Stress Free Discipline

 

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:

1. 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.
2. Have each family highlight the words which describe your family now.
3. Have each person circle what your family should be when you work your plan.
4. 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.

1. Write down and post the positive ideas in several places around the house. Move them (slightly) often so they are noticed better.
2. Review them daily together.
3. 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.
4. Remind each other that love is emotion in motion. Unlove is obstructing lifelong love and growth. Pray.
5. 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.

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.

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

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!

 

 

As manager of a senior apartment complex, I learn a lot about the pressures, perks and pitfalls of aging.

One resident, call her Mary, has focused for years on life according to her feelings. She dwells on her son’s murder, her husband’s infidelity, T.V. and slurs, imagined or real, on her heritage. The bipolar critic who lives downstairs has added to years of unforgiveness, swelling Mary’s bag of complaints. Mary drops that bag on anyone sympathetic enough to stay in range.

Victim-hood for Mary has become a comfortable cloak for reality.  For half of my 64 years I created my own reality like that.

 

At U.C. Berkeley I majored in fiction and creative writing while getting my degree. Picture Berkeley in the 60’s: the Vietnam War, Student Rights, Free Speech, Kennedy’s assassination. To that heady brew I added Buddhism, self-hypnosis, automatic writing, Transcendental Meditation. Did you know that if you are adept at T.M. you can levitate?

My liberal friends and I felt that a group of loving people with our intelligence could resolve the world’s problems. Our parents had been too materialistic, unaware, uneducated. People were, after all, basically good.

It was only a matter of culture—American culture—that enslaved their spirits. Not a Christian at that time, I felt that Christianity was just a mythical crutch to make weak people feel better.

Generosity and service to others would shore up the life style and attitudes of those downtrodden unfortunates who were victimized by our culture.

 

Hiring quotas, pay equalization, more welfare and social engineering were our answers when my peers and I wore the power hat.

Teaching, my profession, progressed during the 19 years I was in it through a series of stages.

Grades were a problem.

The military and business worlds needed some useful kind of sorting device to categorize high school graduates so they could do their jobs: defend our country and raise the bottom line for shareholders. They needed some sort of predictability.

But grades were a big problem. Grades discriminated between educable mentally retarded and high level thinkers.

People FELT bad when they were labeled with a grade, and they aimed lower in life. They got depressed and discouraged.

 

Grades pounded the life out of a person’s self image and thus their future. No caring educator wants to do that.

Coursework and in-service education for teachers stressed solutions to self-worth problems in order to bring teachers into an enlightened interaction with students. Sarcasm, negative body language and other destructive baggage were rightfully removed from the student-teacher relationship.

However, drop-out rates, drug use and teen suicide kept climbing. It did not compute.

 

Schools were not making a positive difference.  More administrators were added in order to help teachers do their job. Curriculum gurus lowered P.E. requirements and dropped art, music and vocational education in favor of academics.

After all, academics were high status and status made students feel good. Everyone ought to be able to attend college, gaining high status and bigger pay, if they so desired. Even my remedial fisherman in Alaska, who could not grasp basic concepts of Senior Economics, had to be dragged through the course with incredible accommodations, hints and outright answers to every test question. The Special Education teacher saw to that.

Nobody was left out: an excellent fisherman had to get a diploma just like everyone else. His goal was to be an attorney. His true inability and our failure to be truthful doomed him to years of fruitless accommodation until the Bar Exam truthfully rejected him.  Did we do him a favor by eliminating realistic boundaries?

Reality and truth were not our objectives as educators.

Our questions given any choice were not “Is it true? Is it right?” but “Can we make it work? How will it feel?”  Feeling good about your self was the objective.

However, drop-out rates, drug use and teen suicide have kept climbing.

Our true levels of practical life skills such as Math, English, and Science have dropped dangerously in relation to students around the world at the same age and stage. 

