I'm Nicoleen Peck and I teach parenting and family communication all over the world through
the lens of self government. And in this video, we're going to be talking about a new truth
based parenting technique that you are not going to want to miss.
In this video, we're going to be talking about what this new truth based parenting technique
is, and how you can go about using this technique in your family to improve your relationships,
and increase calmness and love at your house. There is a lot of talk about positive parenting
and free range parenting and helicopter parenting and a lot of different descriptive words for
different kinds of parenting. But as I look at all the different kinds of parenting out
there, I pull little pieces of truth out of them. So there are pieces of truth in there.
But really what I'm looking for is truth-based parenting. Because if you have truth-based
parenting, then that means you are not manipulating your children. And really, when we say we
don't want the anger, we don't want the fights. We don't want all the attitude problems and
temper tantrums. We're saying that we want the truth to prevail in our homes. And when
we have truth as the base of our parenting interactions, that actually brings the people
together, it bonds us closer together, because then we have integrity in our relationships.
When we're just relying on our emotions and power struggling to get through the problems
in our family, it actually breaks our bonds in the family, we start thinking we're all
alone, we're isolated, we can't necessarily trust the other person to know everything
about us. And then that decreases our support. This is not what we want. We want the hearts
knit together, the hearts of the children turned toward their parents, and the hearts
of the parents turn toward the children. So how do you have an environment where that
happens? And is it even possible? The answer is yes. The type of environment that I created
when I brought in troubled teens into my home to do treatment foster care years ago, was
an environment that I called a family government based on the principle of self-government,
I took in troubled teens and helped them to treatment for them. But I also had four children
of my own. And after taking in these troubled teens for a short period of time, I realized
that the principles that I was using to help do treatment for these children to fix the
problems in their lives, were principles that would help my children forever to and I was
going to have a self governing family. Now I'll tell you what, my children actually especially
the younger ones took to self government really quickly, because their brains were so supple,
and easy to mold and latch on to these skills. The person who had the hardest time with the
self government or truth-based parenting was actually me, I realized I've been buying into
all kinds of lies in my own head about what they were really doing and why and how it
was taking all of my time. And you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, selfish, selfish,
lie, lie, me forgetting who I was supposed to be in their lives. To begin with, I actually
ended up writing a book about this truth based parenting called Parenting A House United.
And it's all about teaching children to have a change of heart through the principle of
self-government. But the catch is, it's not just about the children, the parents need
to have a change of heart too. They need to learn self government to and one of the things
they need to focus on is their role. So I ended up writing another book called Roles:
The secrets of Family, Business and Social Success. Because I realized after the first
book, that people were struggling with their roles, which was why they were creating so
much frustration for themselves. So many lies in their own head about who they were supposed
to be in this family, we should have happiness in our home, the families should feel our
buckets not drain us, which means that we've got to have the environment that actually
sustains that. So what does that look like? Before I get to my definition of self government,
and some of the helpful skills you're gonna want to use in your family, click that subscribe
button. There's so much great content on this channel related to self government and teaching
our children the skills they need for success, you're not gonna want to miss any of the new
videos that come out, which is why you might want to also click that notification bell.
Self-government is being able to determine the cause and effect of any given situation
and possessing a knowledge of your own behaviors so that you can control them. So what that
means is that you're able to analyze yourself and recognize if you're going in the direction
you want to go or not, and if not how to make a course correction. It's based upon having
a certain type of tone in your home, as well as a certain structure. The structure involves
skills and open communication styles so we can check up on how the family is doing at
their self-government and how the relationships are doing at uniting the family together.
So the tone elements involve things like calmness, acceptance, love, mercy, forgiveness, being
anti-fragile, having courage. There are many different principles that are part of that
tone that we want to create for our families. So how does a person go about creating this
environment? Well, the very first thing I do is help the children understand who we
are as a family and where we are headed. We created a family vision, it was a picture
for 20 years in the future of a Christmas Eve, this Christmas Eve that we practice every
single year. And in this Christmas Eve picture, we have certain conversations that we have,
and a certain type of bond that exists within our family. It's a truly beautiful time, something
that we can hold on to so that we remember what type of bond we need to have on a daily
basis. Truth-based parenting means that we decide where we're going. But we also acknowledge
the truth that nobody's going to be perfect just because we made that decision of where
we were headed as a family. That vision is just something to keep us focused on moving
forward. But it is powerful. So make sure that you actually spend your time making that
vision at first. After that, we focus on key principles. So what are principles? Principles
are based upon truths. They are concrete, they're not changing, and they're very broad.
