How to Avoid Being Fired as a Parent: Building Respectful Relationships to Secure Your Family'S Success and Happiness

by Jenny Bailey

Overview

How to avoid being fired as a parent: Building respectful relationships to secure your family's success and happiness is for parents wishing to build strong, loving and trusting relationships with their children. It is for parents who want to raise their children without relying on threats, bribes, rewards and punishment-all of which have a negative impact on your relationship with your children and your family. It is for parents who are challenged by defiant and difficult children. If you are seeking more pleasure in your role as a parent, and wish to enjoy deeper and more intimate relationships with your children, the skills and ideas described within this book will secure your success. This book will provide you with a positive and constructive way of raising your children to have high emotional intelligence and exceptional communication skills, while you will enjoy an enhanced opportunity to influence your children.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781482852578
Publisher:	Partridge Publishing Singapore
Publication date:	08/13/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	130
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Jenny is an author, trainer, coach, speaker and consultant who specialises in helping parents build great relationships with their children. Jenny founded Parent Central because she believes we can dramatically improve our childrens lives and change the world by parenting without the use of threats, punishment and rewards.

Read an Excerpt

How To Avoid Being Fired as a Parent

Building Respectful Relationships to Secure Your Family's Success and Happiness

---

By Jenny Bailey

PartridgeSG

Copyright © 2015 Jenny Bailey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4828-5256-1

---

CHAPTER 1

THE MODERN PARENTING DILEMMA

Current parenting challenges

You discover that by the age of four, children have their own will. Then you discover that their will is different from yours. It is usually at this stage that parents seek help: 'How do I get my kids to listen to me and do what I say?'

They start school as cute and innocent preps in their new and oversized school uniforms. They become defiant. It feels like they won't do anything they are asked. For many, family life is chaotic and not at all fun.

You have survived pre- and primary school. Now they have started high school. Your home (that is, their home) has turned into a war zone. The only time you see your teenager is when they want something. They come and get it (usually negotiating with their mother as she is a bigger pushover), and then they leave. If in the process you ask for something then all hell breaks loose, and there is yelling, arguments or angry sulky silences. You try to help them and provide advice on how to manage their lives. They roll their eyes, look at you like you are an imbecile and storm off. How dare you be treated like this in your own home? Where is the respect you deserve? Why will these children not take good advice? Ultimately: Where has my gorgeous little girl with the pigtails gone? Where has my little boy who used to give me cuddles gone?

You have been fired as a parent! But my message is this: major pain and conflict is not necessary when children become teenagers.

Over the years, I have spoken to thousands of parents of pre- and primary school children. During these interactions, I discovered there are clear and common challenges, of which there are millions of variations on the theme:

• How do I deal with my children's meltdowns, tantrums and upsets?

• My children don't listen to me.

• My children are fighting all the time.

• How do I manage myself and stop yelling at my children?

Parents these days are acutely aware that the way they parent really matters for their children's long-term emotional and psychological health. A parent's greatest fear is that they are going to screw up their children. They know this because they are aware that how they were treated as children has impacted their adult life, or they have seen evidence of this in others.

The importance of needs for our family's survival

Both parents and children have needs, and they deserve to have their needs met. We are all driven, psychologically and biologically, to have our needs met for survival.

The Parent Effectiveness Model below shows the four types of families (based on their parenting style) and how they are going about having their needs met.

In the bottom left quadrant neither the parents nor the children are having their needs met. This family is Dysfunctional. The symptoms are frustrated parents and frustrated children. Parents are unable to help their children and are inattentive to their needs. They don't listen to their children, who tend to be highly emotional, and either upset or angry. They don't listen to their parents.

In the bottom right quadrant, we have Permissive families. Here the children are having their needs met but the parents are not. The parents are being walked all over. The children are not considerate of the parents, and could be considered spoilt. The problem with these families is that over time the parents become resentful when their needs are not being met. They begin to dislike their children. The problem for the children is they don't learn to be considerate of other people's needs. They also start to feel resentment towards their parents.

In the top right quadrant, we have Authoritarian families. In these families, the parents have their needs met but the children do not. These are families where children should be seen and not heard and where you might hear, 'You are living in my house and my rules apply'. Parents generally get what they want but the children don't. The children might be compliant and do what they are told to please their parents. Other children will become defiant. These children fight back against their parents. They become aggressive and badly behaved. They won't do what they are told despite threats and punishment.

Children in these families often grow up feeling their needs are not important or don't matter. They feel they are not listened to. Often they will grow up feeling alone with their problems.

We are programmed to behave a certain way in order to have our needs met. If we can't ask for help, we will try to have our needs met in other, less direct ways — you could call these ways manipulative. This family model will seem familiar to many of us.

