A Parenting Toolbox

A

Parenting

Toolbox

A Collection of Strategies

to Raise Children and Teenagers

into Happy and Successful Adults

Gregory H. Wlodarski

Copyright © 2015 Gregory H. Wlodarski

Edition: October 2015

For

All the parents who are ready

to do the hard work of parenting.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Child

The Developing Mind

The Spectrum of Egos

Personality and Character

Birth Order

Summary

Chapter 2. The Parent

Parenting Styles

Personal Skin

The Dark Side

Avoiding Stress

Summary

Chapter 3. Parenting

Stages of Learning

Teaching the Child

Parenting Goals

Parenting Misconceptions

The Parenting Process

Summary

Chapter 4. Emotional Fluency

Introduction

Teaching Emotional Fluency

Comments

Summary

Chapter 5. Behavioral Modification

Introduction

Negative Reinforcement

Positive Reinforcement

Preventing Misbehavior

Reasons for Failure

Summary

Chapter 6. Parenting Stages

Chapter 7. Safety and Comfort (Ages 0 - 3)

Introduction

Soothing

Emotional Fluency

Self-Control

Self-Assurance

Reassurance

Pain in Perspective

Summary

Chapter 8. Subordination (Ages 1 - 5)

Introduction

Be the Boss

Share Lives and Laughs

Yes Ma’am, Yes Sir

Require Permission

Offer Simple Choices

Emotional Fluency

Summary

Chapter 9. Self Control (Ages 2 - 7)

Introduction

Be Calm

Minimize Excess Stimulation

Minimize Tantrums

Prepare for Changes

Encourage Stillness

Define Limits

Encourage Kindness

Emotional Fluency

Keep Your Promises

Summary

Chapter 10. Values (Ages 3 - 18)

Introduction

Teaching Values

Respect

Responsibility

Curiosity and Initiative

Backbone

Perseverance

Honesty

Caring, Tolerance, and Citizenship

Fairness

Summary

Chapter 11. Meditation (Ages 4 - 6+)

Chapter 12. The Teenager

Chapter 13. Parenting Teenagers

Tolerating Turmoil

Nurturing the Individual

Emotional Fluency

Behavior Modification

Values

Meditation

Summary

Chapter 14. Parent as Teacher

Appendix

Bibliography

Introduction

Parenting is a complex and demanding undertaking full of hardships and rewards. While we can be grateful that the hardships are temporary and the rewards last a lifetime, it would be nice to approach those hardships prepared with useful information. The contemporary parent is, in many cases, a parent who is raising a child while also balancing multiple family responsibilities as well as working part- or full-time. And, too often, this contemporary parent is a single parent.

Although there are many opinions about raising a child, there are a handful of clear and well-documented principles about raising a child correctly. These principles have been described in many books, texts, and journals. Unfortunately, few parents are in a position to read all these valuable resources.

I am a parent who has witnessed both inspiring and inappropriate parenting. And I’ve seen the wonderful and tragic consequences for children and for the adults they become. After reviewing multiple texts and other resources for parents, I concluded that parents need more information and need it delivered in a way that gets to the subject more quickly. The purpose of this text is to put the principles of effective parenting in a form that is clear and to the point. Though I don’t pretend that the following chapters are all inclusive, I hope they form a basis for parenting that will help make the process of raising a child less frustrating and more understandable and enjoyable.

Unfortunately, there are parenting issues that pose greater challenges and demands for parents than those of typical families. These issues may be found in families affected by a quarrelsome divorce, an absentee parent, the death of a parent or sibling, mental illness, abuse, or crime. I leave the discussion of these extraordinary circumstances to more specialized books and specially trained authors.

This book presents the elements of childhood behavior so that you can understand the reasons behind the parenting strategies discussed here. The multiple parenting techniques presented can be thought of as tools for influencing child behavior. But you don’t have to apply them all. Consider this book a toolbox from which you pick those tools that serve you and your child best. Use the techniques that match the needs and temperament of your child while also taking advantage of your own strengths as a parent and minimizing your weaknesses.

It’s likely that you may already understand or know much of the material here. If that’s the case, adding a few of the remaining strategies to your skills as a parent, while avoiding those actions listed under the Dark Side in Chapter 2 and Parenting Misconceptions in Chapter 3, will help you and your child tremendously.

This book is available as a free download at smashwords.com and as a print-on-demand paperback book at TheBookPatch.com.

Chapter 1. The Child

The Developing Mind

Though infants come into the world lacking knowledge, experience, and memories, they have the capacity for motivations, emotions, and learning. Their brain circuits are ready to learn as much as possible from what is seen, heard, and felt. This contributes to the process of forming the new individual. Knowing what motivates infants and children and understanding the process of learning will help you make the right parenting choices and take appropriate actions.

