Making positive change: Problem Two
Does your nine-year-old leave after you tell him to stay home? It is a common event. The problem here is that parents think their leadership skills are good when in fact those skills are ineffective and obsolete. Group dynamics can help the whole family.
Group learning has a big impact.
Knowles and Bradford state that “groups can induce learning in individuals of a kind and depth that an individual teacher cannot, by himself, induce (Knowles & Bradford, 1952, 12).” To expand on that idea: group learning often has more impact than a nagging parent, lecturing or coercing a child into following rules.
The interaction between your child and your family may be more productive with group activities like role playing, buzz groups and reflection, listening teams, and personal summaries of group action. These are big challenges for your leadership.
Play “You be the parent, I’ll be the child.”
Ask neutral questions when in doubt about who did what: questions like, “What happened?” “Could it have been done better?” “What could be changed so everybody wins?” “How could we share so it is fair to everyone?”
According to Knowles and Bradford, “One of the primary educational objectives of the leader, in fact, is to train members to take over functions that once were reserved as the exclusive prerogatives of the ‘leader.’
Parents are really training children to be independent first, but then to form interdependent family teams of lifelong learners.
Why should parents give up their power as children grow more mature?
A child’s judgment is only trained through experience in making judgments and seeing results. Sometimes children learn from other people’s experience, sometimes only from their own experience. Children grow as parents explain the consequences of behavior.
“If you bite your playmates or do not share being the boss, they will not want to play with you.”
The next step is a well disciplined, self-governed child.
Knowles & Bradford put it this way: “The more mature and self-directing a group becomes the more effective it is an instrument for producing change in individuals.”
Ideas for development of parent leadership skills are clear. The goal of parents is to raise children who are self-reliant, lifelong learners, choosing to work as a family team with their parents.
The team dynamic created as children grow toward self mastery and interdependence will provide functional group dynamic skills useful in the world of work.
Few parents welcome change in their habitual methods, but positive family dynamics reward those who do make positive changes.
A Family Plan: dignity, equality, unity
Technorati Tags: family planning, positive peer pressure
How can we create a family of dignity, equal worth and unified purpose? Doing what comes naturally (nothing) will not do it.
As Zig Ziggler said:
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,
How do you plan?
Start with the end, the goal, in sight. That’s good advice from Stephen R. Covey, planning expert (stephencovey.com). If you want to stress-proof your family life, you must make a family plan. Here’s a start.
Consider what we have to know in order to create the best family life.
We need to know what every family member considers most important, and what each person needs to do and be (willing? organized?) in order to get there.
To do first:
- Make copies of my “What is Family” list below. Feel free to distribute this plan to others if you give me credit and list my blog address.
- Have each family highlight the words which describe your family now.
- Have each person circle what your family should be when you work your plan.
- Brainstorm ways to eliminate the negatives and accentuate the positives in each list.
Brainstorming rules are few:
- First, respect each person’s opinion, no matter how much you disagree or how crazy it sounds.
- Secondly, find agreement on rules for eliminating those ideas which are unrealistic or outside your family values.
Your Family Vision: An Essential Foundation for building a strong family
Find the purpose of your family.
(To be read out loud in a quiet place…each family member separate from the others).
Is family a place where, when we knock, they have to let us in? A resource? A refuge? A learning center?
Is family a millstone,
touchstone,
milestone,
bulwark?
(If you don’t know these words, look them up.)
Is family a burden, a standard, a fortress, something you pass by on your way to personal fulfillment? Is it a source of enrichment?
Is family a labor force which produces leisure for us? A safety valve for venting? A nuisance? A service organization? An embarrassment?
Is family a critical, negative, no grow force? A hostile communication environment? A place where nobody cares? A bad example? A lost childhood? A fragile identity? A den of thieves?
Is family a sense of roots? Is family something we use and abuse? Is it security in the midst of our adventures? A fantasy? A team? A sacred duty? A place to go when we are old and broken? A warrior-priesthood band of brothers?
Is family a survivors program? A listening post? A source of bragging rights? Who, on their deathbed, ever said, “I wish I had spent more time at the office?”
Tell me if you can: what’s the point of having your family?
Now, work through what you have to be and do in order to bring about your family plan.
- Write down and post the positive ideas in several places around the house. Move them (slightly) often so they are noticed better.
