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Parental Involvement – You Can Do It

By Bob Lancer
Friday, July 8th, 2011

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Parenting children

Many parents want to spend more time with their children

Children need positive parental involvement perhaps more than anything else to keep their attitude and behavior on track.

It is not only the child who benefits in crucial ways, the parent also benefits. Particularly in the first 3 years the child is simply so magical and the mutual, instinctive need for bonding so intense, that the parent’s heart is nurtured and even healed through close engagement with the child.

Many parents want to spend more
time with their children.

They recognize their child’s real need for more parental involvement. And they realize how their own heart longs for more close time with the child. But they believe they just don’t have the time.

At the same time, one of the important strengths that parents want to impart to their children is the inner fortitude that comes with the belief that “you can do it.”

We want our children to face challenges with a can-do attitude,
but we do not model that attitude when we accept defeat
regarding our own life-challenges.

The fact is that YOU CAN DO IT when it comes to providing your child with the loving, the positive parental involvement that both you and your child need to feel and to do great.

There are four basic steps to achieving the goal of adequate parental involvement:

  1. Face how you really feel. A parent can sense when a child’s mood, attitude or behavior problems are a way of calling out for more parental involvement.
  2. When you recognize the need for spending more quality time with your child, notice your attitude. If you think that you cannot do it, let go of that attitude and try to just presume that YOU CAN DO IT.
  3. Remain open and trusting that you will find a way to at least gradually spend more time with your child, even it the progress is slow going.
  4. Seize your opportunities, however small they may be, to increase the quantity and the quality of your parental involvement.

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Imaginatively Raising Children

By Bob Lancer
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

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Imaginatively raising children

Raising children successfully begins with a vision of the successful child.

Raising our children as successfully as possible requires raising ourselves.

Because our results in any area of life, including parenting, are a reflection of our levels of ability and influence, we do a better job of raising children as we remain committed to fulfilling our own higher potential.

One of the ways that we can raise ourselves to a higher level of functioning, for the good of our children, is to raise the level of our mastery over the creative power of our imagination.

Imagination functions as a self-fulfilling prophesy.

For instance, the more you imagine your child as a brat, the more you will bring out his “bratty potential”.

Raising children to fulfill their higher potential demands that we reject any negative visions of them that may occur to us.

Your child will tend to live up to the vision
that you hold in your mind.

Raising children to be as successful as possible requires that we recognize HOW we imagine them, WHEN we imagine them.

If we are not self-aware enough, we won’t even realize that when we resent our child, we are envisioning our child in a negative way.

So raising children to be successful obliges us to raise our level of awareness to the degree that we recognize what our imagination is up to.

The power of imagination is something we need to run, not something that ought to run us, and we need to teach this to our children.

A message that both parents and children need to hear is:
“Whatever runs your imagination runs your life!”

The more you intentionally direct your imagination to work for you (and for your child), the stronger your control over it grows.

To use your imagination, focus on a vision of what you want, including the healthy, happy and successful person you want your child to be.

Raising children successfully begins with a vision of the successful child.

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Dream Your Way To Parental Control

By Bob Lancer
Thursday, June 16th, 2011

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To improve your parental control, improve your dream control.

parental control

Enjoy increasing parental control and less parent-child conflict

Envisioning yourself in-charge, with love, and without anger and stress, helps you to achieve more parental control.

To apply this empowering parent-wisdom, think about a situation in which you find your parental control challenged by your child’s behavior.

Perhaps it happens at bedtime when your child suddenly refuses to cooperate, and you find yourself repeating directions several times, until you finally lose your patience.

Now, imagine that scene happening, but this time, imagine yourself demonstrating your ideal form of parental control.

Envision yourself feeling perfectly calm, content,
confident and in control.

Envision the entire scene flowing smoothly,
with love, ease and fulfillment.

Often, when parents feel frustrated by their child’s behavior, they repeatedly remember the difficult scenarios, envisioning their stressful, frustrating experience of lacking parental control.

But improving your control in your relationship with children begins with improving your control of yourself, and that begins with taking control of your dreams – of the imaginary visions that you focus on in your mind.

When a parent worries about future lapses of parental control,
or painfully recalls past episodes of previous “child behavior
chaos”, the parent allows negative dreaming
to rule his or her mind.

