John Gray: Children Are from Heaven: Positive Parenting Skills for Raising Cooperative, Confident, and Compassionate Children

When parents model respectful behavior, children gradually learn how to respect others. When parents learn how to remain cool, calm, and loving while dealing with a child throwing a tantrum, that child gradually learns how to remain cool, calm, and loving when strong feelings come up.

Parents can stay calm, cool, loving, and respectful when they learn what to do when children go out of control.

Parents can stay calm and cool when

they learn what to do when children go

out of control.

If you hit children to regain control, children learn that aggression is the answer when they feel out of control. Many times I have witnessed a mother hitting her son, saying, “Stop hitting your brother.” She wants him to understand how it feels, but hitting is not the answer. By hitting her son, she reinforces his tendency to hit or use aggression.

Later on, when he is not getting what he wants, he will automatically resort to acting out his anger by either direct or passive aggression. Although spanking or hitting children worked in the past, it backfires today. Fear-based parenting methods restrict our children’s natural development and make our job as parents less fulfilling and more time consuming.

Parents today have less time than ever to devote to parenting. For this reason, it is essential that they learn what is most important for their children. This knowledge not only helps them to use their time more efficiently, but also motivates them to create more time. A greater awareness of their children’s needs naturally motivates parents to spend more time with their children.

In dealing with stress and pressure, many adults often devote time to what they feel they have to do and can do.

Women commonly feel overwhelmed with all the things they have to do. Men feel primarily focused on what they can do.

When fathers don’t know what they can do to help their children, they often do nothing. When mothers are not aware of what their children need, they often make others things more important.

When parents learn what their children really need, they are less motivated to create money to acquire things and more motivated to create time to enjoy their family. The greatest wealth for a parent today is time. Parents begin to find more time to be with their children when they recognize what they have to do and can do.

By reading Children Are from Heaven, you will learn practical ways to update your parenting skills. You will not only learn what doesn’t work, but what you can do instead. You will learn new ways of motivating your children to cooperate and excel without having to use fear tactics.

Children today do not need to be motivated by the fear of punishment. They have the innate ability to know what is right and wrong when given an opportunity to develop this ability. Instead of being motivated by punishment or intimidation, they can be easily motivated by reward and the natural, healthy desire to please their parents.

In the first eight chapters of Children Are from Heaven, you will learn to use the different skills of positive parenting to improve communication, increase cooperation, and motivate your children to be all they can be. In last six chapters, you will learn how to communicate the five most important messages your children need to hear again and again.

The five positive messages are:

1.It’s okay to be different.

2.It’s okay to make mistakes.

3.It’s okay to express negative emotions.

4.It’s okay to want more.

5.It’s okay to say no, but remember mom and dad are the bosses.

These five messages will set your children free to develop their God-given abilities. When practiced correctly with the different skills of positive parenting, your child will develop the necessary skills for successful living. Some of these skills are: forgiveness of others and themselves, sharing, delayed gratification, self-esteem, patience, persistence, respect for others and themselves, cooperation, compassion, confidence, and the ability to be happy. With this new approach, along with your love and support, your children will have the opportunity to develop fully during each stage of their growth.

With these new insights, you will have the confidence needed to raise your children well and to sleep soundly at night. When questions and confusion arise, you will have a powerful resource to return to again and again to give you support and to remind you of what your children need and what you can do for them.

Most of all, you remember that children are from heaven.

They already have within them what they need to grow. Your job as parent is only to support their process of growth. By applying the five messages and positive-parenting skills, you will not only enjoy the confidence that you doing exactly what is needed, but know that, with your help, your children will be able to create the life they were meant to live.

All children are born innocent and good. In this sense our children are from heaven. Each and every child is already unique and special. They enter this world with their own particular destiny. An apple seed naturally becomes an apple tree. It cannot produce pears or oranges. As parents, our most important role is to recognize, honor, and then nurture our child’s natural and unique growth process. We are not required in any way to mold them into who we think they should be. Yet we are responsible to support them wisely in ways that draw out their individual gifts and strengths.

Our children do not need us to fix them or make them better, but they are dependent on our support to grow. We provide the fertile ground for their seeds of greatness to sprout. They have the power to do the rest. Within an apple seed is the perfect blueprint for its growth and development.

Likewise, within the developing mind, heart, and body of every child is the perfect blueprint for that child’s development. Instead of thinking that we must do something to make our children good, we must recognize that our children are already good.

Within the developing mind, heart, and body

of every child is the perfect blueprint for that

child’s development.

As parents we must remember that Mother Nature is always responsible for our children’s growth and development. Once, when I asked my mother the secret of her parenting approach, she responded this way: “While raising six boys and one girl, I eventually discovered there was little that I could do to alter them. I realized it was all in God’s hands. I did my best and God did the rest.” This realization allowed her to trust the natural growth process. It not only made the process easier for her, but also helped her to not get in the way. This insight is important for every parent. If one doesn’t believe in God, one can just substitute “genes” — It’s all in the genes.

By applying positive-parenting skills, parents can learn to support their children’s natural growth process and to avoid interfering. Without an understanding of how children naturally develop, parents commonly experience unnecessary frustration, disappointment, worry, and guilt and unknowingly block or inhibit parts of their children’s development. For example, when a parent doesn’t understand a child’s unique sensitivity, not only is the parent more frustrated, but the child gets the message something is wrong with him. This mistaken belief, “something is wrong with me,” becomes imprinted in the child and the gifts that come from increased sensitivity are restricted.