Finally, we have the top right quadrant. Here parents and children are respectful of each other's needs, and recognise that having their individual needs met does not mean someone else has to miss having their needs met. It is not a 'zero-sum' game. There are ways of relating to each other where parents can have their needs met and so can their children. Some take these concepts further and cooperate to help everyone to have their needs met.

In truly successful families, all members are actively engaged in having their own needs met and helping other family members have their needs met. Can you imagine growing up in a family where everyone else was actively committed to helping you have your needs met and be successful? Can you imagine being a parent in a family where your children were actively engaged in helping you be successful at what you want in life? No longer do mothers have to sacrifice 20 years of their lives to raise children. No longer do children grow up feeling that they are not very important.

Parents don't know any better

In my parenting seminars, I begin by asking parents: 'In your many years of formal and informal education have you ever undertaken a parenting program?' The majority answer no. I then ask them how they have developed their parenting style if they have not embarked on a program. Almost unanimously, they say they must have learned their parenting style from their parents.

For most of us this rings true. How often do you hear yourself sounding exactly like your parents? Sobering, isn't it? Surely, we are more than just our parents. In addition, most of us swore that, as parents, we would never say these things to our children.

The truth is the majority of us parent as our parents parented us. It is what we know. Our parents parented as their parents did and so on, back through the generations. In reality, we are parenting using ancient methods. There might be nothing wrong with this except that over the past 60 years there has been significant research into the nature of human relationships and parenting: what works and what does not. In most areas of our society, we do not relate to others by controlling them with punishment and rewards. Physical punishment is only used against children. In the workplace, we focus on engaging our employees – not punishing them.

Many parents would adopt a No-Lose approach to parenting if they understood the impact of their Authoritarian methods and were taught the alternative.

Losing power

Many parents are fearful of losing their power and influence over their children if they stop using it.

I also suspect that those who felt powerless as children feel it is important to retain power as a parent – otherwise they feel that they lose power at both ends. What few realise is that their power is transitory; it is short lived. By giving up their power, they gain influence – much more valuable in the long term.

My friends do it this way

The culture in which we live is a very powerful determinate of our behaviour. The way we raise our children can often be very public. There are many people watching how you are dealing with your badly behaving child. We are particularly vulnerable to the judgements of others when we lack confidence in our parenting abilities, and many parents lack this confidence.

The pressure to punish your children can be hard to resist. Teachers often speak to the parents when a child has behaved badly. They will have generally already punished the child themselves but seem to expect you as the parents to at least give them another lecture.

Parental influence: I raised four kids and they are fine

Our own parents can also be quite judgemental towards our parenting style. After all, we do have to admit that they have been parents. If we claim they did a bad job then we are criticising ourselves.

All parents want to be good parents. It was the same for our parents. Many wonder: could I have done a better job? What could I have done differently? They look at their children's problems and character defects and ask, is that my fault? What could/should I have done differently? Having their children choose to parent differently than they did makes them feel defensive. Having their children choose to parent the same way they did gives them some confidence that what they did was correct.

I remember sitting with a 70-year-old woman whose five adult children were all lacking in confidence. 'What should I have done differently?' she lamented with tears in her eyes. 'It must be my fault.'

My parents smacked me, and I'm OK

Parents adopt the parenting style of their parents by arguing that, 'My parents brought me up this way, and I'm OK!' Let's face it: who wants to admit that they are not OK? Many parents still smack their children. A 2010 American study showed that one in five parents still smack their children to manage misbehaviour. Many parents say,

'My parents smacked me and I'm OK'.

Effort to learn something new

Even once parents realise there is a better way to raise their children than using an Authoritarian Parenting Style, there is often reluctance to change. Inertia is a big factor in getting people to change their parenting style. It takes time and effort. Parents are very time poor. Adults do not want to learn something new until there is a real need. Unfortunately, for many parents, they do not realise the importance of changing their parenting style until it is too late – and the kids have already fired you as a parent.

Some parents are lucky. They get a defiant or rebellious child. Their household is in chaos already. They have to do something and realise they have to change their parenting style. They come along to classes, put in the effort to learn the parenting skills and change. They are rewarded with an infinitely more peaceful family and insurance against being fired by their children when they become parents.

We don't want to parent the way our parents did

When we were children, our parents told us what to do and we did it. They enforced threats and punishments to manage our actions. Many of us were punished physically if we transgressed the rules set in the house. Often we were fearful of our parents. We did not want to be in trouble so we tended to not confide in them. This meant we often did not have anyone to turn to if we needed help. Growing up, for some, was a lonely place. If something was going wrong at school or with their friends, their parents were not there to help them.