- Review them daily together.
- Give three cheers and a group hug to the family member who can identify the most positive or negative behaviors. No blame for the negative, just identify it. Write it down for consequences later. See if it persists three weeks before judging it as deliberate sabotage of the family plan.
- Remind each other that love is emotion in motion. Unlove is obstructing lifelong love and growth. Pray.
- Create positive peer pressure for your friends. After they get over being jealous, they will want what you have and you can share it with them. Dignity, equal worth, and unified purpose are extreme strengths.
Socializing The Bully, Part 2
Technorati Tags: parenting,
peer pressure,violence,pain,sex,power struggles,self-confidence,attention,parenting
A bad mouth and a bad temper with pushy behavior are marks of a bully. We may feel the bully cannot change.
That bully may be any age. He or she rules a corner of the world by constant harsh “put downs” or taking advantage of others.
A bully feels peer pressure to change, but is stuck in a hard place.
Confrontations are constant when the rights of others are squashed and they fight back. This may be the bully’s only way to relate to others!
The bully may be a loner or a gang leader, since he or she looks for trouble and responds to all interactions by fighting, criticism or arguments.
Sometimes a psychologist will suggest that the bully sit next to or work with the opposite sex in school if relationships are obviously off base and needing modification. Good counseling is essential if your child has progressed from small bully behavior to serious criminal behavior.
The bully rules by intimidating others but sometimes protects weak friends from other bullies.
At school, the bully often has learning problems caused by emotional distress.
At home, siblings become emotional and easily upset.
The bully leaves a whirlwind of pain behind his or her own pain.
Parents may be promoting fighting, saturating the bully in violent media or setting a bad example by dealing with problems by violence.
Parental Responsibility In Bullying Behavior
If parents are weak in discipline or too harsh, inconsistent or belligerent, they may be training their child in the dynamics of bully behavior.
The father who is permissive while drinking and harsh when he is hung over is a bad example.
Parents may express their own pain with bullying behavior. Your temper fit only shows your failure at impulse control. You are trying to teach impulse control.
Does Mother only “mean it” when she is in a screaming temper fit, throwing things or smacking a seven year old around?
Does Dad punish without clear rules and a carefully crafted love relationship?
All possibility of teamwork is gone while time is wasted with fighting. Be consistent with discipline but gentle.
The bully becomes special by abusing power.
While some may be frightened by a bully, others may think this behavior is funny. At home and school the bully stops all teamwork, learning and positive interaction. The bully enjoys attention he or she gets from peers and adults, even if that attention is negative.
Even though a bully knows abusive relationships are wrong, he or she needs to escape the pain of failure in relationships, insecurity or a poor self-concept.
Bully behavior could show a lack of coping skills and fear of failure in relating to others.
Bully behavior makes a person feel independent and in control of life.
Parents, do not assume your bully is tough or an extrovert for being loud and pushy.
Your bully may be in the 25% of Americans who are introverts, made uncomfortable in social situations or by our cultural hyperactivity.
Is your bully pushed by you into awkward, failing situations? Are you expecting your child to be your clone, forcing her into situations she cannot possibly enjoy? When did the bully behavior begin?
Explain, if your bully is school age, that bully threats have consequences. When any threat is made, require the child to stop and think in a “cooling off time” first.
Make it clear that if bully chooses to fight after cooling off, fighting is then “premeditated,” and will carry a harsher penalty.
Dissolving the Bully
Since bullies accept bigger responsibility well, give him or her an impressive job that builds higher status into their self-concept. At home it will be something that only adults have done up until now.
Do be gentle but consistent. Use only as much power as necessary. Your best tool is loving time spent one-on-one until your child moves out of this phase.
Also, suggest that your bully say, “My parents won’t let me fight” at school or home. That will let bully back out gracefully from useless confrontations.
If the confrontations have been with a teacher, help your child identify the triggers for these fights and quietly identify your child’s own unrecognized character flaws.
Always carry through. Never let a rebel win. Be consistent with discipline but gentle.
If you have trouble with this, get counsel.
Praise every step in the right direction. Love is spelled T-I-M-E.
Make your own transparency and vulnerability clear as a pattern for your bully to follow. It is strong to express your need for help, feelings of stress, and desire for teamwork.