Motivations and Emotions

Though the infant’s life and learning are just starting, there are a few thinking patterns that are part of the brain’s fundamental design. These involve the basic motivations - to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and survive - as well as the emotions that fuel them: joy, sadness, fear, and anger.

Joy is the emotion associated with a physical experience of pleasure or with the experience of avoiding pain. Thus, feeling joy motivates us to continue or to repeat those behaviors that lead to the experience of pleasure or the prevention of pain. The emotion of sadness is derived from experiencing a physical pain or the loss of pleasure. Similarly, sadness motivates us to behave in a way that avoids painful experiences and the loss of pleasurable ones.

In the first few months of life, the experiences of pleasure and pain are limited: being fed or being hungry, feeling warm or cold, being massaged or having the pain of an illness (e.g., an ear infection). As children experience and learn about the world, they link their motivations and their related pleasure and pain to an ever-growing collection of experiences. The feeling of pleasure and pain is often a direct result of experiences such as those listed above. However, if an infant, child, or even an adult experiences pleasure or pain followed by a memorable experience, even if not directly related to that pleasure or pain, the mind will learn to link the two. Examples include a mother’s voice and scent being linked with the pleasure that really came from being fed or hugged, and the sound of running water being associated with the discomfort of a cold bath. Or, in adulthood, hearing a certain song while being happy or sad will connect that song to the emotion long after the real cause for the emotion has passed. This type of conditioning continues throughout life and increases our collection of stimuli for our emotional experiences. And our behaviors respond to those stimuli, to repeat or avoid those experiences, depending on their pleasurable or painful nature or associations.

The crib-bound infant has little opportunity to express his or her survival instinct; however, as the infant becomes more aware of his or her surroundings, the emotions of the survival instinct can show themselves. Fear can be experienced when the infant hears sudden loud or unpleasant noises or sees unfamiliar objects or faces. Stranger anxiety, the fear of unfamiliar faces, is first seen when the infant is about seven to eight months old. Anger, however, develops much later. Nonetheless, just as discussed above with joy and sadness, the infant and child will link their emotions of fear and anger to both related and unrelated experiences that happen to occur about the same time. Occurring throughout life, this conditioning increases the collection of experiences associated with the survival instinct and its related emotions of fear and anger and their associated behaviors of fleeing or fighting.

The Egocentric Self

During an infant’s first year, he or she reaches out with eyes and limbs to make contact with the world and learn about it. During this period, the world becomes identified with two realms. The external realm is that which is seen and touched without further identification. The blanket, bed, food, and people all have this external identity identified through seeing and touching. The internal realm is that which is identified as part of the self. The infant moves an arm and simultaneously sees and feels it moving. The infant reaches out a hand to touch his or her foot and simultaneously feels the foot being touched. The touching self, while also feeling the sensation of being touched, and the moving self, while also seeing the self move, contribute to the process of learning what is and what is not me, the self.

As the collection of experiences and associated emotional responses grow, so do the meanings of these experiences for the self. The motivations connected to pleasure, pain, and survival expand into thoughts of like, dislike, want, and don’t want, as well as feeling needed and wanted, and the desire to exercise self-expression and independence. These make up the complex pattern of thoughts and motivations that grow with time in both number and complexity. These thoughts, like the brush strokes added to a canvas one by one, eventually form a recognizable image, the image of me or I, the feeling of self. The first expression of this image of self, the ego, can be seen the first time a toddler between the ages of twenty and twenty-four months says No! or demonstrates embarrassment, pride, or shame. The baby’s mind has now given birth to the self and will realize his or her own will, the basic motivations, and the associated emotions.

Egocentricity and Irrationality

After the child’s ego forms, the motivations of pleasure, pain, and survival, along with their associated emotions, evolve. Previously, these emotions and motivations pertained to the physical self or body, but with the birth of the ego, they began to involve this psychological self as well.

Pleasure is no longer limited to physical experiences; it now includes egocentric experiences such as getting attention, owning objects, having relationships, and expressing one’s will, whether through power, creativity, or destruction, etc. And pain refers to things besides physical distress. It now includes psychological hurt as well, for example, a loss of relationships (loneliness), powerlessness, and envy. Anger and fear also evolve to include non-physical experiences such as jealousy, frustration, and contempt, or anxiety, shame, prejudice, and disgust. In a safe environment, survival becomes less about physical survival and more about survival of the sense of self, the ego.

