Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach parenting and family communication
as well as strengthening relationships all through the lens of self-government
and in this video I'm going to be talking about proactive behavior training for children.
In this video I'm going to be talking about what it looks like to truly be proactive and I'm going
to share with you my formula for creating an environment where you and your children can be
proactive in handling some of the most difficult behavior. So, let's talk about proactive behavior
and what that actually looks like. So, there is a difference between being proactive and being
reactive and it's important to understand that. I'm forever grateful for Stephen Covey who
brought that to the world's attention years ago that so often we stay in this reactive state
and that actually ruins our outcomes. It ruins our relationships, it makes us jump onto the defensive,
we end up communicating in aggressive ways or passive ways or passive aggressive as opposed
to communicating in assertive ways. When a person is proactive, they are being assertive. So, it's
important to understand that means they're being deliberate or intentional. These are all words that
describe a person who is proactive, that means that they are planned ahead of time. When a person has
created a plan and then they are following that plan, they are being a very proactive person. By
contrast, a reactive person just waits to see what happens in the minute and assumes it was the best
choice because that's what happened, even if it hurts them and other people. So, being reactive
is definitely a more passive thing even though sometimes it can come across as aggressiveness. So,
we want our children to be proactive, that means we need to set the proactive example. So, let's
talk about some of the components in a formula that would make a really great proactive family.
Your family culture is instrumental in helping your children have a life of purpose, security and
for them to learn how to bond and communicate well with others. When people have a reactive family
culture, their children often learn to manipulate, to play systems, to lie, to be aggressive or try to
be dominant of other people. All of these happen because the family didn't make a concrete plan
ahead of time for how to solve their problems. A good plan starts with a picture for where we're
headed. So, I call the picture for my family a family vision. This is a picture that we created
that takes place 20 years in the future. Well actually my family's so grown now, it's only a few
years down the road but for most people, it's 20 years in the future at this point because they're
just starting. So, think of your family 20 years in the future, what do you want those relationships
to be like? What do you want it to feel like when you are together for a family occasion or party?
There's a way to create a family vision that sticks in the hearts and minds of the people
so that it gives them a reason why they might want to care about changing their relationships
and the way that they communicate in the first place. And honestly, our communication with each
other and our problem solving is really what leads to the majority of our behavior problems.
If we can improve our communication, our connection with each other and our problem-solving skills,
we can make great headway at conquering some troubling behavior that seems to be destroying
our family culture, that's right. Your family culture can be negative too so make sure that
you are proactively planning what you want your family culture to be like. So, step number one
in the formula is to establish your direction, which means to create that vision. Step number
two is to pre-teach. So, if you are going to help your family bond together and learn how to take
responsibility for themselves, which is a big part of conquering some of those behavior problems,
then you need to make sure that they know ahead of time what is expected and by the way, teaching them
what is expected in an emotional way is not very proactive, that's actually just reactive at the
beginning. Saying I can't take it if it goes wrong, so make sure when you do your pre-teaching that
you explain to them exactly what is required. They need to know the law. Did you know that a person
can't actually be obedient unless they know the law first and then they can put themselves in
alignment with the law? If they don't know the law and they just do something that bothers you, well
they just did something that bothered you, that didn't mean they were being disobedient. So, if we
want our children to be obedient and conquer some of those good behavior, we need to tell them ahead
of time what is expected. This means that we're going to be teaching them certain skills and stuff
that they need for success. Let's talk about those skills. Before we talk about the skills that your
family can use for successful communication, click that subscribe button. There are so many great
videos on this channel that come out all the time, you're not going to want to miss them. They'll help
your family develop more understanding and loving communication that you need to have calmness
and respectful behavior at your house. Click the subscribe button now. So, let's talk about the
four basic skills for success. So, there are four basic skills that I've taught my children, all of
my foster children. These four basic skills take care of 99% of their behavioral problems. These
children's books in the teaching self-government children's book package teach those four basic
skills to children. So, this one teaches accepting "no" answers and criticism, this one teaches
following instructions, this one teaches accepting consequences. If you don't give your child the
opportunity to accept consequences, they can't learn self-government. This one teaches disagreeing
appropriately. This should be their favorite skill. Sometimes your oppositional defiant child doesn't
like the skill because they wanted to say things their angry way but this helps them get understood
the calm way. Stay till the end because I'm going to talk more about calmness at the end and I even
have a free gift for you. These four basic skills have made such a difference in our family. In fact
they've increased our productivity on everything that we embark upon as a group. But they've also
made it so that we always understand each other and care. I want to give you an example of one of
the skill sets for these skills. So, let's take disagreeing appropriately. Each one of the four
basic skills has a skill set attached to it. This is the skill set for disagreeing appropriately.
You look at the person, keep a calm face, voice and body, say that you understand the other person's
point of view then you share your point of view, listen to what they have to say and then you say
okay and drop the subject. Disagree appropriately works well for parents and children, mother and
father, siblings, the children with their teachers, anyone that they come in contact with. It's
literally just an adult skill and principle for good communication. If your children understand
these skills and you've taught them ahead of time then when it seems like they're going to talk back
to you or get aggressive, you can say to them remember you can always disagree appropriately.
Oh, now they have something to use and you are ready to listen as well. So, having these skills
in place decreases a lot of that contention. So we have established correction, pre-teach
but now we have our action step. So, the action step is where the parent is going to be giving
instruction or maybe "no" answer to a child to help direct the child in the moment. So, we do have to be
willing to take deliberate action but making sure that that deliberate action is predictable, meaning
that it happens the way you said that it would happen in the pre-teach is the key. The next step
in our process is the analyze step. So when we analyze the behavior, we are going to be doing
corrections and we are going to be doing praises. When a person learns self-government, they learn
cause and effect really well. This is why they take ownership of their own behavior so that
they will choose to control themselves, that's what self-government means. They're analyzing themselves
on a regular basis. Well, parents have to teach children how to do this self-analysis and they do
this by analyzing them after interactions or after action steps. So, when you correct your children,
this language that you use for the correction is hopefully language that they already know. You
should pre-teach your children in the pre-teach step exactly how you will correct them each time
and what tone and structure or words that you will use. My children know that every time we do
a correction, it's going to be done with calmness and there's going to be a format that we follow.
You can learn my formats by going to the TSG parenting course and I can give you more
information there. After we do a good correction or appraise, sometimes even as part of this step,
we bring in another step and that other step will be familiar to you. It's called
pre-teach, that's right. When you teach a person to govern themselves and to control their behavior,
it requires more teaching than correcting. So first we teach how things should happen the right way,
then when they don't happen or do happen, we are going to practice doing them the right way again.
So, there will be more teaching about the right way to handle a situation or the right way to behave.
If a person has more opportunities to practice things the right way than the wrong way, then they
are able to actually follow through better. So, when a person learns self-government, heavy focus on the
pre-teaching. I have more pre-teaching for you that I think is going to be very beneficial. It's
all about calmness. Remember how I promised you a free gift? Well here we are, this is the free gift. I
have for you. It is a calm parenting toolkit. In the description below this video, there is a link that
says teachselfgov.com/toolkit or something like that. Click on that link and you can have my calm
parenting toolkit course for free. It's the perfect beginning step for a person who's wanting to
understand more skills of self-government and get their own calmness under control.