SPRING is here! A time for renewal and rejuvenation, a perfect time to do the 3-Week Dare To Love Yourself Challenge!

Should you choose to accept this mission, your reward will be:

• Lighter Moods
• Stronger, Healthier Sense of Self
• Noticeably More Manageable Emotions
• Optimistic Feelings
• Increased Tolerance to Stress
• Less Reactivity to Other People’s Negativity

The person with the most comments on any one blog post (on your blog or the Love Never Fails social network) will receive:

• Attendance at my “Every Day Is Mother’s Day”
  conference, exclusively open to Challenge participants!

Here’s how the 3-Week Challenge works:

1.  First you’ll need my ” Dare To Love Yourself ” CD set.   If you don’t have it already, it is still available at a special new release price:

At the Beyond Consequences Institute our goal is to help you to become the best parent you can be and that takes moving yourself first to a place of forgiveness, self-love, and happiness. We receive emails every day describing the transforming power of love through our work, and I hope your experience with the ” Dare To Love Yourself ” CD set will be equally as wonderful.

Press on,

Children’s Feelings, Behaviors, and Relationships

(This article is based off the books “Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control Vol 1 & 2”

Visit our website at www.beyondconsequences.com)

By: Heather T. Forbes, LCSW

author of “Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control Vols 1, 2 & Dare To Love”

Children need unconditional love and unconditional acceptance from their parents; we all know this and believe this.  However, do we ever stop to consider how so many of the traditional parenting techniques accepted in our culture work contrary to this primal goal?  Traditional parenting techniques that involve consequences, controlling directives, and punishment are fear-based and fear-driven.  They have the ability to undermine the parent-child relationship and because they are tied into behavior, children easily interpret these actions to mean, “If I’m not good, I am not lovable.”  Thus, children often build a subconscious foundation that says that love and approval is based off of performance.

How to Parent With Love

Parenting from a love-based paradigm means going beyond our children’s behavior and beyond consequences to first see that negative behavior is a form of communication and that negative behavior is a response to stress. If we see the kicking and screaming child as one who is having difficulty regulating due to an overflow of feelings, we can learn to stay present with the child in order to help him modulate these feelings and thus, help him to build his emotional regulatory system. A child kicking and screaming or in a rage is a child who has been “emotionally hijacked”. Emotions are not logical or rational ; this hitting and kicking is the body’s natural fear reaction gone awry.

Allowing a child emotional space to safely dissipate this energy will then allow him to calm down. As we provide reassurance, unconditional love, and emotional presence for our children, the need to kick and scream will disappear.  Many times our children kick and scream simply because they do not feel that they are being listened to nor do they feel as if they have been heard. Staying present and reassuring a child that you really are listening to him, can be enough to help them begin to regulate. The life lesson that kicking and screaming is inappropriate does indeed need to be reinforced. But, this life lesson can only happen once the child is fully regulated (when the child is calm) and his cognitive thinking is intact. This is also the time to present alternatives to kicking and screaming. This is a way of teaching our children instead of punishing them. The definition of discipline is to teach.  The more we can stay focused on the relationship with our child and strengthening this relationship instead of controlling it through consequences, the more we will be helping our child learn to work through their stress appropriately.

Four pointers to help you stay in a loving and emotionally open place for your children:

Just Be Happy!—But I’m not!

Did anyone ever tell you, “Just think happy thoughts and it will be okay.”?  Did it really work?  Probably not.  Emotions do not simply disappear.  If feelings are not released and acknowledged, they are stored and become part of our physical make-up.  Research has convincingly shown that being able to express feelings like anger and grief can improve survival rates in cancer patients.  With our children, feelings that become stored and “stuffed” become activators for negative behaviors.

ALL Feelings are Good Feelings

As parents, it is important for us to understand the necessity of emotional expression, both in teaching it to our children and in modeling it to our children.  Blocked feelings can inhibit growth, learning, and the building of a trusting relationship between the parent and child.  The first step to take is to recognize that ALL emotions are healthy.  In our culture, feelings such as joy, peace, and courage are seen as good feelings, yet feelings such as sad, mad, and scared are seen as bad feelings.  Let’s rethink this to understand that it is not the feeling itself that creates negativity; it is the lack of expression of the feeling that creates negativity.  And in children, this negativity is often expressed through poor behaviors.

Getting to the Core of the Behavior

When children are acting out and being defiant, we need to begin to understand that their behaviors are simply a communication of an emotional state that is driving these behaviors.  If we simply address the behavior, we miss the opportunity to help children express and understand themselves from a deeper level. Start by modeling basic feeling words to your child.  Keep it simple and teach the five basic feeling words: sad, mad, bad, scared, and happy. Even the youngest of children can learn to say, “I’m mad!”  When the toddler is throwing his toys or the teenager is throwing his backpack across the room, encourage him at that moment to get to the core of the behavior through emotional expression.  Remember…it really isn’t about the toys or the backpack; and they really do know better than to do the negative behaviors.

Responding vs. Reacting

So the next time your child becomes defiant, talks back, or is simply “ugly” to you, work to be in a place not to react to the behavior, but respond to your child.  Respond to your child in an open way—open to meeting him in his heart and helping him understand the overload of feelings that are driving the behaviors.  He doesn’t need a consequence or another parental directive at that moment; he just needs you to be present with him.  As your children learn to respond back to you through the parent-child relationship, they won’t have the need to communicate through negative behaviors anymore.  You’ll both have more energy for each other, building a relationship that will last a lifetime.

How do you feel about this article?

In the spirit of National Adoption Month, I’d like to invite you to celebrate adoption with me. Even if you’re not an adoptive parent, you’re invited.

Starting today, you can go to my website and type in a coupon code for 20% off of all my educational resources. This includes all my books, audio CD’s, and DVD’s
(However, this will not include the value packages which are already discounted).

Here’s the 20% Off Celebration Coupon Code: ADOPTION

Simply type in this code at the shopping cart and it will automatically calculate your discount: www.beyondconsequences.com/store.html

So the question came up at a lecture this past weekend, “How do I keep myself from going back to negative interpretations of my children and back into negative parenting?”

It takes constant vigilance and self-discipline to keep yourself and your family on a positive healing journey, especially when your child’s behaviors are beyond challenging!

Keeping yourself immersed in reading, listening, and watching new information is the key to making lifelong changes!

Whether it is my information or other resources you find, I encourage you to make a commitment from here until the end of the year to feed your mind new information every single day.

This way, come January 1, 2010, you’ll be completely prepared to start a New Year’s Resolution to being the best parent you can be! You’ll already have laid down new neural pathways to keep you on track, ensuring success for all of 2010.

My new book, Dare to Love, is 90% Questions and Answers. Simply read one Q&A per day, and you’ll have your brain wrapped around this whole idea of love-based parenting by the end of the year. Nothing will be able to stop you come New Year’s Day!

If finances are tight and even with a 20% discount, you can’t stretch your budget one more inch, be sure to sign-up for one of my f/ree full-day parenting lectures beginning the first of the year. All the locations and dates are now up and waiting for you to simply register: www.BeyondConsequencesLive.com

There are also other resources (articles, videos, and audios) available on my website available to you at no charge.

Everything for the coupon is available at: www.beyondconsequences.com/store.html

Again, the Coupon Code is: ADOPTION

Celebrate adoption and keep pressing on,

Heather T. Forbes, LCSW

P.S. The 20% off Coupon is good through this coming Saturday (November 21, 2009)