During the years immediately after the first sign of the ego’s formation - that dreaded first No - the child’s perception of the world is egocentric. This is most obviously seen when children play. Children at this age have so-called parallel play; that is, each child does what he or she wants to do beside another child but without much interaction between them. This does not mean there is no point to children playing side by side without interaction. Children playing together, even though separately, provide each other with the stimulation and variety that allows them both to develop social skills that reduce egocentricity. This play also allows children to develop an awareness of the thinking of others as something different from their own. This helps redirect children’s attention away from themselves toward others.

Until children are able to shift more of their attention away from themselves - their own ego - they strive for the pleasure of attention in any form. Very young children will first strive to please their parents to gain a positive attention response: praise. If children feel this isn’t effective, they will then behave or misbehave to receive other forms of parental attention, even if it results in an unpleasant parental response.

To a rationally thinking adult, this may seem absurd - to get pleasure from a form of attention (from unwanted behavior) that causes an unpleasant result. It must be remembered that the collision between the child’s various drives creates many situations in which the child is caught between conflicting motivations: for example, gaining attention vs. avoiding an unpleasant consequence. This is further complicated by the child’s inability to think rationally. Because the child’s rationally thinking mind does not start developing until about age seven, the attitudes and thinking of a child under this age are largely magical and irrational. This is best seen by the easy acceptance of fantasies, such as the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny as real.

You can now understand that conflicting motivations, uncontrolled emotions, excessive egocentricity, and irrationality in the first years of childhood make growing up a confusing and difficult process for both child and parent. Early childhood is referred to in J. Gottman’s book Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child as an unavoidable period of temporary psychosis. Good parenting prevents this psychosis from continuing in adulthood.

This combination of emotions, egocentricity, and irrationality contributes to young children’s increased impressionability. They are influenced to a greater degree by what they see and hear than older children and adults. Thus, images and words can manufacture a reality in young children’s minds that has no relationship to what is real. Children, who are not experiencing a certain emotion, may start to experience it if they hear that the emotion can occur in their particular location or circumstance. For example, telling a child not to be afraid when entering a dark theater may actually cause the child to experience fear. Similarly, telling children about their own physical or mental weakness, real or not, can cause children to express the weakness if it is imagined, or give up trying to overcome it if is real. Real or not, this perceived weakness could become a burden they will carry and struggle to overcome for years or a lifetime.

When hearing about an event, again and again, children may perceive each retelling of the same event as multiple occurrences of similar events. Thus, children who hear repeated news of a single catastrophe may become more anxious since, to their minds, every retelling means the event is happening again. Additionally, because young children are so ego-centered, they may consider an event their fault, causing guilt that could linger for years or a lifetime. This is the reason children should be spared any detailed discussion of adult topics, which are beyond their ability to cope and understand. Examples include reasons for divorce, home fires, lost job, someone’s death or illness, etc. This is not a reason to avoid discussing these issues but a warning about how the issues are to be discussed, so that children do not perceive the event as something greater than it is or themselves as the cause.

Excessive praise or repeated criticism affects the image children are constructing of themselves. Excessive praise magnifies their own importance, putting their values, wants, and needs ahead of others, which can lead to arrogance and intolerance of others. Furthermore, excessive praise can be an experience children fear losing, so they may not want to risk challenging themselves with new or difficult tasks. Repeated criticism, on the other hand, puts their value below others, which can lead to feelings of inferiority, insecurity, timidity, and anxiety.

Dominance of Ego and Emotion

The desires for pleasure and the avoidance of pain, the urge to fight or flee, the emotions of joy, sadness, anger, and fear, together with egocentricity and an irrationally thinking brain, all contribute to the dominance of a self that prefers to express emotions.

A fundamental characteristic of the brain is to do more easily what it does more often. In other words, practice makes perfect. Thus, since the rational centers of the brain don’t start to develop until about age seven, the mind has years to practice being immature, emotional, egocentric, and irrational.

Another characteristic of the brain is the reverse relationship between its emotional activity and rational-thinking activity. When the brain is engaged in emotion or strong attention to the self, the centers of the brain involved with problem solving show reduced activity. Conversely, when the brain is involved with problem solving, there is less activity in areas involved with emotions and thinking about the self. Furthermore, emotional expression is often a fast, automatic phenomenon done without much thinking, while rational thinking is a slower, more deliberate process. The automatic emotional reflex means that emotions can intrude upon other thoughts or invade and replace them so that a person who was once thinking calmly can, with the right stimulus, be suddenly driven to respond emotionally and irrationally. Furthermore, when the brain is involved with emotion, it is simultaneously activating the centers responsible for egocentricity, attention to the self. (There is a sort of feedback loop, where emotions increase attention to the self, which increases the intensity of emotions, which increases attentions to the self, and so on.) Thus, emotion and egocentricity contribute to reduced involvement of the rational mind. Finally, the automatic nature