Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach all over the world about parenting, good communication
and developing good strong family relationships and in this video
I'm going to be talking about parenting in the modern world.
In this video I'm going to be talking about the different types of parenting that we see around
us today and some of the pitfalls that we might experience as we go through our parenting journey.
I'm also going to be sharing with you some key things that you can do so that you don't fall
into these traps too. There are different styles of parenting. In fact there have always been different
styles of parenting. No two parents are exactly the same although one type of parent does often lead
to another type of parent. So if you have a really bully fear-based type of a parent for instance,
oftentimes that will lead to a more modern, progressive, permissive type of a parent.
Someone who wants to be a child's friend instead of to actually be their parent. Then there's this
other type of parent. This type of parent seems to be focused on principles. They want to present
truths to their child, not manipulate their child because see the bully fear-based type of a parent,
they actually are totally fine manipulating their child as long as the behavior gets better and goes
away or the child does whatever it is that they want them to do or doesn't do, whatever it is.
That parent just wants to be in control and have that child obey and that's it. The permissive or
modern progressive type of a parent, they're really focusing on the relationship which is great, they
want to have a relationship. The problem is the roles get all out of whack. So the parent starts
behaving more like a friend and the child starts behaving more like an adult and then soon we've
lost parental authority somewhere in there and there isn't the type of teaching and training that
happens and the child ends up feeling abandoned and alone. I just had a conversation with a young
man just yesterday and as I was talking with this young man who was 19 years old, he talked about his
parents and he said they let me do whatever I want. I was a mess. My life was a mess, drugs and drinking
and partying and all this stuff. He said they'd never stopped me. He's like when I see your family,
when I see The World's Strictest Parents episode that you were on from back in 2009, he's like I
wish my parents would have had rules like that and values like that so that I wouldn't have done all
the things that I did. He's like now I'm having to figure it out all on my own because why? Because he
didn't get any training because the parents were like ah go do whatever you want. Totally permissive.
He felt lost and like they didn't care. In fact to this day he's still trying to see if they care.
It's heartbreaking to me but that is the most common type of parenting that we see in our
world today. People are worried about the feelings that they see right in the minute and they have
lost the long view. The traditional strict type of parenting which is the only effective type of
parenting for creating good character, good bonds and unity and family as well as helping a person
learn self-mastery and self-control as they navigate life is based upon commitment, good
connection, clear boundaries, values and morals that everybody understands and a direction that
the family is headed that is predetermined so that they know when they have arrived at becoming the
type of family that they're trying to become. A traditional strict parent has a plan. They
have a long view. They don't just focus on what somebody's feeling in the minute like themselves
or the child. People are hyper focused on feelings right now and it's actually hurting things.
Let's talk about that. We're going to talk about the feelings and the other pitfalls
that we can be trapped by in our parenting but before we do, click that subscribe button now.
There are so many great videos that come out on this channel every day that will help you dodge
those pitfalls and be able to have strong bonds with your family. Click subscribe now. So let's talk
about feelings. Everybody's doing it, everybody's having feelings and talking about feelings all
the time. When I talk to modern parents, they are more concerned about feelings than anything else
and I think it's great that people are concerned about each other's feelings. People are wanting
their children to have emotional intelligence. They're trying to have emotional intelligence too.
The problem is nobody really understands emotional intelligence. The stuff that's being taught at the
school is totally missing the mark. I know, I've looked through the curriculum and it leads to
emotional entitlement and victimization which is horrible and even puts ideas in people's heads
about emotions that they should have in certain circumstances which is not true for every person.
Emotional intelligence really is formed when a person understands a feeling, how
it communicates with their thoughts and then what emotions they choose after those thoughts.
They get to pick the thoughts and the emotions and actions. They may not be able to pick the feeling.
So understanding a feeling is a good angle to take but only if we know what to do with it afterward
and many people are so hyper focused on feelings and they hook emotions and feelings together
as if they're the same thing. The people think all feelings since they're part of being human are
just fine to cater to. So, all emotions are good and sometimes even true. So if a person's angry
and mean to somebody else, they feel like they need to get it out but then at the same time if the
other person feels like a victim and they've been mistreated then they need to be protected. Well how
in the world do you protect both of those people's feelings at the same time? One person has to have
crossed over a boundary line or done something that they shouldn't have done and we have to
be able to do teaching. If we focus too much on feelings, we stop our ability to teach. So feelings
are important, very important. It's important that we understand there are productive feelings and
non-productive feelings. I have multiple videos on this channel about feelings. Please go and see some
of those if you want more information about that particular thing because I go into great detail
there but we need to understand how to stay in the zone of the productive feelings and the productive
emotions and not the non-productive ones, which disconnect us from each other. So productive
emotions connect people, non-productive emotions disconnect people. So, we need to remember that. Okay
and if you see people getting disconnected, if you see one person becoming a victim and another
person an oppressor then you know it's a non-productive emotion and the feeling is being
interpreted in a way that is hurting everyone. Another key thing that people are falling into
is this understanding that relationships have to be two-sided. They don't, that's a total pitfall.
Your child could say they hate you, they could be attacking you and you could think I love you. I'm
sorry you're struggling. I'm going to keep helping you because I honor you as a person and your role
as a child that you're learning. You could be thinking all of those truths inside your head
while somebody else is telling themselves lies about you. Relationships actually only run one way.
The way I think about you is my relationship to you, the way you are thinking about me right
now because I'm the one doing the talking is your relationship to me. You might have judged me about
something already you might not like my haircut or something but that's on you because that's your
relationship to me. We need to recognize in our parenting that we are responsible all the time
for our relationship to our child. If we don't feel loved toward them, if we're not communicating
calmly toward them, that is on us. We've got to work on that we need the skills to overcome
the selfishness that might be getting in the way. Ooh, that's another thing. So, modern parents
especially the ones that are more leaning toward becoming their child's friend instead of their
child's parent which the child needs a parent really bad. Not a dictator but but a parent.
The parents who are leaning toward friendship with their children a lot, that are undermining
those roles, they actually often times are doing it because they feel worn out, they feel tired,
they don't know how to handle a lot of their own things that are going on on the inside. Maybe they
were coddled, they were babied too much, they were spoiled as children. They don't have the skill
development that they need to handle the problems, they don't know what to teach the children next.
People don't know what they don't know and then they get overwhelmed. There's a lot of
mental health things that are going on for people and that can make it hard too. This is
a huge. I had another experience yesterday as well where I was taking a personal mentor call with
someone. So, I do personal mentoring with people especially people that have been through my course
and maybe need a little bit more help than the course has for them, they will arrange personal
calls with me. Well this one mother, she's a young mother, young children and she was tired. I mean
that can happen. She's tired, the children are waking up all the time and they've had sickness
and all kinds of things and I talked with her about some of the things that her generation of
parent was facing and a lot of it has to do with entitlement because they haven't been given the
skills that they need to handle and because we're so hyper focused on feelings and she was like you
know that's right. She says I feel down a lot. In fact I don't know how to handle my problems a lot
and I think that it's almost like this dialogue that's going on in my head that has come
from the generation that I was brought up in. Like yeah, that happens. Our generations do make
a difference on how we process the world and the dialogue we choose to have inside our head.
She said to me that when her children were doing things like just waking up in the night because
they woke up in the night and their toddlers that she was saying why is this happening to me and
actually choosing to feel like a victim. So, she was taking on victim thoughts on a regular basis.
This is super common with modern parents. They see being a parent as a victim and it does not help
that people all over social media are telling their woes about parenting and talking
like victims also. They're promoting the idea that being a parent is a victim and so how could people
choose to think something good about it? They would be going completely against the social grain,
that leaves everybody trapped. It's horrible. Modern parents are having struggles getting
their children to launch, they're having struggles getting their children to carry a weight or a load
around the house, take personal responsibility. Children are blaming their parents for a lot of
things and I think this is also because modern parents are blaming the children for all kinds
of things and they're blaming their upbringing and they're blaming everybody else. The parents
are oftentimes not wanting to take personal responsibility so it shouldn't surprise us
that the children don't necessarily want to take personal responsibility either. This is a big
characteristic of modern parenting and this one's a little newer because in previous generations,
the parents have always taken the responsibility on as the parent. Whether they've been the bully
or whether they've ruined their child, they usually would take that and say oh no. I did that now they
say oh it's somebody else's fault and part of that happens because the parents of this
generation of parents were really focused on their children being perceived as perfect and everything
running, just smoothly and perfectly for the children and so the children could do no wrong
so every time something did happen that was wrong, the parent made an excuse for the child and for
everybody else who saw the problem. So, the child does not know how to just take responsibility. They
don't know how to accept consequences from their own life and that is one of the four basic skills
for self-government success, that's accepting your own consequences because a person cannot learn
self-government or self-mastery unless they learn cause and effect and you can't learn cause and
effect if you don't accept consequences. Obviously I cannot give an exhaustive list of everything
modern parents are facing there's so many but some other key things that modern parents really feel
like they're falling into and they find out too late and that is technology sex culture
and well-defined values, that's huge. So, technology everyone's like well it's part of our world. We
need it, we need to be able to use it and the parents let the child get into it really young.
They even hand the phone to the child when they're little to calm them down when they're having a
tantrum at the store or something and then they're like oh no my child's an addict. What do I do, how
do I get them off of this and they don't watch for the signs that the child is going too deeply
into that device or those screens until it's too late and now they've got addiction so they've got
to overcome or help the child overcome and at this point, the child is resistant because they
have addictions. So, this is a terrible thing for parents to be dealing with. Children need to learn
how to accept "no" answers on technology way earlier on than they're being taught right now and parents
need to learn that it's okay for children to wait for some of those stimulations that come
from technology. They need to have more government over themselves so that the devices don't control
them. If they can control themselves then hopefully the devices will not be able to. They'll be able to
think more clearly. Now sex culture is huge. It's in everything. People are even so worried about
sexual abuse that they're sexualizing children in a lot of the information that they're presenting.
I've been incredibly concerned as a previous foster parent who worked with many troubled teens
who had sexual abuse in their past. I've been concerned a lot of the curriculum I've been
seeing coming out of schools and different places and of course online and there's YouTube and
everything else, all the sex just pouring in at the children and it's not pointing them toward healthy
sexuality and marriage. It's pointing them towards self-pleasuring, self-gratification is pointing
them toward increased sexual addictions and not knowing who they are and parents are wondering how
come my child is like having this conflict when they never had a conflict before? Well because
everything is undermining their identity. You undermine sex and and what sex is in a society and
procreation and family dynamic, you undermine that, you undermine a person's identity every day of the
week because we all have to have a big picture of where we're headed in our adult life and that big
picture usually includes family life. It includes having a family of our own and so when we turn it
into well whether you wanted it or whether you didn't want it and you just decide whether you
want that stimulation or you don't and if you make a mistake then whatever you know and if we
turn it into that, then our children struggle. So many parents are not knowing what to do with that
because they're like well there's like freedom of expression and people can make their own
decisions and there's all these different kinds of people that we know and everybody has their
own thing but at the end of the day the child ends up in this sex culture going should I just
stay with focusing on my own pleasure? I think I will. I think it's safer sex isn't safe and
it's also supposed to be for everybody so I don't know what to do. There's so much confusion there
and it really is hurting our young people so that's a hard one that people are dealing with
and then what about values? So I will say modern families are shifting in values pretty drastically.
Some people raised with certain values or even religious principles or all of a sudden going nah,
I don't think I'll do that. Now that's always happened to some degree over the course of history
but it really is a big thing going on right now where a lot of parents are abandoning their core
values and principles and instead of taking those principles and truths that they were raised with
and maybe the raising wasn't super great which is why they're leaving them, I don't know
but they had them and they were historical and they were part of society forever and ever.
Now what they're doing is trying to invent new things based on their own preferences
and they're calling those things truths and they're calling them their new values and what's
happening is that the children now are the victim of that because they're having a hard time knowing
what's right and wrong, good and bad, true and false and it seems like everything's so very subjective
that again this undermines their attachment to family, this undermines their identity. You want
your children to stay close to you, they need to know what you stand for, they need to know your
values your principles and the truth and it better be based upon the truth. If not, they're going to
leave your side, they will drift away, that's what happens. So, we want to keep rock solid values for
our children that's super important. I've given a ton of advice but I wanted to share with you some
other skills for success. So, there are adult skills that parents just are not teaching their children
anymore. The four basic skills that I teach in my teaching self-government parenting course
are actually four of the most vital adult skills that a person could learn. Those four skills are
following instructions, accepting "no" answers and criticism, accepting consequences and disagreeing
appropriately. Also teaching children how to problem solve, how to converse well with other
people, how to be calm when they feel like they're going out of control, these are all skills that
people need for success and we need to be teaching them as parents. Since you have stayed to the end
of this video, I would like to share with you a free class that will go into more detail
about these skills and others that you can use to help your children and yourself not fall
into the pitfalls of modern parenting. So, the video that you should watch next is the not so
known secret for parenting success. Click on the link to that video now and I'll see you there.