Inattentional Blindness: Personal Jihad
Technorati Tags: Jihad,inattentional blindness,Personal terrorism,child discipline,Walid Shoebat
Moderate Muslims, we are told, consider jihad a personal struggle for spiritual purity.
Americans ignore the facts that over 100 references in the Koran refer to jihad as genocidal slaughter of unbelievers with only one quote referring to an internal struggle[1]. (Source: www.shoebat.com)
Muslim violence (jihad) supersedes peaceful contemplation in every country now ruled by Islam. Americans are too distracted, too comfortable, to pay attention while Islam gains a strategic foothold.
The American approach to Islam is a perfect example of inattentional blindness.[2]
Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, psychologists, first showed that people who were paying attention to something else in their line of sight were “blind” to something that was right before their eyes.
What does this mean for you?
Pay strict attention: your children’s lives depend upon your focused attention to discipline.
Consider your self discipline and their discipline plan.
While you are teaching your children Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Muslim children learn lullabies and poems about flying body parts and rolling heads.
Here is an example:
“Sharpen my bones into swords, for I am a bomb, I shall eat the flesh of my (Israeli) occupier, O Killers, your blood is ‘Halal” for us, (meaning “kosher” or all right to spill)[3]
Oh, you say, “that’s not me. I’m aware of everything: I’m plugged into news 24/7. I know what is a threat to my family.”
U. Neisser, D. Simons, and C. Chabris, experimented with viewers watching a film. Viewers were focused on counting how many times a basketball was passed from one team member to another, while someone walked through the scene wearing a gorilla suit.
A surprisingly large percentage of subjects did not notice something as obvious as a person in a gorilla suit moving through the scene they were observing, if they are paying attention to something else. (Several examples of these experiments can be viewed on the Visual Cognition Lab page of the University of Illinois.)
Every country in history which has fallen has done so because of failure to perceive a threat.
Let’s look at some brief lessons in military history, you can research further through Wikipedia:
1. Carthage - fell after this city-state’s council failed to recognize the threat Rome posed. They allowed Hannibal’s victory over Rome to slip away simply by not reinforcing Hannibal when he had the upper hand.
2. Rome - many theories here, most show the failure to recognize a threat either from within or outside Rome itself.
3. Greece - the most famous lesson of recognizing a threat was told in the recently fictionalized movie 300. Recognizing the threat where his countrymen did not, Spartan King Leonidas led a personal bodyguard of 300 Spartans to hold a strategic thoroughfare named Thermopylae.
 |
300 by Frank Miller, Lynn Varley Read more about this book… |
4. Persia - failing to recognize Alexander the Great’s tactics as a threat the entire Persian empire was captured by this young Greek king.
Back to the present
“All four major Islamic schools of thought agree that jihad is not merely a personal struggle, but a call to wage war on the infidels by all means possible: giving money and recruiting and training people are also means of jihad.”[4]
It is not only your Christian faith at risk when you’re not looking. It is your life and the lives of your children.
Discipline is not just for kids. It is for you, the adult, first.
Do you “relax” for hours after work with flickering pictures and telephone chatter? Do you understand that you are being hypnotized into a passive, shallow thought pattern?
Print media requires more logic from you. (See “Twilight of the Books, by Caleb Crain, The new Yorker, December 24 and 31, 2007)
Are you really going to study this, or will you dance past these issues into your chocolate paradise of brain fog?
Do you feel uncomfortable when someone needs to be confronted with facts? Like Pilate when he confronted Jesus, do you wonder, “What is truth?” Have you found ways to learn and grow smarter your whole life, or are you stuck in a high school low effort mentality?
Before you can discipline and teach your children, you must have a plan. Stress Free Discipline provides a tots-to-teens plan for life skill mastery and lifelong family teamwork.
What’s a parent to do?
To begin: I suggest you need to simplify your life and read more, with and for your children. Restrict the phone calls, the ipod, the wireless flood of distractions which pacify but do not satisfy your mind. See the tech junkie quiz at rd.com/tech.
Right now a flood of raw data makes you anxious because you cannot use it all or digest it, but you keep trying. Distractions, as good as they may be, may be a real threat to your thought life.
Inattentional blindness can kill you. Pay attention. Read up. Prioritize.
