Stress-Free Discipline

Is your child really the most important person after God and your spouse? How do your priorities line up? If streaming and social media consume four or more hours of your time each day, how are your children going to learn effective life skills?

Effective life skills are those things everyone has to do–to be an effective adult–or pay someone else to do them. The teaching job required for this list of chores takes time and plenty of work.  It is ongoing, frustrating, lasts a lifetime and is worth every minute of your self-sacrifice.

If your child can do those adult chores fast and well, he or she will be happy, according to “happiness research.” How many of the following adult chores are you planning to teach your child…or how many of them have you mastered? Here’s a list of adult responsibilities which—if you are skillful—will make you a happy adult.  Unplug from the TV and plug into life.

Parent’s Duty and Skill List (Frame this and hang it in plain sight.  Review it often with your child when you assign chores to yourself and children.)

Yard and Home Repairs:

Manage workers or repair and maintain yard and home yourself. Paint, build, plan, budget for and buy materials for projects such as roofing, bookshelves, storage areas.

Bookkeeping:

pay bills, keep records of spending, balance bank statements, track credit spending and loan repayments. Plan and carry out insurance and financial strategy.

Secretarial:

do time planning and errands, phone calls, correspondence, special occasion gifts and cards, schedule appoints, games, classes, and special events. Chauffeur people to these events.

Files:

set up and maintain files on all aspects of the household, including financial, warranty, and physical plant information. Keep records on repairs done and specifics of new equipment installed.

Protection:

Research, provide for, and maintain the following: inventory of possessions, furniture and valuable paintings. Create and maintain safety rules, fire escape drills, tracking of children away from home, etc.

Food Services:

plan menus, purchase food, prepare meals, serve them and clean up after them. Take into account: nutritional balance, personal preferences, special dietary needs, variety of texture, color and type of food, degree of “cooking,” freshness and freedom from unnecessary additives. Food storage rotation and freezer “quickies” for Sunday use must be planned and maintained. Ambiance, service, food preparation and purchase for parties are additional.

Purchasing:

Buy toiletries, paper products, small appliances, gifts, clothing, etc. on budget. Wrap and mail gifts as needed.

Laundry:

Wash, fold, and iron clothing, bedding and towels, schedule and record items sent out for dry cleaning and laundry, get items from cleaners.

Fabric maintenance:

Mend and perform tailoring on clothing, backpacks, and other fabrics.

Physical plant maintenance:

General Handyman tasks, basic plumbing, wiring, carpentry, and other household upkeep.

Daily cleaning:

General pick-up, make beds; straighten, fold, and put away items, organize magazines, books and newspapers, freshen bathrooms, straighten towels and clean bathroom sink.

Trash Disposal:

Empty kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and office trash as needed, recycle coat hangers, plastics, glass and newspapers, prepare trash for weekly pickup.

Weekly cleaning:

Change bed and bath linens weekly, clean shower area, hot tub and shower as needed, wash floors, vacuum and dust.

Periodic Maintenance:

Clean windows including skylights and screens at least twice yearly, clean carpets and upholstery, oil furniture with four coats oil inside and out 2-3 times per year. Remove books from shelves and vacuum books and shelves. Clean gutters and attic or basement areas.

Houseplant maintenance:

Purchase, re-pot, water, trim and feed houseplants.

Gardening:

Water as needed, use weed killer and spray for insects and diseases. Wash or hose off porches and outdoor furniture.

Small Appliance and computer Repairs:

Schedule and carry out computer virus protection, vacuum and other routine cleaning and repair to prevent problems before they happen. Record repairs done and by whom.

Organization:

clean out and organize closets, cupboards, drawers and basement and furnace room. Discard out-of-date items, such as spices over six months old or outdated medications.

Automobile repair and maintenance:

track oil changes, radiator and belts and regular tune up needs, gas and wash car as needed.

Pet care:

daily brushing, walking, vacation planning and vet visits, shots, licensing and shampoos.

Child care:

1. Raise children in the discipline and nurture of the Lord,
2. Supervise and instruct them on reasonable chores, safety, expectations and family goals
3. Teach manners, citizenship, respect for authority and education,
4. Attend school and church events, track homework and project due dates, help with schoolwork, provide quality control of schoolwork and handwriting,
5. Teach and monitor spelling, History, Math, English, Science, etc.
6. Teach and practice problem solving skills, negotiation skills, conflict resolution, communication skills, hobbies and anger management skills.
7. Teach and practice adult skills such as budgeting, spend/save/tithe principles, making decisions, analysis, creativity, synthesis, time management, priority and goal setting, application of right principles, proactivity rather than crisis management, follow-through on duties, life-long learning habits and interdependence.

Does your youth have these adult skills mastered so they can be done fast and well? If not, he or she remains in a submissive, student’s role until time to establish his/her own household.

Do you have an optimal family life?  My husband and I have foster-parented our 9 year-old granddaughter for eight months, learning a lot about all of us in the process.  Now her mother has joined us while she builds a new life for them both.

The school has informed us that–while our granddaughter is in the gifted and talented program with test scores above average–she lacks personal knowledge of real-world facts.  She is immersed–given the chance–in streaming media four to six hours daily.  So are her mother and grandfather.  She is addicted to fiction:  grandpa favors the news and military history.  Dinner is fragmented by different time schedules or is eaten in silence in front of the TV.

All of us are engaged in solitary independent play.  Our granddaughter has substituted media for learned facts and social interactions, placing herself at a disadvantage in the real world.  Grandpa learned his social skills on schedule but does not exercise them when he is focused on the news at dinnertime.  All of us are engaged in solitary independent play.

Solitary independent play is what happens with toddlers in a sandbox.  They do “their own thing” without communication, commitment, cooperation or planning.  They continue in that mode until they are taught and required to behave differently.

