Parenting Skills to Raise Responsible, Mature Children

The purpose of this course is to help you learn principles and communication skills to create a happy and nurturing climate within your home.

This video provides a few suggestions how you can get the most from your investment in this course. A few tips about taking notes, completing the exercises, and referring to the supplied PDF reference guides are included.

Our primary goal, as we parent, is not just solving an immediate problem but rather the long-term maturation and development of our children.

Families vary on two dimensions: how responsive we are to our children and how demanding we are. These dimensions result in four styles of parenting: uninvolved, permissive, authoritarian, and nurturing.

I will help you understand the characteristics of a permissive climate and share examples of parenting young children and teens when we are permissive.

I describe the characteristics and give examples of an authoritarian family climate.

I help you understand how nurturing parents communicate and interact with their children.

This is a downloadable/printable PDF of the Family Climate Summary Chart.

You'll learn the nine principles of a nurturing home and the relationship between these principles and family outcomes.

This is a downloadable/printable PDF which contains more detailed information about the Nine Principles of a Nurturing Home.

You'll complete an exercise to make your day-to-day behavior correspond with the principles of a nurturing home.

This is a PDF worksheet for you to complete which contains the If-Then exercises.

Key moments are upsetting situations or events when it's easy to get hooked and react to our children. As we learn to handle them well, we use them to help our children grow in responsibility and emotional maturity.

This is a reference guide which summarizes the Key Moment Model.

This is a reference guide containing detailed information about overmanaging and overindulging.

We respond very differently if our primary goal is maturation rather than solving problems, during key moments.

You will learn the three skill sets that form the foundation of all positive parent-child interactions.

A document summarizing the skills we use to stengthen our children during key moments.

The objectives of our communication are more than solving the immediate problem. It includes building trust, enhancing self-worth, and fostering maturation.

This quiz will check to see how well you are remembering the basic concepts of this course, for sections 1-4.

We use these skills to create an atmosphere of unconditional love, mutual respect and acceptance in which our children develop emotional literacy and the ability to deal with the challenges of their lives.

Respecting is more than a communication technique. It is recognizing and communicating the inherent goodness and capability of each family member.

Affirming is using non-verbals as well as verbal comments to express our love and reinforce desired behaviors in our children.

Listening is suspending judgment and being fully present with a child to understand her experience or point of view. Children mature as they feel validated through good listening responses.

Mirroring is matching a child's emotions, gestures, facial expressions, etc. to get into deep rapport and help them work through troubling emotions.

Supporting is asking questions about how we might be helpful rather than guessing or taking over.

This is a document you can refer to for a summary/overview of the empathy skills.

As parents, we need to be honest with our children about our own feelings and perceptions. The purpose is to expand their awareness and also take care of our own needs.

Disclosing is being truthful about our own experience so our children are not in the dark and guessing (or not caring) about what's going on inside of us.

Care-fronting is giving feedback about behavior that is either outside our child's awareness, is harmful to others, or interferes with our needs as parents.

Reproving is a direct confrontation of a clearly inappropriate behavior.

A PDF reference guide to help your understand and apply the elements of the reproving skill.

Negotiating agreements enables us to work through conflicts to solutions we can all support. The skill also helps our children learn skills in dialogue and collaboration and take ownership of their commitments.

This is a document which contains details about the negotiating skill discussed in this section.

We use Harnessing Harmful Behavior with challenging or defiant children in order to help them stop manipulating and learn better strategies for dealing with their problems and negative emotions.

This is a document which provides detailed information about how to harness harmful behavior.

This document provides a summary of the Honesty skills discussed in this section of the course.

Creating structure is a way we bring discipline and accountability into the lives of our children.

Setting expectations and enforcing consequences teach children the cause effect relationship between their choices and consequences as well as necessity of respecting the inevitable boundaries (rules) of life.

We end up being wishy-washy and renegotiating everything if our expectations are not clear. We'll learn how to establish expectations that are both clear and understood by our children.

This document is a reference guide for enforcing consequences.

We help children grow as we encourage age-appropriate choices and allow them to "own" and solve their problems.

Questions, rather than lecturing, enable children to think deeply about their lives, identify what is important to them, options available to them, and actions to make good things happen.

This PDF document provides information about how to ask valuing questions.

This document provides a summary and review of the Responsibility Skills.

Good parenting is not as much about getting our children to be different as getting ourselves to be different. By changing ourselves, our own emotional reactions, our relationships change.

This document provides details about the process: Stop - Look - Listen - Choose.

This quiz will check to see how well you are remembering the basic concepts of this course, for sections 5-8.

We bring it all together in this last lecture by reviewing the relationship between our principles, behaviors (communication skills) and outcomes of our parenting.

This document provides information about the HERO Principle.

This docuemnt includes a chart listing the behavior and related outcomes in a nurturing family.

You can download and unzip the folder which contains all the audio files (MP3 format) for the videos in this course. Load them on your audio player or phone to listen to and reinforce the lessons while you are on-the-go.