Home is a place where competences should be exchanged among family members. I'm Nicholeen
Peck and I teach all about parenting, good communication, and how to build strong family
bonds all through the lens of the principal self government. And in this video, we're talking about
how to get people to open up and that environment, what it looks like.
In this video, we're going to talk about why some people will not share confidences with each other in the home setting,
and what you can do to create an environment so that people will hopefully have that exchange
of ideas and stories and understanding with each other. Many people will isolate or put up walls,
they don't want to talk to people about what is going on. Why would they do that in their
family? So family is an environment where you are closer to those people than anybody else,
or at least you should be. They know things about you in the family that nobody else
will ever know. And hopefully they keep those things confidential, right? Not that we're all
doing such bad things. But hopefully, we keep some things about our families confidential,
just out of respect. Now, here's the thing, if we don't keep some things confidential, especially if
one of our family members is more of a private person, they might decide they can't trust
opening up to somebody else. If we just blab to everybody all the time, then the walls go up,
and the mouth closes down. So we've got to be very careful about that. Also, if we get emotionally
affected in negative ways, by things that our family members do, then the family members
might not want to tell what is actually going on in their lives as well. So for instance,
if someone does something that's like maybe a bad behavior, maybe they, you know, forget to flush
the toilet in the bathroom or something like that, and the parent gets frustrated about it, then
guess what the child is going to do next time. If they forget next time, and the parents starts to
get angry, the child will just lie. They'll say nope, and there goes the wall, it just goes up.
Lies are a wall. When people don't want to tell or tell the wrong thing. This means they're not
wanting to open up to other people. This is why home has got to be the safest place to
make mistakes. Years ago, I took in therapeutic treatment care foster children, they were all
between the ages of 12 and 18. And they had a lot of things going on. Many of them were non
neurotypical, there were also things like ADD, ADHD, OCD, ODD, RAD, there was substance abuse
in the, in the in utero right before they were even born. We used to call that FAS, they had
bipolar they were on the spectrum. There were lots of things that were happening, so many frustrating
behaviors, if I would have taken those frustrating behaviors personally, those children would not
have been successful in my home, they would have struggled to know if they could talk about any
of the issues that they really did want to fix about themselves. They would come to me and say,
Nicoline, I have such a problem with lying. I lie before I even think about it, I need help. Well,
that was an honest action right there. But what child usually comes to their parents and say,
I have a problem with lying. Well, they would only do that if their parents truly were safe people to
talk to. So I had to make sure that I always was a safe person to open up to and to talk to home had
to be the safest place to make mistakes. I told myself, no matter what that meant, I had to have
skills. I had to be prepared for any frustration, or any bad behavior that I might encounter or need
to correct. So we're going to talk about what to do in order to be that safe person, what skills
you might need to learn or adopt, so that you can make sure that your child will not feel personally
attacked if they do something wrong, because of your emotional response. But before we do that,
do you see that subscribe button, click it. It's fun to click buttons on the screen. Plus,
you get to see more videos if you click it. I'm known all over the world for teaching parenting,
specifically teaching self government to parents and so that they can teach the self government to
their children. This is is my main book, Parenting A House United. And it is a vital piece for learning
self government for yourself and your family. I also have courses, trainings, other ways that
you can learn self government, for your family. So how does that apply to correcting things and
becoming that safe place? Well, basically, it's my formula, the formula I developed during treatment,
foster care and raising my children, and the things that I learned from the facilities
that trained me as a foster parent as well. So I learned many skills in my youth during
foster care, trading and afterward, and I share them all with you one of those key skills that
is vital for any parent to make home the safest place to make mistakes, is the correction skill,
how you correct your children needs to be understood by them, and by you long before
you ever actually engage in a corrective teaching moment. So what in the world? Does that mean? How
can you be prepared for every single circumstance to correct they're all different circumstances,
right? It can't be the same every time, we have to be creative, right? Not right. In fact,
the more creative you are, the more their anxiety levels, increase, predictability,
decreases anxiety. That's one thing that helps your child know that home is going to be a safe
place to make mistakes, if their anxiety levels are low. What's one of the number one thing that
makes anxiety levels low is actually you telling them ahead of time, all the words that you will
use in a correction before you even use those words, and then sticking right to the process
and the words. So basically, having a script. Now, before I lose you on the idea of having a script,
I want you to know you already have one, you've created one for me or for yourself,
or you create one every time through emotion, but you already have scripts that you use,
you just have to ask yourself, are they effective? Do I feel closer to my children during an after
correction than I even did before? If the answer is no, then you might need a new script. And I
can help you with that by teaching you the scripts for how to correct your children in even the most
troubling circumstances. So what you want to do is pre teach all of those scripts ahead of time
so that your child knows what they are hearing. Even if they happen to get slightly emotional,
they will remember no, I need to go to that. That logical part of my brain. I know what mom's doing
here. I know what Dad's doing. I know it's not anything personal. They are just helping me learn
something. So that's a key thing. Knowing how to correct your children is vital and them knowing
how they will be corrected to this will make it so that they don't put up walls and withhold
information that instead openly talk about what happened. And they plans for future success.