Practice the following to dream your way to improved parental control:
1. Pay attention to your thinking to recognize when you are envisioning disturbing parent-child experiences.
2. When you notice this happening, shift the focus of your thinking into envisioning that scene as you would love it to be

Your experiences with your child will gradually reflect your positive visions
of delightful parent-child scenarios more and more.

To further improve your interactions with your child, ask your child to spend time dreaming or envisioning himself or herself behaving beautifully.

Children often want to behave better than they do, but because of tiredness, habits, or other influences, they find self-control just too difficult.

By teaching your child about the positive power of directed dreaming or envisioning, you empower your child to lead a more successful life.

Guiding your child into envisioning the positive behavior you want helps you to enjoy increasing parental control and less parent-child conflict.

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Forgiveness & Child Development

By Bob Lancer
Monday, June 6th, 2011

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Teaching children about the healing powers of forgiveness is an important aspect of child development.

Child development

Forgiveness is the foundation for positive child development

But it is also quite challenging.  Without realizing it, parents teach their children about withholding forgiveness when they carry and convey a resentful attitude toward them.

The Child Development Process
Is Not Always Positive.

Through our own, sometimes unconscious, patterns, we may develop negative traits and tendencies in our children.

The fact is that you cannot really improve your child’s behavior before you truly forgive your child for the misbehavior that you want to change.

Forgiveness Is The Basis For Supporting
Positive Child Development.

Holding onto resentment holds onto a form of toxic, unhealthy stress at a deep level, which compromises healthy organic functioning to some degree.  High blood pressure, migraine headaches and even heart problems can be linked to anger patterns.

As we learn how to dissolve our resentments, we also dissolve the barriers to optimum health that they induce.

Modeling Represents The Most Potent Way Of Influencing
Child Development And Child Behavior.

Parents automatically instill an unhealthy pattern in their children by holding onto resentment.

Forgiveness is our natural, healthy and healing state.  You don’t have to create forgiveness. You simply need to unblock it by releasing yourself from resentment.

As long as you feel resentment toward your child, your child lacks real trust in you, and then the child’s insecure emotional condition develops into problematic behavior.

As You Release Yourself From Resentment, You Release Positive
Child Development Through Healthy Modeling And Love.

When the child senses that your heart is clear, open and loving, a harmonizing influence enters and spreads throughout the child’s nervous system, promoting optimum organic health and healing.

Here is how to dissolve resentment for the sake of positive child development:

1.      Notice what you are thinking about when you feel resentment.

2.      The instant you notice the thought that keeps you feeling resentful, let that thought go by focusing your attention elsewhere

Releasing the healing powers of forgiveness for positive child development is a simple matter of releasing yourself from the resentful thinking that blocks love’s flow.

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Parenting Children Without Overwhelm

By Bob Lancer
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

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Parenting children without overwhelm IS possible. Understanding the cause and cost of parenting children with overwhelm begins to set you free.

Parenting children

Parenting children without overwhelm IS possible

You are NOT overwhelmed by the typical daily demands of raising children.

Overwhelm is a state that you place yourself in by straining yourself to meet life’s demands.

Overwhelm Is Not Only Painful.
It Is Counter-Productive.

You enter overwhelm in parenting children by overtaxing yourself. An unbalanced mode of parenting is the real cause of parent fatigue, burn-out, and impatience.

When you feel overwhelmed you react from frustration, instead of responding from inspiration. This blocks your ability to recognize what your child really needs from you to behave well, to feel good, and to develop into his/her great potential.

Parenting Children Responsibly Does Not Demand Overwhelm.

It Demands That We Maintain Our Balance And Avoid
Slipping Into Modes Of Stress And Strain.

If you regard your child as the cause of your stress and strain, or blame your overwhelm on all the rest of your responsibilities, you blind yourself to your freedom, power and responsibility to improve the way that function.

The Measure Of Difficulty Of Parenting Children
Depends Upon How You Approach It.

Your feelings are signs that point you in the direction of healthy, balanced living.

If you hold onto the belief that being responsible means driving yourself so hard that you feel unhappy, frustrated, burned out, your belief, not your children or your responsibilities, prevents you from parenting children less stressfully.

To access your own best judgment, creativity and problem-solving ability, you need to feel basically calm, relaxed, well-rested, and inspired.

