Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach all over the world about parenting,
good communication and how to build strong family bonds through the lens of the principles self
government. And in this video, we're going to be talking about subjective versus objective parenting.
In this video, we're going to talk about subjective versus objective parenting
and how parents do it, what subjective and objective parenting due to children,
and how parents can improve their parenting. So what is subjective? Subjective is when a person
bases their thoughts or opinions or their actions, upon feelings, or bias or other people's opinions,
they're heavily influenced by the opinions of others. So think follow the crowd, okay? Follow
the crowd. One person gets emotional, that means another person is going to feel the same emotion,
carry that emotion on or maybe even counter that emotion. That's what a subjective parent would
do. So what about our objective? Objective is when a person is not easily influenced by what other
people are doing, or saying or feeling or emoting. A person who is objective is a person who's going
to look at all of the facts, they're going to stay in the front part of their brain and they are
going to choose to consider carefully what they've seen, and what they know needs to happen. And then
they are going to point the people in the right direction. So they're going to focus on finding
facts and truth, as opposed to following emotion. So an objective parent has a plan, they consider
carefully, they maintain calmness, and they are able to point their children confidently in a
good direction. So what happens when a parent is subjective to a child? When a parent parents
subjectively, what that means is the parent is going to be probably emotional. Maybe they're
emotionally worn out. Maybe they're emotionally aggressive, maybe they're just, you know, feeling
like they're being attacked emotionally, there's a lot of different places that parent can be coming
from. But they are going to take that emotion that they are feeling coming from the child,
or maybe from other people around them, maybe it's overwhelming, even they might feel stressed,
or overwhelmed and they're going to take whatever they're feeling in the minute, and they're going
to load it onto the child or remove themselves from the equation entirely. So some parents who
are subjective are very aggressive parents, they might be militant, or authoritarian type parents.
But then some people who are subjective parents might be very passive, and be pushing back and
saying, I don't know, I don't know if I can deal with this. I think, you know, hopefully, it will
go away, or hopefully somebody else will take care of the problem. Some of those modern progressive
or very passive tendencies that some parents have, are also based off being very subjective. Now,
oftentimes, parents think it's fine to base their parenting on whatever they're feeling or doing in
the minute because they also think that it's okay for their children to behave the same way. But
what happens to the child? I mean, the parent feels like is world war three all the time,
or they need to retreat all the time. They feel entitled, what happens to the child? Well,
the child ends up feeling entitled too. The child ends up thinking that everything is happening
to them all the time. So they either become combative, or they become a victim, right. So
then we get the whiningness, the passiveness or we get the child who's in your face? No, you can't
tell me this and they're starting to question your authority and push against your parental
authority, which then brings your family into a state of dysfunction. I have three books. Well,
I have actually written 11 books, but these are three of the 11 books that can actually help with
this problem. So this book, Popular Parenting Methods, talks about how the different parenting
styles are affecting the children. Okay, so we're in there's three different parenting styles. Some
people are a combination between these styles. But you get to see all we're having that problem
with our children. Oh, here is probably why and it does help husband and wife get on the
same page as well and then this book here Roles, talks about how to keep your family
relationships in a functional state, how to keep everybody maintaining their proper family role,
and I'm not talking about responsibilities here. Because anybody can go to work or do the dishes,
I'm talking about who you really are to each other in the family and who your children are
too. This is a great story that helps teach that. So this is going to help improve the function in
your home. If people know their roles and live them, then they maintain more functionality as
well and then this book here, Parenting A House United helps parents and children have the same
language for problem solving, that helps keep them in the prefrontal cortex. So all of the things,
you understanding what your options are with the parenting, the different parenting styles,
and is it subjective, or objective that's going to be in this book that's going to help you. Roles who
you are in the family, and how to strengthen those relationships. This is going to help you stop
being emotional, hopefully. And then this book, Parenting A House United, which is going to give
you all of the skills and principles that you need, in order to solve the problems in
a calm and effective manner, that is going to be life changing, it gets the whole family on
the same page with all of their behaviors and everything and you can find these books at
teachingselfgovernment.com. So go to teaching selfgovernment.com and pick these up. Okay,
so now let's go ahead and talk about more things that you can do to be hopefully the better version
of a parent that you want to be. So in contrast to the subjective parent, the objective parent stays
in their prefrontal cortex. They have a plan, they say, Okay, I need to stay in this place. So I can
solve problems. So I can think things through. If I go to my amygdala and the middle of the brain,
sure, I'm going to care about all these other people. But I'm going to care so much that I'm
going to get drained all the time. So I've got to stay front brain, even though I can also be
carrying at the same time, as I am front brain, I just don't have to be stuck in the middle. When I
midbrain, I don't have as much capacity to think front brain. So this is an important thing that
we need to recognize about our brain function, the objective parent is going to be describing
what's happening instead of reacting to what's happening and it looks very different. So when
you are correcting a problem as a subjective parent, then you might say something like,
Oh, not again, what were you thinking? But if you are correcting a problem as an
objective parent, and you are in your front brain, instead of your mid emotional center,
your front brain, prefrontal cortex, cognitive brain function going on here in front brain,
then what you are going to do when you need to correct a problem is you're going to say,
what just happened there? Am I calm? Am I ready to handle the situation? You're going to be saying
these things inside your head? And then you're gonna say yes. Now what is it that I am going to
say? You plan your words out, because you already know them, you've got skills to handle it, and
they're all in that Parenting A House United book. So then you say, Okay, step number one is describe
the situation. So I'm going to say, just now I gave you an instruction and remember, you know,
the five steps to following an instruction, you're supposed to look at the person, keep a calm face,
voice and body, say okay, or asked to disagree appropriately, do the task immediately,
and then check back. But what you didn't do is you didn't keep a calm face, voice and body.
Since you chose not to keep a calm face, voice and body, then you have chosen to earn an extra chore,
okay. And then the child accepts that then you move into a training phase, which is the
second half of a correction. You can learn all of those things in that book, Parenting A House,
United. A person who is objective knows what to say, they start describing what happened,
what should have happened, what you've earned, where we go from here. That's what an objective
parent does. They learn the skills that they need for success, so that they don't end up
stuck saying those emotional things again, and again. Objective parents also want to take time to
get the whole family on the same page. This means that they're going to take some time to have some
deliberate conversations individually with their children individually with their spouse, and as
an entire family group. I call these meetings. So we have family meeting, couples meeting and
individual mentor meeting every single week in our family. These journals that I've created help you
have a place to record all of your meeting notes. So as you solve problems as a family, talk about
your scheduling as a family, get people taking ownership of their own day, time and education,
and their relationships s a family, you record everything in these places. When we deliberately
take time to have the meetings, we have certain rules for how we govern the meetings to make sure
they go well. I don't have time to go into all those right now. But as we do that, and as we
record the meetings and make them official, then we take more responsibility for our relationships,
we also are better planned for the future. This keeps us in the front brain, which then makes us
more objective. These meetings are a great time to go over the facts, to assess what is happening
and what should be happening. We talk about goals and we point the family in the right direction.
That's a very objective parenting thing to do. If you've enjoyed this video, I'm pretty sure you'll
enjoy my next video which is actually a full class dedicated to helping you overcome some
of those traps in your communications and your relationships that you might not recognize you're
falling into. The video is called the expectation trap versus the cycle for success. Click on the
link to that video now. I'll see you there.