Home should be the happiest place for a child, don't you think? I'm Nicholeen Peck
and I teach parenting, good communication and child development all over the world
through the lens of the principal self government. And in this video,
we're talking about creating a happy home life for children.
In this video, we're going to spend some time talking about what the view of home life is like
in our modern culture, and how that's impacting children. And then we're going to be talking about
some key things that you can do to make home a happy place for your child. It used to be that
home was the center of everything, but there are many forces around us that are currently
vying for that position of center, right? The schools want to be the center or sometimes the
government's want the schools to be the center of all community life. Some people want governmental
things to be seen as the center. Many people want social that happens outside of the family,
within the community to be the center. Some people want church to be their center. So
there are many entities that can be perceived as center of a person's life, or that gives meaning
to their lives. But there is another one that is really underhanded. And that is the media,
this view of everything else in life that comes from the media, and your touch with either social
media, that can be one type of center, or your touch with the world via news threads,
or even YouTube, the videos that you watch can become your central experience that you compare
everything else to. You need to ask yourself of all of these things we have not listed family,
let's throw that into the mix, school, community, government, church media,
friends and family, what do you want to be your central focus for you and for your children, be
honest. And then you have to ask yourself, what is our central focus. Usually, where you spend your
most time, or what you do in your downtime ends up being the sign of your central focus. So some
people it's a project or a hobby, or it's their TV time. Historically, it has always been the family,
that home culture that the family creates, where everyone joins together as a group, and they
work on the family relationships, the bonding, they discuss, they play, they learn together,
that has historically been where the central focus has been for most people. But nowadays,
I will argue that for many homes, that is not the central focus anymore. The central focus is
what is happening outside of the home, the home will not be the happiest place for the child,
if the focus in the home is what is happening outside of the home. If the lessons on the school
and the job, and the technology, and the even the church, if those things are the central focus,
and not the family, then the home life seems to be serving a different master, right? It's not
serving the group that's there, it's serving some other group and then it loses its identity, and
it loses its iBill its ability to be fulfilling for the person. So then that decreases overall
happiness for everyone. When your environment with the people around you is not fulfilling, you feel
like something is missing. And that certainly can happen with home life and family life. So
here's another thing too, the family gives people purpose. So what does it mean to have purpose
in your family? Well, when you mean something to another person, that gives you purpose, your
husband and wife relationship gives you purpose. The parent child relationship gives you purpose,
you know that all of the people around you care about you. They think of you, they want you there,
they want to talk with you and do things with you. This gives you a purpose as a human being.
So family life, if it is centered around the family, we'll give everyone more purpose but
if family life is centered around the sports, or the music or the activities, then that makes all
of those extrinsic things take the purpose away from everyone or give them a different purpose,
a new purpose that exists outside of the family. But they'll always feel a little lopsided if they
don't have that family need met first, before they go out into the world and try to maintain
an identity within the world. So how do we create this environment where home can be the
happiest place? Well, we're going to be talking about that. But first in the comment section,
how about you tell something that you have done in your family or you've seen other people do that
has made their home life happy? I bet that you could share a lot of great words of wisdom with
other people that might be seeing this post. So leave me a comment about something that you feel
has made home life great, or that you hope will make home life great for your family. So how do we
make home the happiest place for the child? Well, number one starts with the roles or the identity.
That's super important. In fact, this book right here, Roles: The Secret to Family, Business, and
Social Success is all about helping everyone in the family understand their roles. And this isn't
like their responsibilities, like who does the dishes or who earns a paycheck. It's nothing like
that. It's about who you are to each other in the family. This is important to understand, if you
don't deliberately identify what your roles are, you could go through your entire upbringing, and
never even consider the roles of the people around you. And then you might take them for granted or
even be unkind and take advantage of them. So step number one is identify who each other is in the
home, make sure that everybody knows who they are. And then step two is know where you are going,
where we are headed. As a group, you need to articulate that to your children as well.
So in my TSG parenting course, which is on the website, teaching self government.com,
I talk about creating a 20 year vision. This is a vision for where the family is headed 20 years in
the future. This helps the family get buy in for building stronger, more lasting communication,
and relationships. Then after that, we set up a system of skills that we can learn to communicate
and solve our problems in our home. And we have a method for checking up on how we're doing with
all of our skills, and how our relationships are faring. We also talked about family activities
and family projects that we want to be working on such as humanitarian projects or work projects,
these that our family feels might be important. So some of your key pieces to building a happy
home is know who you are, know where you're going, know how to communicate to get there,
and have a time of checking up so that you can see your progress in the first place. So we're going
to be talking now about some of those skills for communication that may help you. I have written
11 books that help people have self government for themselves and for their children. So to create a
good happy home, you can see some of the books on the bottom of the stack relate to meetings
that you might have, or solving problems. These other colorful books in the middle, those are
all about teaching skills. These top books are for parents to learn the skills, and how to set up an
environment where self government can be learned. So before we get into some of these skills,
let's talk about what self government is. 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 understand cause and effect, you understand
your behaviors and how you do things. And you make plans for greater success for you. This means you
take personal responsibility for yourself, your connections to other people, your relationships.