Speaking of those plans for future success, it is important that you regularly have meetings with
your children. So in the teaching self government form of parenting, I talk about certain types of
meetings. So there's couples meetings, family meetings, and then individual mentor meetings
as well as parent counseling sessions. All of these meetings, except for the couples meeting are
actually meant to help the child know what's going to happen ahead of time. So in the family meeting,
the family discusses issues that the family might be having and comes up with how they will
solve those problems so that then they can follow through in a very predictable way in the future.
In the mentor meeting, during that process, the child evaluates themselves, they evaluate
how they're doing in different areas of their lives. And then they make goals and plans for
their future, and then come back and check back with their parents to see how they're doing their
goals, commitments and plans that they have for their future. This impacts their academics, their
relationships, their behaviors, all the things that matter most to them. Also, parent counseling
sessions. Parent counseling sessions are key times where a parent will talk about one issue with a
child, maybe the child is having a hard time with a certain friend or making friends in general,
the parent can have a parent counseling session with the child about that and the child can even
help develop plans for themselves so that they see a reasonable way to move forward and solve some of
their problems or prepare for upcoming things in the future. If you have regular talk times with
your children, and when you correct your children and teach children, it feels calm and safe.
Then your children will open up to you more they will express themselves. Now just a little
warning. If a person has been putting up walls, it might take them a while to know that you won't
get angry or upset if they Oh open up to you, you might have to deliberately tell them, I know that
in the past, I've been emotional. Sometimes when you've shared things with me, I've even taken it
personally. But I want you to know, I'm not going to do that anymore. When you share things with me,
it's not about me, it's about you. And I want you to have that time to talk to me. So I'm really
sorry, you say something like that it changes everything for the child, they'll test it.
That's what we want to have happen in a family. People need to be able to discuss have good,
open, honest communication. When you learn self government, if you've been at it for a while,
you know that I teach certain skills, those skills are not meant to shut down communication,
they are meant to open up communication, by making it so that we don't have to spend all of
our time discussing a simple behavior or simple chore. Instead, we spend our time discussing
the things that really matter. And just take a few minutes with those little chores or consequences
and corrections. If we spend the majority of our time talking about the things that we care about,
and expressing our true selves in deliberate ways to our children,
then they will do the same with us, it will become part of our culture.
So you might have to step out of your comfort zone to if you want them to open up to you, you might
need to open up to them as well and share with them some bits about the self government journey
that you are on. Maybe you're struggling with calmness. If you are I have a help for you. And
I'm going to give it to you right now as a gift. So I have something called the calm parenting
toolkit. That colm parenting toolkit has 10 lessons in it for how to be calm when someone else
isn't and how to help them get calm without losing your calmness at the same time. In the description
below this video, there is a link that says teach selfgov.com/toolkit. If you click on that link
right now, it will take you to the calm parenting toolkit, and you can have it for free. It is my
gift to you. It's the perfect beginner course for learning self government. And when I say beginner,
it is beginner, it's a mini course you'll probably want to follow it up with some more training books
or other courses but start there. Get your calmness going start self governing that
and then you can bring self government into all the other places of your life so that you
can have more open communications at your house too. Click on the link now. I'll see you there.