Eight Steps To Connected Parenting

Follow the "airplane oxygen mask" rule. It's quite controversive point for many parents and you may ask - is that what you want to call "connected parenting"? But it's not exactly what you may think. The bases of that is if you don't have your needs met, there isn't a you there to connect with your child.

What is meant by trusting is really trusting your child to have his or her best interest in mind and to trust your child to take care of themselves. Practice trusting that your child knows their own limits and you know, you can be there to spot them, but really hold back when you're wanting to tell them no and tell them to be careful for instance.

The other piece of this step is to assume a positive intention. So this means that even when your three year old is screaming at the top of her lungs and having a tantrum and even when it seems like she's doing it just to spite you, try to realize that she's just doing her best to meet her own needs, and she really has a positive intention underneath all that "bad behavior."

You can encourage emotional awareness in your child. You can hold space for them to have their feelings when they come up. It's a wonderful practice that really helps kids release their feelings in the moment so that they don't have to bottle them up. Another thing that you can do is really reflect back to your child what's going on, "Wow, you're feeling really frustrated."

Then also, let them know that you have feelings. Obviously it doesn't mean dumping your emotional experience on your child. That's not what we are talking about. But it's also important for adults to release their emotions physically; hit a pillow, go hit a punching bag or work out and really run your frustrations out.

Working with feelings is an extremally broad subject and was covered greatly in Perspectives on Feelings Audio Program by Shelly Birger-Phillips.

These young people are complete and whole human beings. As much as it might be tempting to impose our will on them and actually necessary in certain moments to impose our will, at the same time children are strongly undervalued in our culture and in many cultures around the world.

Feeling respect to your child is about figuring out where you place your child energetically? Is your child just kind of off to the side and not important? Of course not, but also is your child the center of the world, that's like the other extreme, right? So you want to come to a balanced place of giving reverence to this young person but also allowing them to know where the boundaries are.

We are the examples for young people in terms of learning all those kinds of skills and so if you want to have respect from your child, you are invited to give respect to your child, really treat him like the full whole human being that he is.

So often, we can get caught up in our own world as parents and there's a way that we can treat young people like we already know who they are and what they want and what they like and what they're going to want to do or not do. It would be good to see more adults checking in and getting curious with their kids because the truth is we don't really know. Children are changing at a phenomenal rate. What his favorite thing was yesterday is not his favorite thing today. Her favorite color might change, her favorite activity at school is different. So really, get to know your child.

If you want to be connected to your child, get to know your child. The way to get to know someone isn't to assume that you know them already, but to really get curious and ask.

This is hugely important because transitions are challenging. You probably know this about your own life that transitions can be really startling, really upsetting. I mean, think about the big transitions in life like getting married and having children and moving, changing jobs. Imagine the little transitions of the day for a child have the same weight as those big transitions do for we adults. They really can affect a child's mood.

Children are feeling upset about being out of control of their own schedule in their own lives and also it's that feeling of not having a choice. That can be really hard for kids so what about giving them a little bit of time to get used to the new idea and even giving them some choice about it. "Would you like to take your bath now or in five minutes", that's a great tool to use as well.

Making kids aware of transitions is very important because without giving them that awareness their life is really frustrating. To make that easier for them and to maintain connection is to let kids know about transitions. How? Which way? Shelly explains that very nicely in her audio program.

Working with strategies are ways to help your child learn to do things on her own and also ways to help her strategize about how to get her needs met, how to get help and support when she needs it so that she thinks to herself, "If I'm frustrated, I have a team of people. My family are my team of people that I can count on to help and support me."

Getting creative and trying new things is another part of the step and that looks like really thinking outside the box sometimes. It is about getting support, learning new things, new strategies, new techniques and sometimes it looks like turning it into a game. Figuring out how to go from struggle to play definitely takes certain level of creativity. This also involves really looking at what's underneath certain behaviors. So there might be a behavior that your child is exhibiting and rather than addressing the behavior head on, you may want to think about what's driving the behavior, what is the positive intention underneath this? By looking at things that way sometimes a creative solution will arise, something synergistic.

This is a lot about strategies for discipline that are connection based. A lot of traditional strategies for discipline don't create more connection and in fact, break connection. How to make children to feel connected even in the midst of considering how their behavior hasn't worked? How to make them want to choose to do something differently in the future? It should be also their wish to chose it, not because they feel as sense of shame or a sense of doing it because they're afraid of what we might do to them if they don't. What we really want is their internal motivation to cooperate and collaborate and have fun together. The way that that happens isn't through punishment and reward.

What rewarding does is it teaches kids to do things when they get rewarded and not otherwise.

When we punish kids, we may get the short term results we're looking for but the long term results are not what we want.

Instead of criticism, try giving feedback and reflection. Feedback and pure reflections can't be argued, they're simply your own experience something that you've observed.

You may think you're helping a child build self-esteem by giving them positive reinforcement but you're actually doing quite the opposite. It's been shown that positive reinforcement is actually detrimental. It can hinder the internal referencing and the intrinsic motivation parts of us and teach us to look outside of ourselves for validation. Instead, what you can do is you can give effort-based praise. When we praise children's effort, then they're motivated to effort even more.

I think Shelly's audio program is a really valuable guide allowing to get some understanding how those mechanisms mentioned above work. After listening to it I felt a bit confused as what I've heared
was sometimes contrary to my present beliefs...
But after all it makes sense to me!
Well, how this little one will develop herself is in my hands and I think it's extremally important to understand the rules...
The audio file discussing those eight steps released by Shelly Birger Phillips, a parent coach, can be downloaded following the link below: