So what are factors that enhance positive parenting and family relationships? I'm
Nicholeen Peck and I teach parenting and family communication all over the world and in this video
I'm going to be talking about positive parenting and improving your relationships with your family.
In this video I'm going to be talking about positive parenting, that's a new term, relatively
new at least in the parenting world, what that means and how to best do it. Also what a lot of
people don't understand about the communication that they have in their family relationships and
then I'm going to share five key factors that you can implement in your home to have better
relationships. Parents who use positive parenting have bought into the idea that they don't want to
use harsh punishments or getting angry at their children in order to create a behavioral change.
Instead a parent who wants to do positive parenting is focusing on the heart of the
child and they want to create a deep bond with the child, they also want to have more positive
interactions with the child that hopefully will propel the child toward doing more positive
behavior. Positive parenting suggests to the parent that if they are more positive that this will
ultimately increase the good outcomes, good behavioral outcomes in their children and if
they are negative that this will increase negative behavioral outcomes in the children and this
is true for the most part. So, let's talk about what this looks like in a family who's trying
to have great, positive parenting interactions. One thing that people don't understand about positive
parenting when they learn about it and maybe it's because it's not always presented the same
to everybody. Some people think that when you're into positive parenting that you never correct
problem behaviors, that instead you just praise good behaviors or you just tell someone how great
they did, what effort they put forth and that's it. But truly parenting the positive parenting way
would suggest to me that a person would need to be able to correct their children in a positive
way as well as praising their children in positive ways too. A parent is a teacher, that is their role
and if they are going to live according to that role then that means they need to do all kinds
of teaching. This means they prepare the child for something upcoming but they also evaluate with the
child after something happens. This means that the parent will have to do corrections sometimes. So is
there a way then to make corrections positive, to feel close to your child even though they're being
corrected? The answer is yes. In fact I've been teaching just those sorts of parenting skills
for well over 20 years now and have had great success with troubled youth facilities,
troubled teens as well as with thousands and thousands of homes all over the world. The BBC
even made a documentary of our family taking in two troubled teens on a program called The
World's Strictest Parents and they saw how at the end of The World's Strictest Parents, those
two teens were crying, begging not to leave our home even though we corrected them and had firm
rules and principles that we followed in our family. Can a family be firm and positive at the
same time? The answer is yes. So one of those things that we don't want to confuse is firmness with
being positive. Those are not opposites of each other even though many parents who try to be firm
do end up getting into a bully or militant tactic, that is not what I'm promoting at all. In fact good,
assertive parenting is the type of parenting that creates a plan for how they will do the
teaching and correcting and make sure that it has a good optimistic tone. In fact a closeness that is
carried throughout all interactions. You should feel closer to your children during and after
correction than you even did before. I've got five factors for creating good connective interactions
that I would like to share with you that really are going to improve your relationships but first,
click that subscribe button now. There are so many videos on this channel that are related to
creating good, positive parenting interactions you are not going to want to miss them.
Here are five key factors for enhancing positive parenting and family relationships because if your
parenting is going well, it should improve your family relationships. in fact you should see mutual
respect, you should see an increase in obedience, you should see family working well together
sacrificing for each other. These will all be indicators that you have good family relationships
otherwise maybe your positive parenting is not quite working. I have seen many people try positive
parenting and their positive parenting just looks like leniency. It just looks like permissive
parenting. Positive parenting the way I teach it is not permissive parenting. So what does it look
like? Let's talk about these five factors. Factor number one, have a plan, a truly deliberate parent
who is practicing positive parenting which I call self-government parenting has a plan of where
they're headed as a family. They have a vision in mind of what type of family they are becoming
and how they are going to get there. So they think to themselves on a regular basis, how are we doing
at becoming that family that we want to be and it isn't the parent that just has the picture. No, no.
They have talked about the family vision with the whole group. Everyone has bought into who they are
becoming as a family and they have decided upon skills and times of communication like different
family meetings and things to keep the family on track and solving problems in a very effective
manner together. So, a family who is practicing good, positive parenting has a plan. Number two, roles.
You already heard me mention that word, roles. Well it's more powerful than you might think.
In fact years ago I wrote my number one best-selling book "Parenting A house United"
and when I wrote that, I assumed that everybody understood parent roles and child roles so that
parental authority would always be maintained in the home as a protection for the children
against possible dysfunction that they could learn elsewhere. Well I was wrong. In fact after
I wrote that book many people were asking me questions that I knew related to roles and
so I wrote another book. The book is called "Roles: The Secret to Family Business and Social Success."
In that Roles book we see parents and children who are all behaving selfishly. They want
things done their way and they are hoping that everyone else will bend to make sure they happen.
The mother is super kind and she's trying to help her children to become the best versions
of themselves, she's trying to alleviate any conflict and make everybody happy but in the
end, all of her nicey-nicey behavior has just led toward very selfish and entitled children. In fact
when many people talk about positive parenting, I think they talk about this very type of parent
that this mother was. Well we see the mother learn principles and skills for self-government.
We see her recognize what her role should be as a mother in that family and then she helps
the children understand their roles in the family too. Not in a way where it's condescending or where
one person is the all-powerful and everybody else is an underling but where everyone knows the best
ways to work together to honor the roles so that they have a proper family government structure
in the home. When she does this, everything changes in the family. In fact dad also has to do it. He's a
little bit more of that more aggressive parent, maybe authoritarian type parent and he has to
learn his role too. So when both parents learn their roles, the children learn their roles too
then they're able to function together as a fully functioning family. It's only when
people don't live according to their roles that we find dysfunction in the homes. So if you're seeing
dysfunction in a family or maybe even in your own family, then you need to ask yourself the question
what do we not understand about our roles? Get that question answered and you are on the track
to improving the functionality at your house. Number three, learn the skills that you need for
success. There are multiple skills that I recommend learning but especially the four basic skills.
These children's books each teach one of the four basic skills for children and just so you know,
my parenting book tells all of these four basic skills too so if your children are older, no
worries. These books are intended for children probably 12 and under. They teach the skills
following instructions, accepting "no" answers and criticism, accepting consequences and everybody's
favorite, disagreeing appropriately. When a child learns these four basic skills, that takes care of
99% of their behavioral problems and guess what? Those skills are not just for the children but
they are for parents too. Everybody needs to learn how to look at a person, keep a calm face, voice and
body, say okay or ask to disagree appropriately and drop the subject which are the steps for
accepting a "no" answer. Each one of those four basic skills has steps associated with it and when you
learn how to do all of those things, it truly changes your interactions with other people and
the condition of your own heart and isn't that what it's all about, the heart. When your family
learns the skills that they need to communicate with each other, they learn these four basic skills
as well as the skills that you're going to use to correct the problems when they have a problem,
then everybody is completely prepared to problem solve together as a group.
It's super powerful for the family. So number three is skills. Number four is eye contact. The
first step of all four of those four basic skills is to look at the person. The eyes are the windows
to the soul. When you look at a person and you think I love you when you're speaking to them,
that actually connects you to the person. It lets them know that that correction or bit of teaching
that you have to do right there actually helps them. They should feel like you're helping them
when you're teaching and correcting. It shouldn't feel like a negative thing. If it's truly positive
parenting, it should feel like a positive thing, you should feel closer to your children. Remember, every
time that you correct them either during or after the correction, you should feel closer. So what this
means is you need to focus on being close to them during that time. This brings us to number five.
If you want to enhance your relationship with your child, if you want to improve the family bonds then
your corrections need to be positive, that doesn't mean they're like singing and dancing and stuff
but they need to not feel condescending, it needs to not feel like somebody has been
bad. Any child can make a decision that was a wrong decision, they can make a mistake, they can even
choose to do something wrong but that doesn't mean that you need to be emotionally attached to that.
We need to be calm instead. Everyone should know the skill for how to be calm when someone else
isn't. They should have a calmness plan in place so that they're prepared if they feel themselves
starting to lose control, that's one of the best things that you can show your children as a parent
is that you can be calm when you start feeling things unraveling within your own mind and heart
as well. They need to know how to stay calm, they need to have seen someone do it and how
to communicate in a calm and effective way. The words that you say, the way that you say them
all communicate your calmness. Since you have stayed till the end of this video, I have a
special gift for you and it is my calm parenting toolkit. The calm parenting toolkit has 10 lessons
where you learn 10 tools for how to be calm when someone else isn't, how to help them get calm
without losing your calmness at the same time, how to make the difficult moments of parenting
the most unifying and positive. Everyone should feel like they were glad when they finally came
from a place of not calm to calm. They shouldn't have felt like it was a battle, it shouldn't wear
everyone out, instead it should feel like freedom and if you don't have the skills that help it feel
that way, if you don't have the words to say and you're just defaulting to permissive parenting,
you'll end up disappointed in the results. I know I've seen all over the world now so many years,
so many parents trying to be nice, trying to be the friends of their children and in the end the roles
get thrown off, things don't get corrected and everybody ends up disappointed in the upbringing.
If we're truly going to have positive parenting then we need to still do the teaching, correcting,
give the skills but we need to do it in a way where we're not taking someone's negative behavior
personally but where we're actually giving them the skills and the tools that they need
for success. In the description below this video, there is a link to the calm parenting toolkit.
The link says teachselfgov.com/ toolkit. Click on the link to that video now
and you can have the calm parenting toolkit for free. Click on the link now. I'll see you there.