Is this your family?  How will your child learn essential life skills when the media consumes six hours per day of teaching time?  When will you commit to leadership in teaching essential life skills?  Check out “The Most Important Person in Your Life” post to see what you have missed by your lack of planning.

San Diego, CA:  A successful May 23, 2010 book signing for Stress-free Discipline was held at St. James’ Lutheran church,  Imperial Beach.  Course curriculum maps and other information were available there for readers receptive to a free hybrid series of classes on Stress-Free Discipline.  Coursework is pending at St. James and at Trinity Lutheran churches.

Stress-Free Discipline gives you tested, unique, time-saving tools for tots-to-teens discipline!

This step-by-step plan not only reduces stress, it builds life-long love, teamwork, life skills and responsibility.

• Five expectation sets are realistic, gradually building complex skills.
• Children master adult skills almost painlessly.
• They are rewarded for every right choice.
• Negatives are minimized, releasing energy for building and bonding.
• Motivational rewards are simple, fun and educational.
• Parents and children grow accountable in a bond of love.

Endorsements

William C. Reeves, Ph.D. Human Behavior writes: “Stress Free Discipline presents some great ideas that have been successfully used to help children mature.  Setting up positive rewards for good behavior is presented as the best way to help children learn self discipline and appropriate behavior.  Children are also presented with the reality that poor behavior results in unwanted consequences for them.  Behavior is tracked by a point system that allows the child to understand the results of both good and improper actions.”

Charles Jeter, Combat Veteran, Software Engineer writes:  “Stress Free Discipline has valuable strategy and rules of engagement.”

John Demas, attorney writes:  “Stress Free Discipline has worked with my children.  Judith has a gift.”

Gary Kirk, pastor, publisher, counselor writes: “As the father of a son with special needs, I feel your book should be required reading for everyone involved in an IEP—educators and parents alike…From many years of being a small group pastor and counselor, I consistently see the need for parents to find the kind of equipping that you have offered in your book.”

Contact Judith to purchase the book ($17.95 + shipping), or contact legacylinepublishing.com.

Is it true to say that our convenient computers, calculators, and technology short-cuts in general are ways to save ourselves the labor of figuring our change, analyzing our data, etc?  If so, I could argue that achieving the end product without analysis may be a short cut which facilitates our life style without damaging it. We do not need to know how the vegetables were grown and transported to benefit from eating them. 

However, we do need to know how to figure our change in our heads.  That involves abstract thinking: recall, application, analysis, judgment.

Since I came from the punch card era–when computer CPUs took up a whole temperature-controlled room and lots of engineering time–I see that our short cuts can own us. While they are simplifying our thought life in order to find the bottom line sooner, they simplify our learning process.  They dumb us down, setting us up to be willing victims. 

The key question is this: Was the trade-off a good one?  Is it good to merely speed up life without doing the grunge work (basic skill building or spiritual work, for example) of making it a worthwhile life?

The issue, then, as I see it, is that the foundational math concepts and logic skills have somehow been lost in the rush toward functionality.  It is the old battle between the urgent but unimportant against the long term important item which seems like it can wait at the bottom of the priority list. 

Then, horrors, the long term important skills or chores (like building higher order thinking skills or buying disability insurance) suddenly loom large and ugly:  CRISIS MANAGEMENT.  Attached is a little chart I invented which might be useful for priority setting and time management

A simple priority system for you and your child might look like this:

Finding the most important thing to do first: 

List important tasks on the left side of your paper. 

Make five small columns to the right of the list. 

In them, give the task a number from 1 to 10, with 10 being the most important.[1] 

It works like this:

Assign points to each column for each task. 

If you’re weak there and really working on planning and scheduling, you may want to assign points for that job like this:  (A) God’s priority 20, (B) Important long term 10, (C) Urgent this week 6, (D) Total points 36.  Leave the priority column blank until the end. 

If you have food management well organized, have plenty in the refrigerator and pantry, and can throw together healthy meals without much effort, you might assign it points like this:  (A) God’s priority 20, (B) Important long term 6, (C) Urgent this week 2, (D) Total points 28.

If you want God to be Number One in your life, your day is ruined if you’re not up early to meet with Him, you’ll probably give that points like this: (A) God’s priority 30 (B) Important long term 10, (C) Urgent this week 2 (D) Total points 42.

Spending birthday money doesn’t look so important now, but you have a burning desire to get to the store while the sale is still on.  Those points might be (A) God’s priority 1, (B) Important long term 3, (C) Urgent this week 10, (D) Total points 14.

What do you need to do in order to overcome that natural laziness which makes you ignorant of life’s challenge and reward?

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.

Knowles, M. S., & Bradford, L. P. (1952). Group methods in adult education. Journal of Social Issues, 8(2), 11-22.

When families malfunction they may not know how to do target correction.  Do not play the blame game!  Use win-win techniques.

Agree on some ground rules for your quarrels. 

Quality Progress (Redmond, 2007, 80) moves people closer to a solution in 60 minutes with four basic tools. Redmond’s suggestions are similar to those made by Richard Feder and John Mitchell nineteen years earlier in a ‘4-day task force’ (1988, August).

Rule 1 – Agree on time management

Both sources argue for the restriction of time as a key to efficiency.  While some problems may require more urgency, sixty minutes is an arbitrary time in which Redmond demonstrates problem solving.

Please do not vent for hours without allowing some kind of decision to be made.  Repeating your beef over and over just makes your family more “hard of hearing” each time you speak. 

It is hard to respect someone who chooses not to be rational.  Vent to an older friend who can talk with you like your grandmother might.  They’ve been down that road and have seen what works or does not work.

The following are simple, but not easy ground rules for problem solving.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.