[1] Why I Left Jihad, Walid Shoebat, Top Executive Media, 2005, ISBN 0-9771021-1-4, p. 36[2] http://www.skepdic.com/inattentionalblindness.html [3] Ibid, p 20[4] Ibid, p.96
Mellowing out Mad Max (Maxine) #2
Technorati Tags: hatred,aggression,revenge,criticism,defensiveness,boredom
,
I really could not understand Max’s hatred. He hated Reading, Blacks, Native Americans, Jews, and Catholics and a long list of other things. He had poor skills and no patience. He was only fifteen.
He actually had no interests but hate. None. As a public school teacher, I knew it was a mistake to ignore, reject or force forgiveness on Max. I chose to accept him as he was. He had no friends, after all. Other students ignored him.
This is beyond negative. Perhaps your child has shown aggressive, anti-rule behavior.
Her revenge, grudges and criticism have given her power over others.
She seems unapproachable. While she has some sympathetic followers, she creates constant tension. She is unsuccessful and defensive in ways that hinder growth. Your son may do all of the above in a defensive, loner way.
Perhaps you worry about your child’s continuous and total lack of interest in activities. Your child cannot work well with others, and your usual discipline techniques are not effective.
You are angry, on edge and on guard, but must act in love if you want results.
Professional counseling is part of your plan. Stress Free Discipline is another part. Used consistently, Stress Free Discipline provides the acceptance, pain relief, trust and status these youth need.
Hate is distilled pain. A small hurt can become a wildfire of hate.
Never ignore it, react personally, judge or trivialize your child’s problem. Never discuss him with other children or think you know how he or she feels. Consider how God treats our bad temper, greed, power grabs, and pride.
Counseling is unavoidable. Choose wisely. What you have been doing until now needs an upgrade. It has not been working.
A good counselor will take one or two hours to test all family members for anger management styles, personality differences, communication styles and problem solving techniques.
With those tools you and your family can work through the tough times. Stop your entertainments and time wasters and focus on healing work.
Memorize the tools. Learn to use them. Get help when times are tough. Sacrifice time and effort for teamwork and lifelong love relationships. You do not have forever. Every day that passes makes healing more difficult.
Raising a Cheater
It is easy to do. Raise a child to want success without teaching him or her the skills that bring success.
Make everything easy for your son or daughter. Do chores for them rather than teaching them to do for themselves. Serve them without asking them to serve the family. Let them watch four hours of media every night, the American average.
Those hours are lowering their attention span, making them less able to compete in the world marketplace, and reducing their ability to think logically. (Check out Caleb Crain, the New Yorker Critic at Large ,Twilight of the Books.) This is a recipe for failure. Cut off your child’s thinking skills at the knees by plugging them into media for hours each day.
That will take away self confidence so your daughter does not believe she can achieve without cheating.
Feed your son junk food or let him skip breakfast. Let him go to bed any time, even though the Harvard Sleep Study says children through age eighteen need eight or nine hours of sleep per night in order to learn. (Check out Matthew Walker, October 17, 2002 Harvard University Gazette Archives. Also see Beth Potier, December 11, 2003 of the Harvard University Gazette Archives.)
Intimidate your daughter by criticizing her weak first steps so she will not risk running. Take away your son’s responsibility by saying the teacher is picking on him rather than holding him accountable. Let the children have after school jobs and cars even though their grades are suffering.
Cheating in college is on the rise. The pressure to succeed is great. Give your child tips on how to steal essays from friends, frat brothers and the internet.
If you want a child to cheat, make success everything, the learning process nothing.
Teach your child that he or she is just an accident of nature, so moral behavior is no longer a useful choice. (See Crosswalk.com, Chuck Colson’s Breakpoint 2/29/08)
Your Challenge
Be close to your child. Know his or her attitudes and actions. If a teacher says your child has cheated, use the “worried-concerned” approach. Express your doubts and disappointments quietly and privately, not in front of siblings or friends. Remember that to your child, success is everything. Say, “Son, I don’t think you’re being completely honest on that test.”
Punishment for cheating may or may not help your child.
Remember that your goal is to support the right behavior, preventing a character defect from developing into further lies and loss.
If you want to change the cheating behavior, punishment might only make your child determined not to get caught.
Use Adam and Eve as examples. Adam and Eve appear to be sorry for being caught, not for their own responsibility in their fall. Your honesty as you talk with your child will encourage changes. Shallow, knee-jerk punishment may reinforce a failing, cheating cycle. Decide what you want to happen.
