Archive for 'parenting skills'

Do You Make These Common Parenting Mistakes?

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As parents, we all understand the trials of parenting. Mistakes are common; indeed, they are part of the territory. The process of learning to be a parent is difficult, and our first child is always the trial by fire. The second child is almost never as much like the first as we expect, and we learn rapidly that what works with one child doesn’t necessarily work with another.

Even the third and successive children present new problems, frequently revolving around the idea of fairness: the rules for one child should, after all, be the same as the rules for another. Sometimes this can be difficult, and parenting mistakes occur as a result. But how do you fix them – or, even better, avoid them?

One of the most common parenting mistakes is to think that your child doesn’t understand the situation, so it’s not important to be fair. Children have long memories; whenever a situation is important to them, for whatever reason, they will recall that situation for many years to come… potentially into adulthood. Even though your child cannot process and interpret your actions today, those actions may very well be remembered later – and they will be processed and interpreted by an older child, who is more than capable of understanding them.

Another of these parenting mistakes – one almost every parent is guilty of making at some point – is to expect all children to be the same. Whether we’ve got multiple children ourselves, or simply have experience with other people’s children, there are many elements of a child’s personality that simply are not the same as other children. While there are certainly common areas of behavior and intellect among all children, these are not as large as most of us expect.

Which leads us to the last of the common parenting mistakes most parents make: relying too much on our own experiences as children. The way our own parents dealt with situations is not always the best way, and the way we would have liked them handled as children is not always the way we should handle them as parents. Our children are not the same children we were, and they certainly don’t live in the same kind of world.

The most important question, of course, is how do we avoid these parenting mistakes? How do we remain mindful of how our actions will be remembered, understand the differences among children, and avoid too much reliance on our own childhood?

As with most parenting questions, there are no easy answers – but unlike our own parents, there is much more detailed help available. Simple awareness can be enough to avoid these parenting mistakes, but there are many programs available that can help us raise our children effectively and intelligently… without having to become experts in child development ourselves.

There’s no way to avoid all parenting mistakes. We’re human; we make mistakes. But with a little thought and effort, we can avoid the larger ones, and raise our children quite well all the same.

To learn more about parenting mistakes I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

The Disciplinary Impact of Childhood ADHD

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When your child has ADHD, it can feel like nothing ever works – like every tactic you’ve learned for discipline simply isn’t effective, and indeed just seems to make things worse.

The frustration, for most parents dealing with childhood ADHD, is that long before you know what it is… you know that nothing you try works. You know that expert after expert, book after book, program after program is just plain not working. It’s not that you aren’t trying; you’re trying everything. You’re getting all the help you can, trying all the techniques you can, and working harder than you’ve ever worked before.

But childhood ADHD changes the rules. Many of the tactics you’re given for “normal” children don’t work at all, and many others do exactly the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. For a child with ADHD, the disciplinary approach needs to be a little different, and you need to take this into account.

The most important difference in childhood ADHD is that these children crave positive attention far more than they fear negative attention.

Instead of recognising the negative behavior and attempting to correct it, the more effective way to handle childhood ADHD is to recognise positive behavior and praise it; in the psychological community, this is sometimes called “shaping” and can provide remarkable results in a very short time.

Another often-overlooked method with childhood ADHD is the use of teamwork. Much of the trouble a child with ADHD encounters is that being so unlike the other children makes it hard to find friends, and a great deal of this can be overcome with simple teamwork between parent and child.

By sitting and doing things together with your child, you provide a role model – an example of appropriate behavior, which is critical in childhood ADHD if the child is to learn how to behave appropriately. A little patience and time go a long way. Apply the shaping methods above, rather than correcting inappropriate behavior, and most children rapidly get the idea and follow along.

It can be difficult to learn all the tactics and techniques that work well with childhood ADHD, so many parents may prefer to get a predefined program from a professional. The danger with these programs, of course, is that several of them simply do not cover the needs of childhood ADHD at all; while a great many do work, there are even more that do not. James Lehman’s system, the Total Transformation Program, is one of many that provide an excellent series of disciplinary tactics and techniques that work well even with childhood ADHD.

Over time, the trials and hardships of childhood ADHD can be lessened, simply by applying a few basic rules and guidelines that are easily learned. Parents can improve their own lives… and, more importantly, the lives of their children… by adapting their approaches to the specific needs of childhood ADHD.

To learn more about childhood ADHD I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

Effective Parenting Skills for Every Child

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Parents the world over are in a constant search for the education that can lead them to the most effective parenting. Skills that can appropriately discipline our children, not merely punish them, are the pinnacle of parental achievement; we’re constantly seeking the best and most effective parenting skills.

It’s important to understand, in that search, what exactly we mean by “effective.” Parenting skills that worked in previous generations are not always appropriate to the modern child; the newspapers are full of advice, from columnists and reporters alike, who tell us which new and improved methods will work best with our children.

But in the end, the most effective parenting skills are not anything new – because children, no matter how much the world changes, are still more or less the same as they have always been… and rather than develop skills at parenting our children, the true aim is to teach skills to the children themselves.

One of the earliest skills our children should develop is the ability to read social situations. This can be made into a game; magazines, newspapers, and television shows can be used to teach children when people look happy or sad, tired or angry.

As children grow, failure to read social situations can lead to difficulty in getting along with others, or – worse – to hanging around with “the wrong crowd.” Our collections of effective parenting skills need to include this practice, of teaching our children to read others’ emotions.

The second step from this position is to educate our children on reading their own emotional states, and controlling their responses – to choose a response that is not merely the easiest or most instinctive, but one that will be effective. Parenting skills that focus on simply calling emotions “bad” or “negative” do little to help with this; the correct and proper behavior needs to be encouraged.

Building on this foundation, as children become older, they’ll need to understand problem solving techniques to make their own decisions. Effective parenting skills are measured not by how well they control the child’s behavior, but how well they educate that child in the skills necessary to enter adulthood.

While teenage angst has become a cottage industry in and of itself, from the “emo” movement to the “goth” and “punk” subcultures, most true dissatisfaction with teenage life comes from a lack of problem solving skills – and teaching them is one of the more effective parenting skills you can develop.

Once you’ve developed the effective parenting skills that can teach your child to read social situations, understand their own emotional states, and solve their own problems… parenting rapidly becomes a joy, rather than a chore. Children are remarkably good at, well, being good – if they have the skills to deal with the world around them.

Children have honestly not changed much over the last several centuries. For all the discussion of effective parenting skills in the new millennium, the children are ultimately still the same… and will probably be the same for generations to come.

To learn more about effective parenting skills I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

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