Recipes

Recipe For Respectful Responsible Parenting

1. Decide to parent and discipline kids with the long term in mind. Yelling and nagging are sometimes effective in the sort tem, however carry an emotional price tag. If you focus most of your energy towards building a safe, open, respectful, and unconditionally loving relationship with your children then you’ve formed the strong, long-term bounds that can easily withstand any mischief or bumps in your journey later.

2. Teach children the intrinsic value in being of service to others by providing opportunities for them to serve. There is no better way to feel good about yourself than giving of yourself and your love to others.

3. Find ways for children to be valuable at home, at school, in their community and for the world.

4. Teach children to look inside themselves for their motivation, for the answers to their questions and for knowing their purpose and direction.

5. Decide that being close to your children is more important than always being right.

6. Teach children that mistakes are wonderful opportunities for learning. Don’t scold or punish a child for a mistake. Instead, say, "It looks like you made a mistake. What could you do to fix it."? Kids thus learn to take responsibility for repairing mistakes without taking on any shame or bad feelings about themselves. Seeing parents model this same attitude is best teacher yet!

7. When you are spending time with your child, give them 100% of your attention and love so that hey will feel important, cared for and loved.

8. Create opportunities so that children can experience the good feelings that come with doing things at their personal best and also with supporting teammates through cooperation to do their personal or team best vs. the old competition model.

9. Help children become aware of their self-talk. If it is negative or discouraging, teach them to redirect their own self-talk to positive and encouraging.

10. Never do things for children that they can do for themselves.

11. Keep all judgments and criticism out of the relationship with your children.

12. Most importantly, role model the life you would want for your child. Be easy on yourself when you make mistakes and take full responsibility for your life. Live life at your personal best. Keep your self-talk encouraging and be internally motivated. Live your life in alignment with your purpose while being of service to others.

p.s. Hug your children often, and especially the little child inside of you!

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