Accusing your child bluntly, ignoring the problem, and emotional reactions will reinforce a failing, cheating cycle.
Instead, realize that needs are not being met. Help your child learn the skills and earn success. Help her assert herself or himself and be responsible in every aspect of family and school life.
Walk with your children through their mine field of uncertainties until they can navigate on their own.
Make sure they are eating right and drinking enough and getting enough rest. The Harvard studies prove that learning is a lot more effective when you sleep on it. Chuck Colson’s research shows that a strong moral foundation prevents cheating.
Parents, go for the gold!
Stress-busters 2: Sharing stress
Technorati Tags: stress,consistent discipline,colds,sharing,leadership
When I was Drew’s age, I thought that if I gave 
my cold to someone else I would not have it anymore.
Now I make sure my grandchildren understand they’ll both be miserable if they share a cold.
The passage of stress is much like sharing a cold.
I can accept Drew’s stress that he is not getting what he wants when he wants it. I will feel miserable and he gets spoiled. I can make exceptions to the rules. I can slide around rules the easy way, being inconsistent. I become a bad parent, or in my case, grandparent. Good parenting is too much work!
If your children are constantly testing you, they have been conditioned to obey you only when you are stressed: (1) standing over them, (2) constantly repeating directions and giving them all of your attention, perhaps (3) screaming at them or hitting them.
Only then, they notice, do you really mean it.
When you aren’t looking, they are doing as they please. As they grow, you age. When you want shared goals, they’re “doing their own thing.” Your family is fragmented. You’re a nag. They’re escaping responsibility, piling it on you, or getting even for your on-again, off-again discipline in underhanded ways.
When you accept your child’s stress, you’re burdened and angry.
It’s no favor to them to let them have their way, but you’re too weary (from the stress you have chosen) to do what is right. Poor discipline is too much work!
Make that child obey! Discipline is not punishment most of the time but it is consistent consequences.
Ask yourself: Does my child put stress on me to give him or her what she wants? Have I trained her to be bad by changing the rules? Is this good in the long run? Is this like a cold: we’ll both be miserable? Whose problem is this?
“Meaning it” is stressing the child enough so that he or she chooses to obey rules over getting his/her own way. If you are consistent, poor behavior will self-destruct in a couple of weeks.
Teaching Money Management / Crime Prevention
Technorati Tags: jail,ministry,rules,consequences,money management,boundaries.
When my sons were pre-teens we had a small jail visitation ministry and they saw first-hand the consequences of writing a lot of bad checks. This experience was very motivational for them, and part of training in conscientiousness (a key element, according to research, in long and healthy life).
Consider involving children early in the process of helping you write checks and balance the checkbook. A second grader can help you add and subtract. Grocery shopping is a time you can give cash for your child to pick his or her favorite fruit and vegetables. As soon as computer skills become important to your child, have them watch you with QuickBooks, then watch them as they help you enter expenses, sorting out tax items as you go.
A three or four year-old can learn how you choose what you buy at the market. Soft fruit, green fruit–teaching the gentle squeeze helps with defining what is O.K. for pet handling as well as fruit choices. Unit pricing on the shelf tags can be a learning experience for older children. As soon as children can understand what money is, they can use a dollar to find a toy at the 99-cent store.
The idea is to help them understand real world limits and luxuries. Real Consequences are essential. You don’t have the grow your own food, but you do have to afford it.
When one of my sons was five years old, he scratched his name all over the outside wooden paneling of the preschool building. I explained to him that since I could not pay a painter and had the skills, my consequence was to refinish that wall.
His consequence was to pay a fine: his weekly “donut money” (routinely given by a sweet church senior). He paid in person to the principal for three weeks.
While the principal said it wasn’t necessary, it did teach a well-remembered lesson. When he was six and bowed in a plate glass window by leaning on it, all I had to say was “WOW! Look at that window bend. If it breaks, that is A LOT of donut money.” He jumped away from the window like it was a hot griddle.
Children can remind you to set aside savings. Play “You be the parent and I’ll be the child” to test learning. Teens can help you to prioritize your spending.
