October 2012-Parent Tip on Dealing with Recyclable Issues
As our children grow up and move through the various developmental stages, we as parents also experience our own "growing pains". Perhaps you are remembering times when you felt left out as an adolescent when your teen is talking about feeling lonely. We grow up again and again.
There is a great resource titled Growing Up Again by Jean Illsley Clarke and Connie Dawson. This book offers resources on nurturing, structuring and coping with those "recyclable issues" that we experience as parents.
In looking at stages children experience between the ages of 6 to 12, there are helpful behaviors that you as a parent employ and unhelpful ones. Helpful parent behaviors during this stage are: affirming your child for doing developmental tasks, offering love, safety, and protection, affirming children for learning to do things in their own way, giving lots of positive strokes for learning encouraging cause and effect thinking, and setting and reinforcing nonnegotiable and negotiable rules-among other behaviors.
Unhelpful behaviors during this stage include but not limited to: being inconsistent with rules and follow through, insisting on perfection, filling all of your child's time with lessons and activities, unwillingness to allow child to feel miserable at times, discounting their feelings, and/or overindulging your child.
Some of the stages you may recycle are: becoming more clear about the differences between wants and needs, develop a new skill or task-and learn from mistakes, evaluate family rules and learn about structure inside and outside the family, a willingness to accept the consequences of breaking a rule without blaming or whining. You may also reassess boundaries with others and become more clear about what is someone else's responsibility and what is your own responsibility.
I highly recommend Growing Up Again because it is a parenting book that gets to the heart of our own emotional journey as are kids grow.
Thanks,
Jennifer Moyer-Taylor
There is a great resource titled Growing Up Again by Jean Illsley Clarke and Connie Dawson. This book offers resources on nurturing, structuring and coping with those "recyclable issues" that we experience as parents.
In looking at stages children experience between the ages of 6 to 12, there are helpful behaviors that you as a parent employ and unhelpful ones. Helpful parent behaviors during this stage are: affirming your child for doing developmental tasks, offering love, safety, and protection, affirming children for learning to do things in their own way, giving lots of positive strokes for learning encouraging cause and effect thinking, and setting and reinforcing nonnegotiable and negotiable rules-among other behaviors.
Unhelpful behaviors during this stage include but not limited to: being inconsistent with rules and follow through, insisting on perfection, filling all of your child's time with lessons and activities, unwillingness to allow child to feel miserable at times, discounting their feelings, and/or overindulging your child.
Some of the stages you may recycle are: becoming more clear about the differences between wants and needs, develop a new skill or task-and learn from mistakes, evaluate family rules and learn about structure inside and outside the family, a willingness to accept the consequences of breaking a rule without blaming or whining. You may also reassess boundaries with others and become more clear about what is someone else's responsibility and what is your own responsibility.
I highly recommend Growing Up Again because it is a parenting book that gets to the heart of our own emotional journey as are kids grow.
Thanks,
Jennifer Moyer-Taylor