positive Parenting Prescriptions - improve relationships, heal your home

Let Parenting Prescriptions help you improve your parenting and heal your family relationships. See your child grow in confidence, self-esteem, and discipline.

Parenting Prescriptions and the Power of Positive Parenting

Join the positive parents around the world. Begin using positive Parenting Prescriptions® by Dr. Glenn Latham.

Applying

Behavioral

Principles

in the home and family

S T R A T E G Y O N E

Clearly communicate your expectations to your children.

S T R A T E G Y T W O

Ignore inconsequential behavior.

S T R A T E G Y T H R E E

Selectively reinforce appropriate behaviors.

S T R A T E G Y F O U R

Stop, then redirect inappropriate behavior.

S T R A T E G Y F I V E

Stay close to your children.

Read detailed explanations, examples, and role-playing experiences in the parent's manual to raising children in a positive way, The Power of Positive Parenting.

Strategy Five

Stay close to your children.

As children grow from infancy through childhood and into adolescence, we notice some interesting things happening in the way parents interact with them. What we notice is a bit distressing, given the effects these things have on putting distance between parents and their children.

Parents spend a great deal of time holding newborn babies close and cuddling them, stroking them, talking to them, looking into their eyes, poking them with their fingers, smiling at them, and trying to invoke smiles and laughter. But by the time children are adolescents, particularly boys, there is a remarkable decline in the frequency of touching, hugging, patting, or poking. There is very little shooting the breeze, chitchat, and casual talk, and in many homes, almost no laughter. The incidence of smiling has even taken a nose-dive.

We know how much influence a parent has over a child's behavior is directly related to the proximity of the parent to the child. In other words, the closer parents are to their children the greater the influence they can have on them, This, of course, is particularly true with young children who are still at home, but it is true, as well, with children who are raised and out of the home.

Here are a few suggestions for how to remain close to our children:

1. Remain verbally close to your children.
Spend time talking to your children. Model good verbal behavior. Teach your children through example and involvement how to express themselves, how to listen, and how to engage in conversation one with another.

2. Build a positive relationship.
Unless what you are about to say or do has a high probability of making things better, don't say it and don't do it -- just talk, don't judge, don't sermonize, don't moralize, don't instruct, don't reason, don't advise - just talk. This doesn't mean there will never be times when you will advise or instruct, but make those separate occasions when that is what the occasion is for.

3. Increase appropriate physical interactions.
In addition to hugging, appropriate touching, tapping, rubbing, patting, scratching, and jabbing are wonderful ways of communicating with our children. Arm wrestling, playfully scrapping on the playing field, a good back and shoulder rub at the end of the day-this is the glue that binds.

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