Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach all over the world about self government,
which is a principle of good communication that helps develop good, united families.
And in this video, I'm going to be talking about how to change bad parenting habits.
We all develop bad habits from time to time. In this video, I'm going to be talking about
how we develop bad parenting habits and what we can do to make a positive change. So what bad
parenting habit do you have? Now I want you to think. Be honest with yourself. In fact,
if you can't be honest with yourself about your own bad parenting habit, then that might be a
bad parenting habit that you have. In order to change a habit and to learn self government,
you do have to be honest with yourself, examining yourself, analyzing yourself deciding this is what
I see but I don't like it, I want to change it for this, that's actually what the process of self
government actually looks like. So when a person understands self government, they understand the
cause and effect of any given situation, and then possess a knowledge of their own behavior so that
they can control them and they aren't afraid of making changes and acknowledging that they might
be doing something in a way that is not that effective. So what do you do that is your bad
parenting habit? Do you yell do you hit? Do you think bad things about the children? Do you think
that things about yourself, do you beat yourself up because you know, that hurts your children,
right? If you start beating yourself up, that actually is damaging to the whole
family environment because you're hurting your role as parents on the inside, which makes you
less confident and less believable in the eyes of your children. In fact, we never want to be doing
anything that's emotionally manipulative, because if we do, that actually pulls everybody in the
family apart, instead of together. So if we want to create an environment where our family can be
united, we need to make sure that we are always taking responsibility over our own feelings,
thoughts and emotions, and examining what we can do to most improve those things and make sure that
we're clearly understood by the people around us. That's what a person does, who's trying to
form good relationships in a self governed way. So how do we form bad parenting habits, you know,
there are multiple different things that can come into play, sometimes we get really busy and so
we just stop doing certain things. Each one of us was parented in a certain way and whether we
like it or not, that was our grooming. Sometimes when we get stressed, we revert back to some of
those old connections in our brain. Maybe it's arguing or power struggling and we'll do that
with our spouses or our children, even though we never wanted to do that and it's just because
those connections are still there in the brain. Now, the only way to get rid of those connections
is to form another connection that is stronger, that can be our go to, maybe the connection of
calmness. Now, at the end of this video, I'm going to be giving you a free gift that will help you if
you want to create a habit of calmness, so stick with me to the end. So what we do is we fall into
these old traps and when we get into the old traps, it ends up sometimes creating even more
problems. So we didn't want to be there in the first place, now we're trying to dig ourselves
out, we start doing other things that creates even more bad habits. Oftentimes, these traps happen,
because we're selfish, we start thinking about ourselves and how we feel too much and we forget
about our stewardship over our children or the duty that we have to teach them and to serve them.
Sometimes we forget who we even are. I tell that to parents, sometimes I say, You know what, lots
of times we start dealing with our stuff in front of other people and we think so much about our
stuff, or emotional stuff, or our mental stuff, or the physical stuff of all the things that we have
to do that we end up forgetting who we even are to the other people around us. We forget our roles,
which are so very important to them. If we don't maintain our identity for ourselves, how are they
going to respect our identity and our roles? Well, they won't. They'll struggle. I actually have a
whole book that is all about roles. And it's a story, it's a fun one to read, and to learn from
because you get to learn to the story of this family. But you see how they're not respecting
each other's roles and they're all worried about their own stuff and basically every single person
in this family is living like they're on their own island. They don't come together in unity because
everything is about themselves. If we are going to help our children to handle their problems or
our spouses to handle their problems, if we are going to be a support person, then we have to not
forget who we are to them, what our role is to them and we've got to stop hyper focusing on our stuff,
or the things that bug us or concern us. I'm gonna give you some skills for how to change
your bad parenting habits. But first, click the subscribe button now. There are so many great
videos on this channel that are dedicated to helping you and your family learn the
skills and principles of self government so that you can have the systems and the
principles in place for mastering yourselves and being able to be more united. Click subscribe now.
