Another installment in my Positive Discipline Articles.
Recently I had the great fortune of crossing paths with Amy McCready, founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, Inc. She runs a very comprehensive educational website chocked full of parenting advice focused solely toward helping parents raise capable, well behaved children with high self esteem.
Amy offers a free webinar that introduces you to her program so I decided to check it out. The webinar I took was titled “Getting Kids to Listen without Nagging, Reminding or Yelling.” This hour-long webinar gave a great peak at some of the foundation child psychology facts that positive discipline follows and some very valuable tools to start making a change at home right now when it comes to getting kids to listen.
If you’ve been following my positive discipline articles or have read my background section on this parenting philosophy, you know that at the root of all misbehaviors is a reason. In positive discipline, we first discover the true reason behind a misbehavior and focus on solving that, rather than punishing a child for the resulting misbehavior (which itself is only a symptom). While punishing will most likely get the symptom to stop, it won’t solve the underlying problem and more often than not will cause a decrease in self esteem while fostering fear and rebellion.
Amy’s webinar starts right out of the gate with a little Adlerian Psychology background, reminding us that a child’s primary goal is to achieve belonging and significance. Here’s how it breaks down:
To have a sense of significance, children need to feel emotionally connected, secure about their place in the family, and have sufficient positive attention. That last one is a key. Kids are hard wired with a need for positive attention. They’ll do anything to get attention, even negative behaviors. Giving the kids lots of positive attention can nip a lot of bad behaviors in the bud.
To gain a sense of significance, children need to feel they’re capable, can make a difference, can contribute in meaningful ways and have personal power. Did that “personal power” phrase get your attention? Did it bring up vivid, chilling memories of power struggles? Here’s how to keep those to a minimum. Give your child choices. For a toddler, do you want the blue or red shirt? Do you want Rice Crispies or Cheerios for breakfast? Do you want to ride your bike or your scooter? The older the child, the more choices they can handle, even up to and including being involved in discussing and agreeing upon what the consequences are for rules broken. Choices are power.
When it comes to power, if a child has not received the opportunity to have enough of it during the day, he or she will fight for control later.
So, when a child is misbehaving, taking a quick look back at these basics might give you a clue as to what the root cause of the misbehavior really is. However, keep in mind this really does apply to children over 2 ½ on a whole. Babies and young toddlers are still all impulse and simple redirection is most likely all you need to do when it comes to curbing misbehavior. However, once that “NO!” stage hits, I’ve personally found using positive discipline very effective.
So what about getting kids to listen without nagging, reminding or yelling (or beating your head against a wall – I added that part)? Amy introduces consequences as a tool. Consequences are effective results or outcomes of an earlier event. And by choosing, discussing and implementing them fairly and without blame, criticism or insult, you can quickly reduce your nagging, reminding and yelling. And kids will listen.
Want to know some effective examples and how to choose the appropriate consequence? Go check out the webinar. Seriously, I’m not kidding. You’ll get so much more out of it than I can write here. In the upper left corner of my blog is a link to the free webinar. It will take you to Amy’s site. Once there, click on the Free Webinar button. On the webinar page you’ll see a handful of webinar’s she’s offering that you can choose from and the times they’re taking place. They’re all live and you’ll see her talking to you live in the upper left corner as she goes through the slides. You’ll also see the names of who else is on, the questions everyone is asking, and can write in your own questions. It is 100% interactive and there are always a couple of webinar topics scheduled.
One thing I really loved when I took the webinar (other than the ton of information she offers in such a short time) is the polls she offered throughout to help tailor the webinar to the audience. For instance, she asked the ages of our kids. Based off the response of the majority, she focused her responses. There were a lot of us with toddlers on my webinar, so she focused examples toward the toddlers, but did give information on the other age groups as well.
I was so impressed that after taking the course I contacted Amy about working with me through Heligirl since she offers so much valuable information that is right along the lines of what I share here. Amy liked Heligirl and the comments and questions you’d been leaving about positive discipline so much she made us a special offer:
She offered to do a special free webinar just for Heligirl readers!!
If this is of interest to you, have a look around her site then leave a comment here about a topic you’d really like for a webinar and a day of the week and time (remember to tell me what time zone) that works best for you. If we have enough folks interested, Amy will hold our own private webinar one evening soon. I’ll e-mail everyone who leaves a comment here with the details.
Thanks everyone. I hope you enjoy looking around Positive Parenting Solutions and getting to know yet another valuable resource in positive discipline. Don’t forget to leave your comment!
