Parenting Tips: Dealing with Tantrums / COMMON PARENT MISTAKES TO AVOID

Bob, you teach today's parents positive ways to avoid common parenting mistakes, to Parent With Love, Without Anger or Stress. What is one the most important exercises parents should learn to practice?

Maintain your peace and poise. That's about the best piece of parenting advice you will find anywhere. Just practice that more and more and you will find so many of your child behavior problems solved. When you lose your peace and poise, you lose your power. The parent's state radiates. Just by maintaining your true composure, you help the child to settle down .

You share parenting tips for everything from public temper-tantrums to bedtime issues. What is your technique based on?

Observation and experience primarily, with background studies in Montessori, Alice Miller, Waldorf, Organic Education, and the study of philosophy, psychology, world religions, and practical self-help literature in the American self-help tradition. There is a sequence of parenting steps to follow for any behavior problem that you face. First, go into peace and poise. Then, pay close attention. Observe what happens between you and your child and see if you can learn from what happens. Observing what happens always reveals a better way.

What parenting advice do you have for how can parents stress to their children the importance of passing tests, without adding stress and pressure on them?

This goes back to the foundation of all parenting wisdom practice peace and poise. When you express calm confidence, your child picks up on it, and is influenced to feel similarly. You want to preserve the child's self-confidence and calm, because that leads to competence. The more worried the parent, the more anxious and unfocused the student. Now let's take these parenting tips a step further. For a child to do well in school, she needs to feel that home is a safe, stable, harmonious place. A harmonious home-life is the springboard to success for every family. This parenting guideline is a crucial factor commonly overlooked regrding school performance.

You have traveled the world sharing your parenting tips through seminars. What parenting mistakes do most parents have in common?

The most common parenting mistakes boil down to blaming the child for the parents' anger, frustration. Using anger to solve child behavior problems. Relating to the child as basically in need of total molding and control. Now let's add to the parenting tips we are discussing here: if you consistently relate with a child as good, kind, capable, intelligent - that is what you find. Focusing too much intensity on correction represnts one of the most common parenting mistakes made. Another parenting tip that applies here is this one: to instill better self-control in a child stop losing yours.

In addition to providing powerful, positive parenting tips, you talk to our young people about the power of a positive self-image.

Among the parenting tips I share has to do with guiding parents in supporting the child's self-image. Children, as do adults, live up to or down to their self-image. The way you think of yourself is no one's responsibility but your own. If you let other people talk you into a negative idea of yourself, you end up acting that idea out. I teach children, and adults, how to shape their self-image, how to let go of negative self-images that operate as negative self-fulfilling prophesies. And I teach parents how to relate with their child to protect and nurture self-image .

In addition to offering parenting tips and youth motivation, what other services do you offer?

I present state accredited trainings on child behavior for childcare professionals, and I've translated my approach into school staff development seminars (learn more about those at www.schoolsupportmotivation.com) and team building trainings for professional organizations (learn more about these at www.teambuildingtrainings.com).

If our audience would like more of your parenting tips about how to avoid common parenting mistakes for better child behavior, what would you suggest?