 

Our students cannot compete in a global marketplace where "feel good" has no place.  Furthermore, we now find that false self esteem is tied to school shootings, low productiion and skyrocketing divorce.

America has done such a good job of shoring up self image that unrealistic expectations rule the home, schools and workplace. Feelings have gained control of thinking: they play ping-pong with the brain. 

Mary was so disturbed by her feelings that she became more and more unhappy.  Finally her unhappiness threatened her ability to remain in an independent living apartment.  The "brain-pong" had to stop.  Mary accepted the county’s offer of counseling and has changed her attitude.

What Mary, educators and I did not realize was that feelings are the culprit.  Emotions in the driver’s seat cause life wreckage.  The brain-pong has to stop before the damage is permanent.

 

Christianity has become for me a standard for measuring truth about our selves.  We are born greedy and selfish, and only the Lord’s input can made us generous, unselfish and happy.  What do you know! 

In giving, we receive.  In loving we become beloved.  In submission to Christ we become powerful.

 

It was 65 degrees below zero wind chill as I walked to school in Bristol Bay, Alaska.

Wolf’s fur around my hood could have avoided the frost build up, but  I couldn’t bring myself to buy a pelt. They hung around the general store, the “Farthest North Grocery Store” in Alaska.  Other teachers, my peers, felt no discomfort about buying wolf pelts.  I never quite fit, it seems, into the survival mind set.  I wrapped a scratchy wool scarf across my face so it wouldn’t freeze off.

Crystalline air glowed around a few street lights. The still darkness was broken only by the crunch of my boots on ice-crisp snow. A porcupine moved leisurely across my path. I could hardly see what it was until I crept up close. Whew. It was too close for my comfort.

The Dillingham city limits included wildlife and tundra.

During “break-up” the snow melted and refroze in spots. I fell twice despite my care…dislocated my shoulder…couldn’t sleep for 3 months. Students had to do my writing on the whiteboard.

The romance of the northern lights was dimmed by pain.

On top of that I struggled with mysterious illness which made me feel like some alien had sucked out my blood and replaced it with water. Teaching became a nightmare. 

Every spare dime was spent on medical expenses: I flew to Anchorage for medical care several times. The principal told me to leave mid-year but I needed the income and fought leaving through the teacher’s union.  I slept on the floor of my supply closet as soon as school was over so I could get up again to do schoolwork before collapsing again at home.

I failed my first year of teaching in Alaska.  After 19 years my career was over.

I was not a pioneer. In June I left teaching and moved to Anchorage where there was more medical help.

My diagnoses included mercury toxicity, Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysregulation, fibromyalgia, Epstein Barr virus and adrenal exhaustion. Doctors shrugged their shoulders and tried various means to make me functional. None worked. 

I slogged through trying to work off my co-pay until my insurance ran out.

I became disabled, homeless, and unable to do anything for more than two or three hours a day.  I felt like a broken doll face down in a muddy ditch.  I considered and rejected suicide.

I was convinced that God had a plan for my life.  Four years passed with no relief and no answers. I sold my car to a couple who defaulted on the payments and disappeared.

A few kind people helped me. I slept six weeks on my doctor’s home office floor.

Most of my peers misunderstood the nature of my illnesses.  I didn’t look ill. 

They pressured me to be like them, to get over it, to straighten up.  They told me to work harder, spend more, move on. 

Perhaps they thought I was lazy or mental.  I thought that at first.  A nurse who had rented me a room in her large home told me to leave when my money ran out.  I went to the Anchorage Rescue Mission in tears.

Other posts detail the first 18 months of disability, homelessness and ten months of down time in bed.

Where was God during that time? He was pulling me through, although it was a tough road to travel.

Why? He never explains Himself to people in the Bible. I couldn’t understand if He tried to tell me why bad things happen. God was silent, but He gave me hope on the shoulder of life’s highway.

