Compassionate Parenting
Raising the Emotional Intelligence of Parents and Children
Have better relationships with your children; enjoy them, guide them, and learn from them. The regular practice of Compassionate Parenting is guaranteed to increase cooperation, self-esteem, and self-discipline, while simultaneously reducing anger, resentment, and hostility in children and parents.
The manual for this 10-week course is filled with parenting
advice, tips, information about family issues,
effective parenting skills, and parent resources, as
well as information that can help with your marriage.
Compassionate Parenting raises emotional intelligence through heavy emphasis on before-the-fact emotional motivation of behavior, rather than after-the-fact consequences. The result is much more effective discipline that does nothing to detract from the crucial relationship between parents and children.
Elements of Compassionate Parenting:
- Learn from your children
- Understand their experience of the world.
- Understand their emotional motivations.
- Understand your emotional responses to them.
- Enjoy them
- Value them
- Guide them
- Empower them
- Allow them to be themselves.
Compassion Does Not Mean...
- Letting children get away with bad or selfish behavior;
- Overindulgence;
- Materialistic generosity.
Compassion Means...
- Seeing beneath the surface of children's behavior to the deeper motivations for their behavior;
- Empowering children to control their own behavior by teaching them to regulate their emotions and impulses.
The Compassionate Parenting program deepens emotional connections among all family members. This allows parents to guide their children’s behavior and help them reach their fullest potential. It helps children develop the Five R’s of Successful Living:
- Resourcefulness
- Responsibility
- Respect
- Relationship investment
- Regulation of impulses and emotions
General Skills of Compassionate Parenting
- Listen to your children. Research shows that children in all stages of development complain that their parents yell too much and listen too little.
- Let solutions come from the children as much as possible. As they mature, your job is less to give answers and more and more to ask the questions that lead them to solutions.
- Choose toys that have something beneath the surface to help deepen their interest. Young children cannot sustain interest for long, but they can develop a beginning awareness that interest works better when it runs deeper than the surface.
- Understand that change stimulates emotion. You and your children will have emotional response to change, regardless of the content.
- We must take care in all stages of life to respond to positive emotions as well as negative, less we set up the habit of using trouble to get attention. Compassionate attention to expressions of interest and enjoyment are opportunities to develop positive emotional response in children and adults.
- Express affection to your children and to other adults in the family.
General Rules of Effective Discipline
Like all human beings, children need discipline to help them function at their best. They actually want discipline. Children from homes in which there is little discipline tend to feel unloved, isolated, and unprotected. Many adolescents from undisciplined homes lie to their peers and make up limits that they attribute to neglectful parents.
Children view it as the job of parents to set limits and as their job to oppose them. Compassionate Parents set firm limits about important issues of safety, health, learning, education, and morality and encourage cooperation with the rest.
Many discipline problems rise from some physical discomfort, such as hunger or sleep deprivation. Take care that the child's physical needs and your own are met. Emotional discomfort caused by nervous energy, anxiety, and disappointment accounts for most the rest. Of course, discipline that increases anxiety, such as yelling or shaming, will only make emotional discomfort worse and produce more of the undesired behavior, at least in the long run.
- Discipline must be implemented with positive parental motivation to protect, nurture, encourage, influence, guide, or cooperate.
- Discipline is a long-term project. Except around safety issues, discipline is never for a single behavior. Rather, it is to give direction for a stream of behaviors over time.
- Stress safety, health, learning, education, and morality as goals that produce pride and empowerment.
- Whenever possible, point out how the long-term best interests of the child are served by cooperation.
- Focus on what you want, not what you don't want. Give short, clear instructions. Don't yell.
- Keep the focus on the behavior, not your emotional state. Never discipline in anger.
- Ask questions whenever possible to help children come up with their own motivation to cooperate. The regulation for behavior must be established in the child, not in you as policeman.
- Help children to understand that their behavior is a choice. They always have the power to choose better behavior.
- Help children think through the consequences of their behavior choices, especially the response that their behavior invokes in other people.
Compassionate
Parenting
A 10-week structured course for resentful, angry, anxious, and overwhelmed
parents. Create deeper parent-child connections through increased
interest and enjoyment. Parents and children increase emotional intelligence.
Empowering-discipline helps children achieve optimal growth, development,
cooperation skills, and moral courage. Research shows that children
learn to regulate their emotions, eliminate temper tantrums, and reduce
bad behavior when they can put their feelings into words. When the
brain has no way to label or otherwise discriminate among the various
meanings it gives to events and behaviors, it tends to funnel all
emotional response into the form of arousal that gives the most temporary
power: anger. Model dialogue shows how to teach key vocabulary words
to children.
Note: This is a
.pdf file that will be emailed to you. $6
HEALSTM
CD-ROM
Step by step guide to a proven effective emotional regulation
technique that, with repetition (an average of 12 minutes daily for
six weeks) becomes a habit the brain does automatically. More:
My Good Heart: Drawing the Greatness Inside
You
This drawing book, for ages 5 to 10, presents a fun, non-preachy format
for learning compassion, anger-regulation, and core value. Notes
for Parents: The My Good Heart drawing book reinforces
the core value of children. Core value forms the foundation of self-esteem,
competence, creativity, achievement, self-care, and compassion.
The good heart concept helps
children build internal regulation of emotions and impulses to prevent
the ordinary experience of disappointment, anxiety, sadness, and anger
from devaluing the sense of self. It helps them learn compassion for
themselves and for others. Care givers can reinforce the power of
the Good Heart by saying something like:
"Rub your Good Heart to
make it better."
Children get in touch with
their own core value when encouraged to look for value in other people,
even difficult people.
"Way to go! You recognized
the Good Heart of another person!"
Children will want to know
about other kids acting out and adults doing cruel things. Emphasize
that misbehaving children and cruel adults are not devoid of Good
Hearts. Rather, they are merely out of touch with them. This same
thought, incorporated into normal safety precautions for children,
can be expressed as:
"Because some people are
out of touch with their Good Hearts, you need to be careful not to
talk to strangers."
A Deeper
Understanding of Your Children
Try this experiment. Draw what
you think your child will draw. Then compare your drawing with the
child's
A Note
for Professionals
The My Good Heart drawings provide
a wealth of diagnostic and treatment material. Choices of color, figures,
shadows, etc., have the usual art therapy significance. The book as
a whole has been used as a pre and post test to measure the effectiveness
of treatment. Children enjoy drawing in the book and usually want
to return to favorite sections of it repeatedly in the course of treatment.
Note: This is a
.pdf file that is emailed to you. $8
Basic
Humanity: How Your Emotions Guide Your Core Value
This 46-page
booklet asks a series of questions that help adolescents
develop a sense of their innate core value, which is the
ultimate guide for their behavior and the foundation of
their morality. For ages 12-18, available only as an emailed
.pdf file. $8