There are few people who enter parenthood without a clear idea of how they want to parent but with a clear idea of how they do not want to parent. Their parenting style therefore, tends to be defined by doing the opposite of what their parents did.

Today, rather than punishing our children we encourage them with rewards. We introduce reward charts then feel resentful at having to use bribery to get them to do the most basic things. We do not want to be harsh, like our parents, so often we end up being walked all over. Then we get mad and resort to our parent's style of Authoritarian parenting: we punish our kids and then feel guilty. Then the cycle starts again.

This world is not the world of our childhood

Another confusing parenting dilemma is that our own experiences of growing up are not transferable to the modern world. I certainly remember how useless I found my parent's advice about what they did when they were growing up. The gap between our childhood and our children's childhood is even bigger. The advent of hand-held devices and games has totally changed the landscape of being a child. When we were kids, we talked about what we watched on TV last night. Now our children are totally engaged in the language and the world of Minecraft, Clash of Clans and Total Girl.com.

I received an email from my son, with a photo of what had happened in class. The photo was taken with his iPad. As parents, we are petrified about the effect screen time is having on our children. Yet, I remember my mother's conversations with other mothers about watching too much TV and how they were fearful we would grow up with square eyes.

Jobs that never existed years ago are now part of our present, whereas, many jobs that exist now are quickly disappearing. The disruption to our society will continue and we know most of our children will have multiple careers. Our educators don't seem to know whether to stick to chalk and talk or sit our children in front of online learning to enable them to progress. What do they need to learn anyway? Do they really need to handwrite?

Too much advice?

Parents today are bombarded with parenting books and advice from all angles — many of which are contradictory. Our parents judge the way we parent our children, in the same way they judged us when we were children. Teachers assume when our children misbehave at school it must be our fault as parents. Our friends watch us interact with our children. Even David Cameron blamed parents for the 2011 riots in London — everyone has an opinion.

Is it any wonder we are confused and lack confidence?

The four styles of parenting

There are four types of parenting styles and according to clinical and developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind, you are one over the other depending upon whether you are demanding or undemanding of your child and whether you are responsive or unresponsive to your child's needs and wishes.

Authoritarian Parenting Style

The most common style of parenting in western society is Authoritarian. Dr Louise Porter (a prominent Australian psychologist) uses the phrase controlling discipline (Porter D.L., 2014) to describe this style of parenting which is characterised by the following:

• Children's behaviour should be managed and controlled by the parent.

• Children will not do the right thing unless you tell them what to do.

• Children should be obedient.

• Children should respect you because you are their parent.

• You can control children's behaviour by punishing (or threatening to punish) or through rewards.

• Children can be trained to do the right thing, for example, if you tell them repeatedly to say please and withhold what the child wants until they say please, then that is how they will eventually learn to say please and learn manners.

• It is a parent's job to set boundaries (rules) and to enforce by punishment.

• Parents know what is best and make all decisions for the child – the parent is the boss.

There are significant downsides to this method of parenting, for both the parent and child, which will be discussed in the following chapter in this book.

Authoritative or No-Lose Parenting Style

There is a range of different names used to describe this type of parenting. I have chosen the term No-Lose Parenting as described by Dr Thomas Gordon. Other names for this parenting style includes Democratic or Authoritative (Baumrind) or the Guidance Approach (Porter). A No-Lose Parenting Style is characterised by:

• A recognition that rewards and punishment don't work to manage children's behaviour.

• Children behave to get their needs met and are not inherently naughty or bad.

• Mistakes by children are inevitable because they have so much to learn, and mistakes are an integral part of learning.

• Children, who are respected and listened to, will be respectful and considerate of their parents.

• Children inherently want to please their parents.

• Children need control over their own lives and do not want to be controlled.

• Boundaries (or rules) are negotiated based on both the parent and child's needs.

• Open and authentic communication is critical.

The aim of parenting is to guide children towards their own independence rather than to control them. This book teaches this style of parenting.

Permissive Parenting Style

A Permissive Parenting Style is characterised by:

• low expectations of the child

• few or no boundaries

• child can do what they want.

Permissive parenting is when children get what they want at the expense of the parents. Although permissive parenting may appear to be the alternative to the Authoritarian parenting with which we grew up, we seem to know intuitively that it is not the answer either. Those of us who have tried find it does not work. We become resentful and angry towards our children if we feel that we are being walked all over.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from How To Avoid Being Fired as a Parent by Jenny Bailey. Copyright © 2015 Jenny Bailey. Excerpted by permission of PartridgeSG.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---