Insights and Applications

Listening to three or four radio sermons daily focused my mind on "things above" my own misery.  It was essential to pain management to put my thoughts somewhere besides on myself.

Ten years later my life focus has completely changed. I am still disabled, but have grieved the loss, then learned more ways to manage and enjoy what I have. I may never have the stamina to teach full time, but I manage 48 apartments instead.

I have learned to pace myself rather than seek the highs and lows of kamikaze living. Previously, I would run full speed in an emotional high, collapse from exhaustion, run full speed again, collapse again. 

Now I walk, enjoy the sights in depth, rest, meditate, listen.

I don’t know what is next.  I see greater growth through the pruning God has fostered in me.

John 15:1-5 and Jeremiah 29:11 have become so important I read them over to myself again and again.

I consider the Bible essential for my well being. It was that which persuaded me that God has a purpose for everything under Heaven.

Our Culture: Paris Hilton. Pro Wrestling and Steroids. Lindsay Lohan.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that uncooperative, sometimes hostile, bored, disinterested behavior is catching. Sometimes it can get so bad that desperate parents feel they must resort to outside sources in order to break the cycle. From Teen Options Blog:

Military teen boot camps are known for their no nonsense approach to dealing with out-of-control-teens. In many cases, boot camps are the right solution for a teen teetering on the edge of a full blown discipline problem and likely only needs a wake-up call.  

Negative children, especially teens, appear to have dropped their lifelong love for you and your values in favor of something which makes all their problems worse. They may be very good or very poor students. They not only disconnect with you but with most of their peers at school.

They may be gang “wannabes.”

For Parents Fighting Gang Involvement

You may feel intimidated, confused, rejected, helpless and angry. How could they do this to you? Their gang seems all powerful. You feel weak. If you are facing a tag team within your own family they will support each other behind your back, sharing and negating everything you say. Suddenly your influence is nil. Years of effort are gone—useless. Don’t believe it.

Your child, your gift from God, is in that gang because of a need. It may be a need for power, influence, achievement, status. A negative group may help your child escape from the pain of social failure with more positive people.

If relationships outside the negative group improve, your child may prefer to leave the negative status or power group.

Peer Pressure Analysis and Combat

Study recent events which reinforce or cause the negative turn. Does Negative Ned need active listening? Do you need information? Are there biochemical causes? Is this evidence of physical growing pains?

Go into computer mode in your head: feelings are your enemy. They push you into adrenalin-driven rejection of others and stupid choices of correction. Deep breathing is essential to your health.

Pinpoint precise wrong behavior and the consequences. Deal proactively with wrong choices. Impose immediate consequences every time the wrong choice occurs. This is simple (not easy) with Stress Free Discipline. Do not attack group membership or make awful generalizations about the future.

Stay specific and impersonal in spite of their identity with poor choices. Never let them see you sweat. After all, you plus God are a majority. You have taken this to Him, right? Offer a positive course of action after prayer, Godly counsel and lots of active listening.

Stress Free Discipline can fill your child’s needs to be assertive, to have influence and to achieve. You cannot force your child to choose the positive action, but it is really hard to keep up the negative one when you show a willingness to open up, listen, and investigate mutual solutions.

Have you been withholding personal power development by not allowing your child to make some choices? We all learn by wrong ones, within reason. Remember that over-protective parenting is disastrous to personal growth. At the same time, do not let your child work together with a negative peer. Keep your contacts positive ones. I moved into a different town to remove my pre-teens from negative influences. Above all, don’t nag.

Christian Steps

Have you provided a Home Fellowship group which is real, available, and interested in your child? Your child will be more likely to leave the negative peer group if his or her need for status can be filled in a positive, God centered way. You don’t need to be watering the seeds of Truth if your child prefers to connect with a personality unlike yours. Make ways to provide that.

Negativity is so fatiguing and self-defeating your child will gradually begin to desire the relief of real, positive relationships. People usually act in line with the expectations of others.