You model and teach them important concepts. What is important long term that needs to be saved for? What sacrifices now will make a big difference later? They master the concepts through practice. They minister the concepts through service to you. Remember that learning needs reinforcement to become mastery. Sacrifice is part of love.
Money management concepts are crammed into one or two classroom hours of Senior Economics class in public schools. Sacrifice and love are not taught there. An economic survey course is useless when students need many hours of practice and discussion. Most of them won’t absorb enough financial vocabulary and basic ideas at school to prepare them for success in life. You are responsible for teaching money management.
Buy Ron and Judy Blue and Jeremy White’s new book: Your Kids Can Master Their Money by Tyndale House Publishers.
My book just touches the surface of what can be done to give children financial skills.
Be aware also that many states impose severe consequences on parents for their child’s misbehavior.
For example, your state may fine or jail you for letting your child participate in theft or gangs. Clearly you want to establish the kinds of bonds with your child which will prevent their need for re-parenting by gangs.
In many states you can be evicted from public housing if your child is using or selling drugs. Laws constantly change, so it is good to educate yourself on juvenile law.
Prevention of criminal behavior depends on showing your child the consequences of not following the rules. Rule-following behavior is something you teach early in life. Your three year old needs consequences every time he or she disobeys a rule. Rules need to be simple and posted in print.
I recommend a family trip to the courthouse, jail or D.A.’s office. It is very educational for all of you. Interview the D.A. Ask about common errors teens make that get them in trouble with the law. Your children will never forget a real lesson.
Check out the American Bar Association’s Division for Public Education (www.abanet.org).
Crime prevention is all about consistent consequences. One way to teach consequences is to have a mini-jail ministry.
Part of good parenting involves teaching what to do. Another part is teaching what not to do. It is up to you.
Fishing—For Responsibility
Technorati Tags: delinquents,responsibility,consequences
Five delinquent teens and I plunged through dry sage and scrub oak for at least a mile on a never-maintained jeep trail.
We came at last to a fantastic fishing spot on Navajo lake.
It was their lake, they said, but Anglos took it over.
An expensive-looking white boat was anchored in the glimmering water of the silent cove. This tiny Eden greatly surpassed the sun-baked, well-trodden areas we passed up in order to get there.
The water was Spring-water high with boulders strewn artfully around the edge: just enough climbing places, just enough level trail, just right reeds and grasses.
It was an artist’s paradise, a child’s dream, a teen’s wonder.
We left my scratched up Ford high on a bluff and scrambled down with three borrowed poles and picnic supplies.
As we fished and then ate hot dogs roasted by the lake a teen said, “I’ve never had this much fun without being high.”
They had never gone fishing. I had to teach them all the basics. Three borrowed poles were passed between the five of them. One made his own pole from fish line and a stick. He caught a fish to everyone’s surprise.
About three in the afternoon, enthusiasm wore thin and feet slowed down. One of the boys set a pole on the boulder and it slid into the lake. I told “Yazzi”[1] to dive for it, since it was a $120 pole and he was responsible. He set his shirt by the coals of the fire and tried to get it, but failed. Then his friends also tried but the pole had sunken out of sight. When the sun began to set we had to give up trying, dry off and drag ourselves up the rocky trail to the car.
Neither Yazzi nor his parents ever paid for the fishing pole. They just didn’t feel like being responsible. I paid for it, since I had borrowed it from another teacher.
Here’s your challenge
If you do not teach the basics, like how to be responsible for their own behavior and how to live up to their promises, your children will end up being re-parented by someone else. Maybe it will be a gang. Or a boy who promises your girl love without work, romance without responsibility. Maybe it will be a coach who imposes down time for poor grades. This story is a picture for parents who end up paying for military school, probationary measures, and other shame, because they did not teach responsibility.
How do you teach responsibility? Impose consequences every time your child breaks a rule. Live up to all your promises. Ask forgiveness for the few times you fail to be a good example. Above all, be consistent. Rules for your child should never change between husband and wife, caregiver and grandparent. Do not tell me you cannot do this. If you can eat regular meals you can be consistent in discipline. It’s your feelings that betray you if you say, “I can’t.” Be accountable for every day with a prayer partner or your spouse. It’s up to you.
[1] Not his real name
Shiprock Stories: Building Respect and Creating Credibility with Rebellious Youth
Building respect and creating credibility with rebellious youth is simple but not easy.