So let's talk about how to change these bad habits that might be plaguing you in your parenting. Now,
number one, the most important thing that you've got to try to identify in order to change the
habits are the thoughts behind the habits. So there are certain thoughts that you have,
every time something happens. Maybe a child talks back to you, and you think, Oh, I can't believe
you would do that, or how disrespectful, that type of a thought is going to lead you down the wrong
behavior path, you will end up doing that habit of reacting that you don't want to do. So if you
don't want to react to the child, then you've got to make sure that your thought pattern is
not reactive. So you have to tell yourself, wait a minute, something just happened? What
thought do I choose to have? Oh, the child wants me to understand something about them,
but they're not going about it the right way? What skill can I teach them that they might need for
this? Now one of our self government skills that would be ideal in that type of circumstance is the
skill disagreeing appropriately. So I'm going to teach my child disagreeing appropriately and in
those moments, I will remind my child that that is the skill that they need to use. And I will
probably do it with the correction skill, it is important to learn how to do effective corrections
to your children or with your children so that your children can learn instead of just feel like
something happened to them. Your children's should feel closer to you during and after a correction
than they even did before. This is possible if you actually have a moment of time in the correction
where you're able to bond and where you're focusing on the learning and the growing
and the teaching, instead of just some emotional reaction to what happened. This doesn't mean that
a person can't no emotions exist, obviously they do but some emotions are productive,
and some are non productive. So if you keep displaying non productive emotions,
and you want to stop, well change the thought habit that's behind that and then give yourself
a system that you can use to replace what you've been doing before. So a big part of changing habit
is changing the thought behind the habit. You need to have a system, a thought system and an action
system in order to create a new habit and both of those systems help you hopefully live who you
ought to be. Remember, you need to live the person you're supposed to be for everybody else and not
just be dealing with your own junk all the time, to be that parent you're supposed to be, embrace it,
love it, say hey, this is what I was meant for. I remember that when I did treatment foster care
for troubled teens years ago, and they would go completely out of control, I would tell myself,
don't worry Nicholeen, this is what you were meant for. You can do this. You've done this many,
many times and then when the BBC came and brought to troubled teens to stay in our home for eight
days to film, the program, The World's Strictest Parents, they said, hey, these kids are really
bad. The you know, they're both school dropouts, they both have all these issues. They're the worst
we ever have had on the show and I said, No problem. There is no behavior that I haven't
seen before and I'm sure I'll be just fine. I have all the skills and principles to handle
it. And that's what I told myself and guess what, there was no problem. That's what happened. If you
start telling yourself I can't, I don't know, am I going to be able to do this, I can't,
then you will start stressing out and then you will behave in a way that is a habit of stress.
And you will misbehave with the other people around you, you won't be able to connect with them
or have the heart to heart connection required to help them have a change of heart as well. Develop
the skills and the thoughts that you need. So what are some key skills, learn the correction skill,
learn how to describe a situation and what happened in the situation, why it wasn't a
good idea, what they should have done instead. And then tell them what negative consequences they've
earned and then go into a teaching moment about practicing it the right way, instead of taking
offense or taking it personally and then getting emotional about what happened and making them have
to feel emotion through a really punitive, awful consequence. That's not what good teaching is.
Good teaching should end up bringing you closer to each other and it is possible even when the
child has difficult situations and other going completely out of instructional control. When
I did treatment, foster care, all of the youth that came to my home had different neurological
differences such as add ADHD, OCD, ODD, RAD, FAS, kleptomania, compulsive lying, anger control
issues, autism spectrum, those types of things. Things that many people would consider to be more
high level parenting a little bit harder but you know what? It didn't matter what acronym was
attached to their file. They were a person and then we're going to learn like a person learns,
it might take them longer because of some little acronym or some neurological difference that makes
their processing different from somebody else. But it didn't matter really for the teaching
because the principles and the skills were broadly applicable, anyone could use them,
they were simple enough. So make sure that you tell yourself you can do it and the you use the
skills deliberately. It doesn't matter if the person even has a longer learning curve because
sometimes people who are not neurotypical, it can take them longer to learn the skills and develop
new habits, but they can and you can develop new habits too even if you're older. I know that your
children will probably learn skills and principles of self government faster than you will because
your brains are older and your connections run deeper. But you can change, you can develop the
calmness and the skills that you need. I would like to share with you a skill set for calmness
that I really think could be life changing for you. In the description below this video,
there is a link to the calm parenting toolkit. The link says teachselfgov.com/toolkit. If you click
on that link now, you will get my 10 lesson, 10 self government toolkit for free. So click on the link
to that toolkit now and I'll see you there.