They can be applied to any circumstance that a person might find themselves in. These principles
are how to follow instructions, how to accept "no" answers and criticism, accept consequences
and disagree appropriately. For instance, when a "no" answer comes, because it's going
to happen, at some point in everybody's life, that they don't get what they want, they can
do these four things, because each one of those skills actually has steps associated
with it. And these steps are also based in principle. The steps are to look at the person
or the situation. So to acknowledge that somebody is telling you something or that something
has happened, then you keep a calm face, voice and body about it. Because you can actually
choose that. People don't think they can sometimes, but they can. I know I'm living proof of changing
myself so that I could choose to be calm and happy no matter what, then you say, Okay,
you're asked to disagree appropriately, which means that you acknowledge this happened.
Is there anything I can do about it? Somebody I can talk about it with? And if so how am
I going to do that appropriately? Then the fourth step is to drop the subject. Is it
healthy when something happens and you don't like to hold on to that forever? No, that's
not healthy. In fact, there's a point where you say, Well, if I can't change it, then
I just need to drop the subject and move on, and work on the things that I can change.
Right. Dropping the subject is another principle, and it's something that people absolutely
can do, if they train themselves to and if they want to experience the freedom that comes
from letting go of something that they keep processing again, and again, in their minds.
Truth based parenting also means acknowledging a feeling that a person has, because we all
get feelings, and then analyzing what are the thoughts that we have associated with
this feeling that are leading to emotions? What are emotions to, right, so when a person
practices truth based parenting, they're actually focusing on picking the right thoughts, so
that we can have the most productive emotions that we build on, after we have a certain
feeling because there are definitely not productive emotions, right? Those are things that actually
disconnect us from each other. When we work on creating productive emotions, then we end
up bonded together, which is much more powerful. So when a person has that ability to examine
themselves in their own minds and hearts, that means that they have good self regulation.
Many people call this emotional intelligence. A lot of times when I talk to people about
the consistent teaching that I promote with the teaching self government parenting course,
and the skills that are associated with that course that we use to help children learn
to solve their problems, many people think, oh, that seems like maybe a person wouldn't
be allowed to have feelings or emotions. Of course they are. The whole idea of self government
or truth based parenting is for a person to be able to analyze those things, and make
sure that they make the best decisions based upon what their analysis is. But this has
to be trained. Children don't immediately know what they can do with that feeling once
it comes in, we have to help them with their options. Some of the ways that we do this
is by pre teaching our children about what they could experience in the future so that
they're prepared for how to handle it when a new experience comes. Pre teaching is powerful,
it's proactive, and it helps a child not have to fall into reactive tendencies that might
make them feel like they're in emotional bondage, or that they're alone or not understand. So
being proactive is also part of truth based parenting. In our family, we have created
a certain culture. In fact, every family has a culture. The word culture comes from the
Latin word cultus, which means to nourish, to strengthen, to correct part of our culture
is to do corrections. So our children need to know that if we truly are following the
truth in our parenting, we will praise what goes well and we will correct what needs improvement.
This is teaching cause and effect, which is one of the tenants of being a person who is
self governing. If you are living the principle of self government as a parent, that means
you're also going to self correct you, you're going to make plans to be proactively calm,
to use skills of correcting that will make it so that you know you have integrity and
truth within your teaching. But if you do not have self government in your teaching,
and you're not using truth based parenting, then you'll probably just get tossed to and
fro, be constantly worn out and overwhelmed by the next power struggle that you just had
to go through. If you would like more help with your parenting, I would like to give
you a special gift. I have something called a calm parenting toolkit. It's a mini course,
it's a starter course for learning self government.
It definitely doesn't teach everything, but it's going to take you to the next level of
education. And I want to give it to you for free because you stayed all the way to the
end of this video. So if you click on the link in the description below this video that
says teach self gov.com/toolkit. Click the link now and I will see you on that calm parenting
toolkit. We'll go a little bit further into self government.