Collaborative Parenting
1. Children Learn From What You Do, Not What You Say
Children learn from what I do, not from what I say. As adults, we have more capacity to learn from what people say to us. Children mostly just learn through observation and repetition. So if you want your child to be more honest, you need to learn how to be more honest. If you want your child to be more courageous, you need to learn how to be more courageous. If you want them to be more kind, you get the idea.
This makes parenting really hard because most of the things that my children do that I don't want them to do, they actually learned from me. That sounds harsh, but it's true because a child's brain is very much programmed to repeat the behaviors that the child observes from their parents.
2. Children Operate at a Fraction of Their Parents' Maturity Level
If I want my child to grow in maturity, I have to increase my own maturity to a much higher level than the maturity level I hope my child will achieve. This ties into what I was saying earlier about if I want my child to manage conflict better, I need to manage conflict better.
3. Demonstrate Collaborative Conflict
One of the most important skills that most of us never got growing up was how to step into a collaborative conflict. This usually comes up between husband and wife: how do I handle myself when I disagree with you? How do I handle myself when I perceive the world differently than you do? How do I handle myself when I perceive you and I perceive myself differently than you perceive yourself and differently than you perceive me?
These things are really hard for adults to manage, and they're even harder for children to manage. But if I can allow my child to see myself stepping into collaborative conflict where I talk straight to you without using anger or manipulation or coercion, then my child can learn that through example. They won't learn that from me talking to them about it. It has to be demonstrated, which means that I have to grow myself up first before I can hope for my children to grow up more.
4. Demonstrate Self-Soothing
Self-soothing is my ability to calm myself down once I've gotten upset. This is one of the most important things that I can demonstrate to my children because it's harder for children to do than it is for adults. A child who never gets to see their parents calm themselves then address the situation is going to have a much harder time learning that skill than a child who actually gets to see their parents do that.
5. Courage is a Prerequisite to Honesty
If you want your children to tell the truth more often, the actual underlying problem is a lack of courage, not a lack of honesty. It's pretty easy for kids to understand the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie—that's not the problem. So there's no use in talking to your kids about "tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth."
The reason they're lying is that they're afraid or they're trying to manipulate you. They would be less likely to do that if they had more courage. Now, here's the problem: it's a lot harder for children to be courageous than it is for adults, and it's already really hard for adults to be courageous.
If I want my kid to be more courageous, I have to be a lot more courageous first, and I have to allow my child to see me being courageous. The most common opportunity I'm going to have as a parent to show my child what courage looks like is to collaboratively confront my partner where my child can see it. So can I talk straight to my wife, for example, while my children are present, without getting angry, without being manipulative, without being cruel? Can I be kind and straightforward and honest and courageous in my child's presence?
The answer for most of us is that we don't really know how to do this. We're not very good at it. If I want my children to learn the skill, I have to learn it first. I have to practice it, and I have to demonstrate it in my children's presence.
6. Most of Your Child's Undesirable Behavior is Caused by Anxiety
If you think of your family system, there's going to be an undercurrent of anxiety that travels through each person in that family system, and children have a much lower ability to handle that anxiety than adults do. So if you as the parent bring a certain amount of anxiety and put that into your family system, your children are going to be more affected by that anxiety than you are, and a child will often deal with that anxiety by doing something you don't want them to do.
This means calming your own anxiety and doing what you can to keep from taking your anxiety and dumping it onto your children, or dumping your anxiety into the family system. One typical example is if the parents are upset at each other, the children will behave poorly because they're sensing the anxiety that's being put into the family system by the parents not liking each other.
7. Don't Use Emotional Punishment
Emotional punishment is just "you didn't do what I want, so now you have to deal with my unpleasant emotion"—so I'm going to get mad at you, or I'm going to withdraw my love and affection, or I'm just going to develop some kind of unpleasant, negative emotion and you're going to have to deal with it. This is the most common way that we parents try to manipulate our children's behavior.
There's a lot of problems with this, but one of the biggest problems is that it just doesn't work. It might work for a few minutes, maybe even a couple hours, but it never works for more than that. You will never improve your child's behavior tomorrow by using unpleasant, intense emotions today.
One of the problems with this is it's much harder to use other discipline methods as opposed to just getting mad or just yelling or just using your unpleasant emotions to try to control your children. The other ways of providing consequences for a child's behavior require a lot more effort and a lot more creativity and a lot more focus than just allowing yourself to get mad.
Now, if you think you can't control yourself, if you can't change the way your emotions come out with your kids, just think about what would happen if your boss showed up at the door while you were in the middle of yelling at your child. If you answered the door, you would not immediately start yelling at your boss, so you actually can control yourself. You're just choosing to allow your emotions to affect your child because it's your instinctive response when your kid doesn't do what you want them to do. This happens to the best of us. It happens to all of us. It's also something we need to work on changing.
8. Immediate Consequences Are Much More Effective Than Extended Consequences
Children respond to immediate consequences much more powerfully than they do to extended consequences. If I tell my child, "you're grounded for a month," that honestly doesn't mean anything more than being grounded for a day or two. To an adult, being grounded for a month has a lot of significance, but children have a very limited ability to imagine what life is going to be in the future. They tend to be very present-focused, and so a consequence that extends out for hours or days or weeks is not very meaningful to most children.
9. Positive Feedback is More Powerful Than Negative Feedback
Providing positive feedback to your child is always going to be more effective than providing negative feedback. So catch your child doing something you want them to do and acknowledge or notice what they're doing. Catch them doing something good and make sure they know that you can tell and that you appreciate their behavior. They really need to know that you can see when they're stretching themselves to become a better version of who they are.
10. Effective Parenting is Actually Super Hard
As you notice from all the things I've talked about, every single item on this list requires me, the parent, to grow myself up, to become more mature, to become more powerful, to calm myself down, to do all the things I want my child to do—but to an even greater extent.
Powerful and effective parenting requires me to look at my own weaknesses, my own inadequacies, and try to change those parts of myself, which sets a good example for my children and allows them to learn from what I do, and also allows me to interact with them in more effective and more powerful ways.
