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

By giving children a new direction, you are focusing on success and not on what they did wrong. By focusing on what you want and the opportunity to do that, children’s resistance is lessened. Then when the child is ready for explanations, he or she will ask and be receptive.

These are some examples:

You left your plate on the table.

Would you bring your plate over to the sink?

Don’t yell in the house.

Please use your inside voice, or (for older kids), Please don’t yell.

Your room is still a mess.

Would you please clean up your room?

Your shoes are untied.

Would you please tie your shoelaces?

I’ve been waiting here for thirty minutes. If you are going to be late, send me a message or call.

If you know you are going to be late, would you send me a message or give me call? I have been waiting thirty minutes.

If you were more organized, you would not have forgotten.

Please take some extra time to get organized and then maybe you won’t forget.

Using the five skills of positive parenting to create cooperation frees women from the need to lecture or correct their children. Children naturally learn what is right and good by successfully doing what they are asked to do.

When a mother corrects a child or gives unsolicited advice, the message the child receives is that he or she is not good enough or something is wrong with him or her. The child will feel cared for, but will not feel trusted. As an adult, this child may feel loved by his mother, but not understand why he or she has so much fear or lack of confidence to take risks.

It is not that advice is wrong. When children are clearly asking for advice, then it is very helpful. The big problem is that mothers give too much advice and, as a result, their children stop listening. It is particularly counterproductive to give good advice when your child is resisting. This means that the child will gradually build up walls against asking for advice when he or she needs it. Giving advice is good when a child is asking for it. If you don’t smother children with advice, they will ask for it more as they get older.

Boys are more sensitive to getting solutions than girls. A girl will resist more and continue to share herself, while a boy loses all motivation. When a father or mother gives a boy unsolicited advice, he stops sharing his problems, stops asking questions, and, even more important, stops listening.

Too much fixing makes a girl feel it’s unsafe

to share, while too much improving makes a

boy resistant to listening.

Mothers seek to give advice so that their children don’t suffer the same problems over and over. This well-meaning support just shuts a boy down. Then the mother’s biggest complaint is that “he won’t tell me anything” and “he won’t listen.” Mothers need to trust more that their children can and will learn on their own or that they will ask.

A big difference between boys and girls is that boys forget and girls remember. Often a mother becomes overly frustrated because she expects a boy to remember things she has asked. A father often becomes frustrated because his daughter will tend to talk more about problems than he thinks is really necessary. Let’s explore why these differences commonly show up.

Men and boys deal with stress by becoming more focused on one thing: one big problem to be solved or one big task at hand. The more stress they have, the more they tend to forget everything but the task at hand. A man can be so focused at work that he easily forgets that it is his birthday, his anniversary, or even his child’s birthday.

Under stress, boys become more focused,

while girls need to talk more.

Women often misunderstand this difference and misinterpret a man’s forgetfulness as not caring. When she is stressed, she is inclined to remember more. It is hard for a woman to forget important things and responsibilities when she is under stress. This is why, after a stressful day, a woman often wants to remember and talk about her day, while a man would rather forget all responsibilities and watch TV or read the newspaper.

This kind of focused activity is most relaxing for him, while a woman wants to expand, talk about her day, remember the details, and then let go. A man lets go by forgetting what was stressful, while a woman lets go by remembering.

This basic difference explains why men and women misunderstand each other so much of the time. Understanding this difference not only makes our relationships easier, but also helps us to understand and support our children better.

Understanding differences helps us to

understand and support our children better.

Much of the time, when a little girl appears to be complaining, she really needs time to remember and talk about her day. This helps a father to understand why he should not just wait for the point and then give a solution. A girl needs time, attention, and her father’s focus on each word. By giving her his full attention instead of just pretending to listen, she will get her need satisfied.

A girl literally needs her father’s full attention to get through and release the stress of her day. In applying the skills of positive parenting, parents need to make sure they don’t jump to rewards or giving a time out. A girl needs more time to share and express her resistance. Talking is one of the best ways a girl releases stress of the day.

Often, when a little boy forgets to do what a mother has asked, the mother feels he is just not listening. In many cases he has listened, but he has then forgotten. When a boy is stressed, he tends to block out all stressful messages. When a mother makes demands or nags a boy, this is a stressful message, and so he tends to forget it.

When mothers use upset emotions to back up their demands for obedience, these stressful messages are literally forgotten. A mother can greatly benefit from this insight. To help her son remember her requests, she needs to frame them in positive ways. If she leaves out the negative emotions and makes positive requests rather than demands, her son is more likely to remember and respond. Up to the age of nine, when a boy forgets, it is never his fault. He should be expected to forget at times and particularly when he receives stressful messages nagging him to remember.

Every generation is different from the previous one. When parents foster an attitude that embraces differences, children, as they become teens, will not anticipate being rejected for having different ways of thinking about things. Many people today mistakenly think that today’s problems result from children being too free. Certainly, this is part of the problem, but taking away freedom is not the solution. The solution is to strengthen the bond between parent and child by using positive-parenting skills.

Taking away freedom is not the solution, but

strengthening the bond of communication is.

Being different does not mean that one is better than the other. When parents are open-minded about the teen generation, teenagers don’t feel they have to pull away to get the acceptance they need. Even if a parent is very loving and attentive to their children, if the parent is narrow-minded, the teenager often feels an urge to oppose and rebel; to break out of their narrow limits. If you hold your values of what is good but do not condemn others, your teens will feel it’s safe to come to you for support. Otherwise, they will break those lines of communication.

Today more than ever teenagers need clear and open lines of communication with their parents. The challenges that our teens face are enormous. Without parental support, it is extremely difficult not to be swayed by negative influences.