That's right, did you know your relationships are all on you. Even if somebody does not like you,
you can choose to like them on your side of the relationship. So in a family where there are
six people, four children to parents, there are actually 36 relationships in that family. Each
person has a relationship to themselves, as well as a relationship to everybody else around them.
That's a lot of relationships. But if each person knows that they take responsibility for their
own side of their relationships, and they're constantly worrying about valuing the other
people helping the other people, then those relationships all thrive and the whole group
becomes more you united together, which really it's that unity that creates such an amazing
environment. But what's the thing that gets in the way of the unity? It's the frustration. It's
the lack of respect. Maybe it's unkindness, it's whining, complaining, selfishness, selfishness
gets in the way of building good relationships. So how do you prepare your family environment so
that there is not that feeling of selfishness that comes in that takes over all of the communication,
and the good family bonds that you'd like to have? Well, you need to teach the family skills for how
to solve the problems in a way that is calm, that helps them not go to some of those controlling or
manipulative and selfish behaviors to solve their problems. If you stay to the end of this video,
then there will be a free gift for you related to calmness. So stay tuned for that,
we will definitely spend some more time talking about calmness in that free gift
that I have for you. But first, let's talk about some of these skills for success.
In a family where happiness abounds, children follow instructions. They accept "no" answers
from their parents, they accept consequences, and they disagree appropriately. For years, I took in
troubled teens, they were all between the ages of 12 and 18. And boy, did I see my share of attitude
problems. But guess what, once I taught them, those four basic skills that I just mentioned,
everything changed for them. Suddenly, they felt like having a conversation about something was no
big deal. They didn't need to close off, put up a wall have an attitude problem, they knew I really
wanted to understand and that I would take the time to listen and understand if they chose to
disagree appropriately. They also understood that if they just followed through with the instruction
the first time or accepted a "no" answer the first time, everything was better for them. Because we
have a system built in where they can learn cause and effect and they could measure their progress
at all of these skills. Let's fast forward now to modern day, all of my foster children, they're in
their 30s. My own children are now in their 20s. And my baby is 19. So he's almost 20. And they've
all left the nest. They're all living adult lives, going to school serving missions for our
church, doing all kinds of things, having children and raising a family. And you know what I've seen
happy people. People who know how to communicate with other people are happy,
my children are very happy, well adjusted people, they keep getting lots of leadership
responsibilities and opportunities, because they know how to communicate with others, because they
are happy. Sure they have bad days from time to time. I mean, that's part of life. But they know
how to get themselves back to that baseline of happiness. Because it's something that they were
raised with that they felt on a regular basis, the home maintained that for them, no matter what
was going on in their work extracurricular with their peers, in college, whatever they happen to
be dealing with home created that foundation for them for the happiness. And it all started with
those four basic skills that I was talking about, following instructions, accepting "no" answers and
criticism, accepting consequences, and disagreeing appropriately, it seems strange that those skills
would lead to happiness, because a lot of them relate to cause and effect, like you might have
to accept a negative consequence, you know, maybe an extra chore or something. But at our
house, home was always the safest place to make mistakes. So I didn't get emotional, if I needed
to do a correction and they had permission not to be emotional, too. We talked about problems.
And then we moved on, we did not spend our whole day being wrapped up in problems. We spent our
whole day discussing, loving, doing, doing projects together. We had fun. We had purpose as a group,
we knew who we were, where we were headed, how to communicate through the little bumps,
like the problems that occurred so that they didn't take much of our time. And then we can
move on with good communication. That's probably one of the key things that makes home happy is
if it's a place where people talk about things. Now, if you're not much of a talker that could
be you stepping out of your comfort zone, but it is worth doing. So make sure that you take
the time to have open communication with your children. Remember that stack of books that I
held up before? Those four books at the bottom there was a blue one it said mentor sessions,
and there was a yellow one that said family meetings. Those books are vital and helping your
children learn how to communicate openly with you and with each other and the whole family too. Open
communication creates a happy unified environment. Being able to solve your problems easily quickly,
without any emotional baggage to carry around. Makes an environment happy. knowing where you're
going makes an environment happy, and having calmness makes an environment happy. Now,
I promised you if you stayed to the end of this video that I had a gift for you,
and I do. It is my calm parenting toolkit which is a mini course that you can have to help improve
your calmness. If you go to the description, below this video, you will see that the top
link says teachselfgov.com/toolkit. That's where you can access my teaching self government calm
parenting toolkit for free. If you click on that link now you can have the 10 tools of calmness to
help you on the journey to calmness so that you and your children can have more calmness, which
will improve all of the skills of communication. So click on that link now. I'll see you there.