parental selection | A Childs Book

Parenting on Purpose:
Expert Advice Using The Enneagram
By Brian Thomas
Founder, A Child's Book.com

Is too much knowledge of self a good thing? Oftentimes people don't even think of their

parenting style as being fluid or understand that they can alter their interactions with their

children to make their relationships better.

Janet Levine's Know Your Parenting Personality: How to Use the Enneagram to Become

the Best Parent You Can Be about using the Enneagram on the journey to become a better

parent. This review starts off with a story. Back in the early 1990s I became the boyfriend of

a woman who was into the "esoteric arts." Many people would label this study New Age, but most of the techniques and tools had been around for years and years. Tarot cards, psychic reading, the Celtic Runes were all used to figure out a bit more in the muck and mire of the every day. This woman whom I dated, we'll call her Annie, exposed me to a world that attempted to lead me from my own uber-unconsciousness into the light.

Many people think that the new age rejects or even contradicts the Judeo-Christian beliefs that most people in the United States profess to hold dear, but I found that to be far from the truth, even as I wrestled constantly with my own skepticism of these arts and what constituted authenticate spiritual practice.

The Enneagram actually fits somewhere in the outer edges of the debate about what constitutes knowledge of oneself and what represents the essence of our hidden nature.

Janet Levine doesn't pretend to give the reader answers to the initial lofty question, but she does offer up the Enneagram as a way to look at what can make us better parents-not a bad pursuit, when you think about it. With chapter titles explaining the basic personality types and how they interface with other types, Know Your Parenting Personality: How to Use the Enneagram to Become the Best Parent You Can Be is a good book and a wonderful read!!

Twelve Rules that Get Kids to Think Their Way to Better Behavior

By Elisa Medhus, MD

Parenting sure would be a piece of cake if kids waltzed out of the womb knowing how to behave. But since we're not that lucky, teaching them the rules of civility is our cross to bear. The tricky part: making sure they don't counterattack us in the process, which means we need to find ways to get our kids to use their own internal dialogue to follow the clear and reasonable rules of behavior that we establish. In other words, we need to get them to think their way to good behavior by getting them to comply with the rules we establish because they know it's the right thing to do, instead of following them because they're afraid we'll go ballistic and ground them until their grandchildren are potty trained.

There are 12 prerequisites to our discipline program that can help us accomplish this goal without too much blood, sweat and tears. If we follow them, we're sure to encourage self-direction instead of external direction in our kids:

First, if we want our children to decide, inwardly, to comply with a rule, it needs to be one they agree with. If they don't understand a rule or agree with its purpose and meaning, they won't follow it because it's the proper thing to do. If they do follow it, it's because they're afraid of being hounded, reprimanded, criticized or punished.
Second, we have to treat our children with respect. Treating them as inferior puts us in the position of being something they need to react to through aggression or surrender. If we want them to trust their ability to make the right decisions on their own, we have to show them that we respect their ability to do so.
Third, our discipline needs to be consistently enforced. When we're inconsistent, it sends mixed messages, making it impossible for our kids to be consistent while assessing their own behavior. (Is this the time it matters that I'm good, or not? They end up using external cues to make that decision.)
Fourth, we need to model our own good behavioral choices. There's no sense trying to get them to stop cursing if we say things that would make Marilyn Manson blush, right? Double standards like this create a confusion that makes creating clear internal dialogue tough.
Fifth, we need to try to keep our cool. Yelling, screaming, or wigging out in any way brings to a screeching halt any attempts our children may have to internally reflect upon their poor choice. Then what do they do? They put the thing in reverse and drive right over us. We become the bad guys. If I say, "Erik, you haven't even cleaned your room! I'm sick and tired of having to remind you!" Erik is going to spend the next hour wishing he had been adopted at birth by a troop of chimpanzees. He sure as heck won't be thinking about going on a cleaning frenzy, that's for sure.
Sixth, it's important to address the behavior, not the child. Saying something like, "You're so lazy! I can't believe you haven't started your chores!" is a statement that attacks a child's self-worth, not his bad choices. So eventually, he's gonna assume every mistake he makes is a reflection of his self-worth. He'll also be more likely to counterattack, shifting all of his focus externally on what meanies we are rather than thinking about his behavior.
Seventh, we can cut the blabber. The more we lecture, explain, nag, negotiate, threaten, coax, bribe, plead, whine, beg, direct, demand, insist, warn or interrogate, the more static our children will have to cut through before they can think about their choices.
Eighth, our children must always be the rightful owners of their problems. Say Rachel is about to miss the bus to school because she can't find her favorite hair scrunchie. A statement like, "Jeez, the bus is coming in 5 minutes, so I guess you might have to walk to school. Well, at least it's a nice morning for a walk," gets Rachel to think about her poor choice and the consequences she might experience as a result. On the other hand, a remark like, "Holy cow, how can anyone get so bent out of shape about some silly hair thing. I'll drive you to school, but if I'm late to work, you're never gonna hear the end of it!" will just make Rachel think about what monsters we are. And since we're assuming ownership of her problem, it implies that we don't have faith in her ability to handle it alone, and solving it is more important to us than to her. So she happily drops the whole enchilada (and future ones) right in our lap.
Ninth, we need to nix most of the negative words in our discipline language. Words like "stop," "no," "can't ," "quit" or "don't" encourage us to define our children in terms of their flaws, not their strengths, and it gives them every excuse to lash out against us, which means they're way too busy to think about their behavior . Here's an example to help illustrate this point:

