a good parent is to be able to 1) accurately and compassionately sense your child's emotional state, 2) figure out what s/he needs, and 3) provide it--and do these three things fairly consistently. It's like trying to be a mind-reader and heart-reader of your child. The truth is, none of us are completely aware of what we ourselves are thinking, and we are often challenged at figuring out our own emotional needs and knowing how to get those met. Doing this for another person is even more challenging than doing it for ourselves. It's basically a guessing game based on watching our child's facial expressions and body language, and decoding our child's unique way of being. Then we connect with our hearts to our child's emotional state. We try to understand what it feels like to be him or her at this moment. Then we use our adult brains to figure out how we might help our child. This might sound like a lot, just like if we had to describe driving a car or even walking with all their steps. Luckily, the more you practice, the better you get, and the easier you can do it, and after a while you sometimes do it without even thinking about it. On this blog, we will post a lot of examples for you to think about. We'll post questions for you to ponder. Every time you think about parenting, you're developing your capacity to be a better parent! So think about parenting often, and visit us often, and watch yourself transform your parent/child relationship into a joyful bond.
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