Building bonds between you and your rebellious or strong willed child may take years of work on your part before you see fruit.
When I first began teaching on the Navajo Reservation, I worked with sophomores who had been expelled from schools all over the 25,000 square mile reservation. A select group!
One of them, a gang leader, said to me, “It’s OK to kill a Bilagaana (Anglo). We just don’t hurt our own.”
I’ll call him James. The school administrators had asked teachers to mentor the students, since all of them needed re-parenting in order to turn their lives in a positive direction.
I was looking for a way to show Christ to Native Americans steeped in Medicine Man and Peyote religion. Talk means little when a soul is in pain.
During three years at the school, James saw me take him on a 400 mile trip to pick up a car given to him by his mother—whose whereabouts had been unknown to him for years. When we entered Albuquerque gang territory he suggested that I ought to be afraid, but could not understand why I was not. “Protection now is God’s job,” I said. “I do my best, He does the rest.”
I waited for the teens to ask questions, and the questions always came when my behavior did not fit their assumptions.
I commuted to school with him after his cousin killed six relatives driving drunk.
James was following that car and held dying babies, aunts, and his uncle in his arms while the Anglo ambulance delayed a short trip by two hours. Two Anglo truck drivers stopped but made no effort to help or comfort. Others watched the victims die without leaving or helping.
I created a way for James to detox his trauma by doing an independent study project (for credit) with him. We talked for 30 miles each way.
James saw me drive six students to the funeral of a loved victim of “Russian Roulette.” I was the only Anglo teacher who took unpaid leave to attend.
I stopped a fight at the risk of getting punched out myself.
I was the only teacher there: the sensible thing would have been to go for reinforcements. Twenty teens had already gathered for the show. This really confused James. I felt bold because I had prayed for protection that morning. It was not a daily habit, but an impulse.
“Why did you do that?” he said. “It was across the street from the school. You didn’t have to stop it.”
“Because I didn’t want anyone to get hurt,” I said, “I’m responsible for students during the school day whether or not they’re on the school grounds.”
Again he said, “Why did you do that?”
My behavior did not compute.
After I had a reputation for being an Anglo favored by their “South Side Brown Pride” gang, I took a girl from a rival gang to live with me for two weeks. She and her parents needed housing for her while she waited for a dorm vacancy. I was taking James home, with his sawed off shotgun in his school bag, on the same trip. “Why did you do that?”
Selflessness confuses people.
James saw me take his girlfriend to the hospital emergency room and stay there until midnight when I learned she had a headache for three days. I told them she needed instant attention since it could be an aneurysm. I was very close to tears. James and two other gang members saw compassion and boldness when it made no sense to them. After all he had seen me do, James told me that the only Anglos whom he could trust were Christians.
I did it because I was focused on living the Bible, not just denying the problems or talking about them. How does this apply to raising your child?
Too many parents are in denial about their discipline effectiveness. Then they wonder why they get no respect.
If you say one thing and do another, your credibility is zero. Give instructions face to face, eye to eye, and do it once only before you take action. A forgetful child may self-distract, in which case you need to ask him or her to repeat your instructions as soon as you say them. Then make sure the consequences you impose are understood and related to the "crime" in severity.
Say something like, "If you hit your brother, you will sit in the corner for three minutes. Do you understand?" Remember that the consequences must be unpleasant enough to guarantee obedience. Also, consequences must be imposed EVERY TIME your child hits his or her brother, from now on, whether Grandma or another caregiver is watching or it is you there.
If the rule is disobeyed again, increase the time out until your child chooses to obey you. Wear a stop watch so you can set a count-down timer for the time needed. Stress Free Discipline has other ideas for the use of a stop watch.
When a small child leaves the corner before you give permission, a judicious spanking is needed to guarantee obedience to the time out. This is not abuse unless it is done when you are uncontrolled in your anger.
When you tell your tot or teen something, take a deep breath or two before you say something you cannot back up with action. Think through your consequences ahead of time.
Too many warnings and not enough tickets creates disrespect for the rule of law. Too much talk and not enough action creates disrespect for your rules.
After three years of confusion for James, he and his pregnant girlfriend walked the isle of the local Native Baptist Church to accept Christ. Your purposeful living and consistent discipline will produce God’s fruit when it’s done for the Lord.