Externally directed parenting:

Mom: "Tommy, don't run around the pool, or you might get hurt!

Tommy ignores her because he's sick of being told what he can't do. Of course he becomes a human hockey puck.

Mom: "I told you not to run! I just knew this was going to happen."

Internally directed parenting:

Tommy races around the pool like an over-wound maniac. He slips, he falls, he cries.

Mom: "I'm so sorry you forgot about our rule to not run around the pool." (A remark that gives Tommy no reason to get mad at her.)

So the first example just makes Tommy feel furious and maybe a little stupid. The second encourages him to think about his mistake.

Tenth, we should avoid using external influences to change their behavior. Threats, bribes, ultimatums, or rewards are examples. Invoking a higher authority like Santa or the Easter Bunny is another no-no. Using these fictitious authorities or even the ol' "Wait til your father get home," trick lets our children know that we (and they) can't handle their problems alone. Sure, they help our children behave (around the holidays, anyway,) but for all the wrong reasons. These tricks teach them that the answer to all of their problems is in the outside world, not within them-that they must be guided by external beacons, not internal ones.
Eleventh, with rare exception, our children should never be rescued from the consequences of their misbehavior. Sure, it's easier to pick up their dirty clothes in their room. Hey, as far as I'm concerned, it's a whole lot easier to live their lives for them, because we can do it so much better and faster than they can! And who honestly enjoys the conflict and confrontation that comes when we don't? But if our kids are forced to deal with the consequences of their bad choices, they will learn to come up with their own solutions rather than rely on others to come up with them.
Twelfth, never use ignoring as a discipline strategy. Frankly, ignoring infuriates children driving them to ever-more obnoxious behaviors.

If we try to follow these twelve rules, chances are that our children will find it natural to use self-direction to figure out their choices, assess the consequences of those choices, and decide how to correct bad ones. The common thread in all of these rules is that we must give our children all the right reasons to behave. In the self-directed, those reasons always come from within.

Side Notes...

Elisa Medhus, M.D. is the author of Author of
Raising Children Who Think for Themselves

She has a website at http://www.drmedhus.com.

Dr. Medhus lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and their five children ages 16, 14, 10, 7 and 5.

The Bandwagon Phenomenon
Why Our Kids Hunger to Fit in to the Fickle Fold
By Elisa Medhus, MD

Now, more than ever before, it ‘s painfully obvious that many of the world’s children would rather die or kill than not fit in. Although these few represent the extreme, what about our own children? What kind of pressure do they feel to belong, to be popular, to be worthy of their peer group? That’s an easy, one-word answer: intense. Okay, maybe two words, then: very intense. Sure, we’re frantically searching for ways to quell the horrific fallout that occurs when children are rejected, teased, and bullied by their peers by counseling the victims and the predators, by tightening school security, by home-schooling our kids, and so on. But this is like trimming the withering tips of the branches on a very sick tree. Why don’t we look to the roots to cure that tree by asking ourselves, What drives our kids to require peer acceptance and approval?

To understand this root, let’s examine another—the root of human behavior. We are, much like wolves and dogs, pack animals. Okay, so we don’t howl at the moon, roll in nasty stuff or sniff inappropriate body parts, but we do have one vital pack animal instinct—the urge to belong to our pack. In our case, we may have many packs—our neighbors, our co-workers, our gender, our friends or all of humanity, but in the case of our children, their most influential pack is their peer group.

There are two ways to satisfy that urge for pack acceptance:

To earn it by coming up with a unique contribution or meaningful role that betters the pack’s welfare.
To beg for it by pleasing the pack, conforming with the pack, abiding by those arbitrary and often warped standards of worthiness that the pack thrusts in our faces.

Sadly, most of humanity has chosen the latter one, probably because it’s easier to let someone else think for us. Also, over the centuries, requiring people to think and act a certain way has been a convenient way for our leaders to dominate the unruly and uncivilized masses. The Spanish Inquisition. Need I say more?

