Successful parenting requires couples to find ways to communicate and collaborate. Collaborative parenting means finding ways to encompass the best of both parental styles to respond to the changing behaviors and needs of their children.
Parenting coaching helps parents create new adaptive patterns as their children age. Good communication and collaborative support facilitates positive parenting around the variety of challenges that arise. Coaching with young couples helps establish this collaboration early in the family’s development. As with all clients, the coaching process is designed by the parent(s) and coach. All clients are seen as creative, resourceful, whole and fully responsible for their lives.
All clients are seen as creative resourceful, whole and fully responsible for their lives. As the coach, I offer a variety of structures that clients can pick from or modify. Together we regularly assess the process and progress. Whenever need we redesign the partnership to better move towards the accomplishment of goals. Coaching activates and expands the client’s sense of personal authenticity, personal authority, and their capacity to show up in life 100% ready, willing and able to be present, receptive and responsive, in any moment to achieve the best outcomes with parenting.
The meeting structure and time frame are flexible and worked out with the client. Some clients meet weekly others every two or every three, four, five or six weeks. Scheduled meeting are via video-conference or phone.
Parenting and Discipline
INGREDIENTS SUCCESSFUL PARENTING DISCIPLINE
1. Staying grounded in your strength, body and soul (stay out of your head). This will allow grace
and patience to rule the interaction, as opposed to a process of judgment, frustration, anger or rage.
2. Communicating clearly. Checking for understanding. (This is not about giving a rational argument for being clear about your intention, your desire and your expectation. Your understanding must include a willingness to accept none compliance as an option that carries consequences.
3. Consistent follow through in the parenting discipline plan. There are no vacations from discipline. It will create a confused understanding about your expectations within the child.
HELPFUL PARENTING ATTITUDES
- Children are never wrong. Their behavior can be wrong or unacceptable or inappropriate or defiant or obnoxious. This change in judgment and attitude creates a new level of respect for the child and for the parent. This also means that the parent is never wrong. The parenting behavior or thinking can be less than adequate, mistaken, mismanaged, inappropriate or erroneous. Behavioral change on the part of a parent or a child is easy. Changing the identity of a parent or a child is a long and difficult procedure and most of the time is impossible. Changing from a bad person to a good person involves an identity change. Behavioral change can be easy. Behavioral change can be easy.
- Discipline is an expression of love and protection for the highly valued child.
- Compliance with discipline is a choice the child will learn to make. All choices have consequences. The child deserves the freedom to choose. Parents must design their discipline plan so that the child will want to make the best choices.
- Being “soft” or feeling guilty for taking disciplinary action is counter-productive to managing family resources (parental energy). Parents can save enormous energy by expending a little energy on discipline planning and consistent action.
- Sometimes disciplinary action can wait. It is unproductive to engage in disciplinary action whenever the parent is under the influence of drugs, alcohol, anger or stress (adrenaline). Anger or inebriation will impair the parent’s judgment. Both will cause similar parenting errors.
- “Spare the rod and spoil the child” does not mean you have an obligation to hit your child. It means that you have an obligation to extend your sense of order and to guide the child. The rod refers to the shepherd’s staff. It is a long stick that is used to extend the length of the shepherd’s arm. Shepherds don’t hit their sheep. They use their extended arm to guide the flock in a particular direction. The rod or staff is a flexible boundary that can serve to “pen” the sheep in on one side. Parents are obligated to guide children in a particular direction. Parents are not obliged to hit their children.
Parental hitting becomes a model for hitting others and generates fear and resentment toward the parent. The fear creates a kind of emotional autonomy in the child that will leave the child to his/her own inadequate resources at times. In those crucial times, if the parent is not feared and is approachable then the child will benefit from the parent’s wisdom. Corporal punishment of hitting is a fear based discipline strategy. The fear is based in the parent (“Maybe I am not an adequate parent.”) The fear-based strategy is primitive and relies on need to feel in control by the parent. The punishment is meant to create fear in the child. This is known as child abuse. If you think of yourself as a Christian, consider a “love based” discipline strategy. The love-based strategy is under divine influence and can give way to divine control.
The New Testament provides stories of love, forgiveness and relinquishing control. The Old Testament provides stories of genocide, murder, and all sorts of gross inhumanity to man. Why do so many Christians take direction from the Old Testament ignore Jesus Christ’s directive on the new commandment?
“I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” John 13:34
THE FAMILY BEHAVIORAL CHANGE FORMULA
- Create a list of rules and expectations that both parents will agree to hold the child accountable to.
- Create a list of penalties for misbehavior. The smaller the penalty the easier the compliance response. The closer in time the penalty is to the misbehavior the more effective the learning process. What is at stake here is compliance. Make it easy to comply so that a habit of compliance will form in the child. Make sure that the penalty is enforced as soon after the misbehavior as possible. For example, “You know that pushing your sister is against the rules. You have 10 minutes to wipe off the kitchen table.”
- Create a list of privileges that your child receives as a result of being blessed to be your child. This list is your leverage. This list is used to gain compliance and provides a choice for non-compliance. For example, “You have 10 minutes to wipe off the kitchen table, You know that pushing your sister is against the rules., and if you do not do that within the 10 minutes allotted, then you will not be allowed to go-on-line this evening.
- Announce, discuss and post the lists. Revise them as the child grows. Maintain ongoing dialogue with the other parent about what works and what does not work. Be open to input from the child.
PITFALLS:
1. Only one parent in the household is willing to work on a disciplinary plan. Parents must function as a team. Some parents need help with communication between themselves before they can be successful in a coordinated parenting plan.
2. Parents feel that keeping the peace is more important than taking consistent action.
3. Parents engage in a struggle with a child and do not hold their authority. Parents do not stay grounded in their body and lose their emotional balance and lose their temper and then lose the respect of the child.
SOLUTIONS FOR COMPLICATED PARENTING SITUATIONS
COACHING THE PARENTS. Parents are often the best coaches and counselors for their children. I coach parents to fine-tune their individual and collective efforts to create effective parenting interactions and enhance the parenting team, thereby enabling successful parenting discipline strategies. Depending on the family and circumstances, this process can take between 1 and 6 meetings.
pjscoglio@gmail.com 978-578-1525