Faml blog#11

 

Today's blog is on some different versions of active parenting. Active parenting well allow us to spend more time addressing a child's needs and thus less time needed and dealing with misbehavior.

All children have a desire for contact and belonging. Under contact, we have the offer freely a positive reinforcement, teach the child to contribute, choices and consequences, response and ability, assertiveness- forgiveness, and skill building.

Some children use a mistaken approach to control others, have rebellion, sacred benge or have undue avoidance. One of the interesting  discussions was based upon the mass center in the brain will not develop if the child has inconsistent caregiving.

A short discussion was held on why it's hard to teach forgiveness. Along with this is the overuse of the word sorry. This follows my own understanding and that it seems that people say I'm sorry when they have just met you or have no idea of what it really means. When I was a customer service Rep one of the training items that we went over is to apologize when somebody called in with a complaint. This was to hopefully to diffuse the situation and bring the conversation under a controlled objective without Angry reply by the customer.

Sometimes a child will have undo attention seeking in which they will do things even though they know it will be a negative correction for response. The teacher mentioned a NICU unit that had higher responses from one section of the complex compared to the other, they with the fact that they had two hospitals with one ward having better response by the patients then the other half of the ward. The administrators tried switching doctors, nurses and yet the one section always had higher markings for responses by patients. In the end it was discovered that there was a cleaning lady that was working in the building that would hold the inference up giving them attention and talking to them. When she was transferred to the other section of the building it was discovered that it was her actions that caused the positive responses in the NICU.

Another area study was Popkin’s problem handling model. The teachers stressed that under the pot 10s model that there are kids who are not getting the attention they desire therefore they turn to undo attention seeking activities and at times do obnoxious things in order to get attention. He gave the example of one young man in his ward that leaped up over his head and he without thinking threw him to the ground. The teacher then started after that deciding to make specific attention to that child and at church he always greeted him several times shaking his hands making contact with him to let him know that the teacher was thinking of him and giving him time and encouragement.

We should therefore be offering contact freely within our home environment another thing that should be done is to teach children to contribute. Children can learn to help around the house with tangible things that will help out the entire family or one particular person in the family. This is the time that the child also learns to be responsible to their siblings in a positive role manner. Kids that learn to contribute make better marriage partners or roommates.

What are the examples that the teacher gave was when he was teaching a parenting class to prison inmates. It was interesting because when the teacher had a introduction done by each prisoner and how long they were in for the total time came to 900 years. When the teacher asked the prisoners why they are taking the class because they would not be getting out before their kids reached adulthood the prisoners made replies that they had messed up their lives and up their kids lives but if they could make any type of difference or impact that they could have on their kids or grandkids, they wanted to be able to do so, because nothing else mattered.

One of the areas covered with the five secrets of communication which is available in active parenting resources online. There are other areas in the Book of Mormon including first Nephi, the first five chapters and also Alma chapter 39-42.

It is not necessarily easy to be a parent but with the resources available and a patient and understanding personality the parent (including grandparents) Ken perform neutering and a active parenting environment for children.