So instead of raising self-directed children who make their choices based on internal cues like their morals, their values, their past experiences, and their concept of self, we’ve been raising externally directed children who rely on the outside word, like their peers, the media, song lyrics and movies, as guiding beacons. And yep, we’ve been doing it for centuries.

Self directed children use reason like a sword to cut through these external distractions so they’re free to make their choices because those choices are right. Externally directed children make whatever choice is necessary to win acceptance and approval. And to do that, they use all the choice distortion tools at their disposal—excuses, self-deceit, denial, rationalizations, justifications, etc. This makes it easy for them to act on impulse, to shirk responsibility, to thumb their noses at accountability, and to succumb to every temptation, whim, mood or desire. Look around you at the world today. Read the paper. Watch the evening news. It’s tragically clear what the repercussions of this choice mechanism are.

So what can we do? Simple. We can teach our children how to think for themselves—to recover their true power of thought, to learn how to be rewarded with acceptance as a consequence of their contributions instead of needing acceptance and thereby conforming.

This concept can be disseminated through many avenues quite easily. In fact, a pilot program is in the planning stages that would include “self-direction skills” in elementary school curricula. For those who want immediate intervention for their own children, Raising Children Who Think for Themselves provides practical parenting strategies that encourage self-direction in children. If we’re successful, and we will be, we’ll proudly bless our children with a safer, happier and saner future. A world that they deserve.

Side Notes...

Elisa Medhus, M.D. is the author of Author of
Raising Children Who Think for Themselves

She has a website at http://www.drmedhus.com.

Dr. Medhus lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and their five children ages 16, 14, 10, 7 and 5.

The Importance of a Strong Family Identity
By Elisa Medhus, MD

Creating a family identity is an effective way to instill our children with a sense of permanence, belonging, and stability, paving the road for raising confident, independent, moral children. Since the family is our children's first "pack," it's important to do all we can to satisfy that intense pack animal urge to belong-to feel accepted by others.

The stronger that identity is, the more comfortable our children will be in their own skins, because they are a unique part of a strong group-a group that accepts them as they are. This is crucial for their developing faith in their own inner choice-making abilities rather than relying on peer pressure, the media, and other outside influences as guiding beacons. Sadly, children whose families have weak identities often seek guidance from less pristine influences to achieve a sense of belonging that they haven't been able to gain within the confines of their homes.

Any way that we can convey this sense of identity is important. Family traditions and rituals, whether they accompany holidays or not, are something to which our children look forward. Some examples include going on yearly vacations to a specific destination, singing "Happy Birthday" in a special, wacky way, having little family sayings, serving special dishes at holidays, going out on "buddy days" with each child, having father-daughter dinners, mother-son outings, creating special handshakes for each child, and so on. Watching family videos together and having photo albums that chronicle the years of family life handy can provide a strong sense of unity and a few belly laughs to boot.

Family dinners are crucial opportunities to strengthen this sense of identity, because it's a wonderful time for children to freely express themselves as individuals as well as members of the family. However, it must be a completely safe environment free from evaluations, criticisms, or judgments that might hinder this freedom of expression. We should never denounce what they say and never feel compelled to offer a better idea every time.

A strong family identity also makes the job of instilling values in our children easier. We might try saying things such as, "We don't tell lies in our family," or "The Vazquez family shows respect for their friends," "We use words in our family, not hitting." This voicing of values demonstrates what we hold dear as a family, but actions pack an even greater punch. For instance, to show my children the benefits of generosity, we enjoy going out on Christmas Eve to distribute blankets, socks, mittens, and jackets to the homeless. To show them the virtues of a strong work ethic as well as the importance of loyalty and responsibility, we volunteer as a family to staff the garage sales and other fundraisers for our schools.

In summary, a strong family identity is like a coat of armor protecting our children from the often cold, harsh world beyond the confines of that white picket fence. It insulates them from those outside influences that would otherwise rob them of their self-esteem, weaken their concept of self, and thwart their attempts to rebound from their mistakes and failures. Most importantly it safeguards them from all that would sabotage the sacred trust they must have in their own inner voice-their ability to inwardly make choices because they are right rather than rely on external beacons to make their choices contingent upon outside approval and acceptance.

What a simple strategy. What far-reaching, momentous repercussions for our children, our families, and society as a whole.

Side Notes...

Elisa Medhus, M.D. is the author of Author of
Raising Children Who Think for Themselves

She has a website at http://www.drmedhus.com.

Dr. Medhus lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and their five children ages 16, 14, 10, 7 and 5.