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

Unless they are free to ask for what they want, children never clearly learn what they can get and what they can’t. In addition, by asking for what they want, they quickly develop incredible negotiating skills. Most adults are very poor negotiators. They don’t ask unless they expect a yes. If they get a no, they usually just accept it and walk away either submissive, secretly resentful, or outwardly angry.

When given the freedom to ask for what they want, children’s inner power to get what they want has a chance to blossom. As adults they will not take no for an answer. As children, they learn to negotiate and will often motivate you to give them what they want. There is big difference between being manipulated by a whiny child and being motivated by a brilliant negotiator. Positive parents do maintain control throughout every negotiation and clearly set limits on how long it can go on.

By giving your child permission to ask for more, you give that child the gift of direction purpose, and power in life. Too many women today feel powerless, because they were never given permission to ask for more. They were taught to care more about what others needed and shamed for getting upset when they didn’t get what they wanted or needed.

One the most important skills a father or mother can teach a girl is how to ask for more. Most women did not learn this lesson as children. Instead of asking for more, they indirectly ask for more by giving more and hoping someone will give back to them without their having to ask. This inability to ask directly prevents them from getting what they want in life and in their relationships.

While girls need permission to want more, boys need a particular kind of support when they don’t get more. Quite often a boy will set his goals really high, and parents will try to talk him out of his goals, because they want to protect him from being disappointed. They do not realize that more important than achieving goals is being able to cope with disappointment so that he can rise again to move toward his goals. Just as girls need a lot of support in asking for what they want, boys need extra support to identify their feelings and move through them. For boys, this is best accomplished by asking for details of what happened while being extremely careful not to offer any advice or “help.” Even too much empathy can turn him off to talking about what happened.

Mothers often make the mistake of asking too many questions. When pushed to talk, many boys stop. When given suggestions on how to cope, boys particularly will back off. At a time when he already feels beaten, he doesn’t need someone to make him feel worse by telling him how to solve the problem or what he did to contribute to the problem.

For example, he feels disappointed that he didn’t score well on a test and his mother says, in a caring way, “I think that if you would have watched less TV and taken more time to study then you would have done better. You are really smart, you are just not giving yourself a chance.” Clearly she thinks she is being loving, but in this context it is clear why he would stop revealing to her what is bothering him. She has offered unsolicited advice, and he feels both criticized and not trusted to solve his problem.

5. It’s okay to say no, but remember mom and dad arethe bosses.Children need permission to say no, but, just as important, they need to know that their parents are in charge. Besides giving children permission to want more and to negotiate, the permission to say no really gives them power. Most parents are afraid of giving children that much power because they may easily become spoiled. One of the biggest problems today with children is that they have been given too much freedom. Parents have sensed that their children deserve more power, but they have not learned how to remain the boss. Unless they employ other positive parenting techniques like consistent time outs to maintain cooperation, their children become too demanding, selfish, and irritable. When parents remain in control, it is then effective to give their children more power.

Letting children say no opens the door for them to express feelings and to discover what they want and then negotiate. It does not mean you will always do what the child wants. Even though children can say no, it doesn’t mean they will get their way. What children feel and want will be heard and this in itself often makes them much more cooperative. More importantly, it allows children to be cooperative without having to suppress their true self.

There is a big difference between adjusting your wants and denying your wants. Adjusting your wants means shifting what you want to what your parents want. Denying means suppressing your wants and feelings and submitting to your parents wants. Submission results in a breaking of the child’s will. After a horse is broken, it becomes submissive and thus cooperative, but it also loses a big part of its free spirit.

Analysis of parenting practices in pre-Nazi Germany revealed that children were severely shamed and punished for resisting authority. They had no permission to resist or say no. In retrospect, we can see clearly on a much bigger scale how breaking the will of your children can make them mindless and heartless followers of strong but maniacal authoritarian leaders. When a person does not have a strong sense of self, he is easy prey for others to manipulate and abuse. Without a strong sense of self, a person will even be attracted to abusive relationships and situations, because of feelings of unworthiness and fear of asserting his own will.

Adjusting one’s will and wish is called cooperation , submitting one’s will and wish is obedience . Positive parenting practices seek to create cooperative children not obedient children. It is not healthy for children to follow their parents’ will mindlessly or heartlessly. Giving children permission to feel and verbalize their resistance when it occurs not only helps children develop a sense of self, but also makes children more cooperative. Obedient children just follow orders; they do not think, feel, or contribute to the process.

Cooperative children bring their full self to every interaction and thus are able to thrive.

Positive parenting practices seek to create

cooperative children, not obedient children.

Cooperative children may still want what they want, but what they want most is to please their parents. Giving children permission to say no does not mean giving them more control; it actually gives the parent more control. Each time children resist and the parents maintain control, the children are able to experience that mom and dad are the bosses.

This is the main reason that giving children a time out is so valuable.

When children are misbehaving or not cooperating, they are simply out of control. They are out of your control.

They are not in cooperation with your will and wish. To restore cooperation, a parent needs to regain control of them through picking them up and moving them into a time out. God makes children little so that we can pick them up and move them.

In a time out children have the freedom to resist and express all their feelings, but they are still restricted to a time out for a set time. Generally speaking, all that a child needs is one minute for every year of his or her life. A four year old only needs four minutes. The containment of a time out is all that is required for children to feel once again the security of being under your control and connected to you as the boss.

Automatically, the negative feelings lift off, and the child reconnects to the healthy desire to please and cooperate.

Parents who are too permissive or don’t give their children enough time outs unknowingly make their children more insecure. The child begins to feel they have the power to control and, because they are not ready to be in charge (although they like the power), they feel insecure. Imagine being given the responsibility to hire two hundred workers to build a building in six months. Or, imagine that you were handed a bleeding person recently shot with a gun and asked to operate on him and to remove the bullet. If you were not trained for either of these jobs, you would suddenly feel very insecure. When children begin to feel the thrill of being the boss, they also begin to feel very insecure and demanding.