To free yourself of parenting children in a state of overwhelm:

  1. Pay more attention to how you feel throughout the day
  2. The instant you feel stress and strain setting in, stop trying to control the situation or your children. Ease up on yourself.
  3. Practice maintaining your unstrained composure as you fulfill your daily responsibilities.

As you apply these three simple steps consistently and persistently, you will enjoy parenting children with less and less overwhelm, and more and more love, joy, AND success.

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Achieve Parental Control

By Bob Lancer
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

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Parenting tip for achieving parental control

A power-struggle begins when your child displays the power to defy your direction.

To achieve parental control, one thing you need to know is how to end a power-struggle between you and your child.

A power-struggle begins when your child displays
the power to defy your direction.

The longer you engage in a power-struggle, the more energy you waste and the more your child learns how to lock you into a futile power-struggle.

As long as you continue using the same approach to win the struggle, you are actually perpetuating the struggle and experiencing a lack of parental control.

You will begin experiencing more parental control when you shift your focus from trying to control your child to controlling yourself.

Your child’s resistance seems to be causing the power-struggle, but it is also true that your behavior started the power-struggle and perpetuates it.

By focusing on what YOU are doing, you empower yourself
to change what you do for different results.

Move toward increasing parental control by first relaxing YOUR resistance.  Resistance starts with a feeling of inner tension, pressure, forcing and conflict.

As you relax, you stop wasting energy on contending for power.  This conserves your energy and brings you a welcome sense of relief.

As you relax, you help your child to relax.  As you let go of your effort to oppose your child, your child will be more inclined to leg go of his/her effort to oppose you.  The power-struggle is then transformed into peace.

From peace, you can move to the next level of parental control.

Consider what you want done and exercise your power to actually make it happen, without conflict.  This might mean:

  • taking the inappropriate object from your child’s hand rather than asking for it over and over.
  • shutting off the TV instead of repeatedly demanding your child to do it
  • simply letting your older child know that if he does not do his homework he will not be receiving his allowance.

You cannot always get a child to do as you want without a struggle, but you can
avoid wasting your power on a struggle and enjoy greater parental control.

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Parent Help For Child Meltdowns (1)

By Bob Lancer
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

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Child development is hampered by instability at home

The child feels frustrated by some form of instability at home, like parents not getting along

Understanding the many factors that may contribute to a child’s routine emotional

meltdowns may provide a concerned parent with the help needed for solving the problem:

  • A parent is slipping into deep states of depression or discouragement and coping poorly with that by engaging in destructive action or speech
  • The child feels frustrated by some form of instability at home, like parents not getting along, or parents discussing (or going through) separation or divorce.
  • The child routinely feels tired because she is staying up too late or not getting enough sleep (or the child is suffering from some other form of physical distress)
  • Children “melt down” (as adults often do) when they feel that they are not receiving the parent help they need when they use more calm forms of expression.  This can be the result of:
    • The parents paying insufficient attention to the child BEFORE she blows up or acts out
    • The parents responding defensively to the child’s attempts to communicate a need.
    • The parents over-relying on the child’s ability to verbally articulate her wants and needs – At least 75% of communication is NON-verbal, and to receive that message you have to observe facial expressions, physical behavior, gestures, voice tones, etc.
    • The parents interrupt and talk over the child when she is trying to express herself verbally.
  • The parents routinely express an attitude of “I am right and you are wrong” rather than expressing, “I hear and understand you and will do my best to give you the parent help you need for happiness AND responsibility”.
  • Someone in the household is modeling emotional explosiveness and blaming it on someone else.  (Usually the parent explodes in response to the child and blames the child for the anger, resentment, impatience, frustration and outburst.)

Part 2 of Parent Help For Child Emotional Meltdowns will be posted in the next parenting blog entry.

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Children’s Feelings And Behavior Problems

By Bob Lancer
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

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Child behavior problems don’t just happen. They can always be attributed to causes.

What we label “behavior problems” are behaviors that lead the child into difficulty, and/or which we simply find it difficult to deal with.

The “difficult” infant may be trying to us simply because we find the natural, instinctive ways of an infant hard for us to handle.

How we respond to a child’s behavior influences the child’s future behavior

Our lack of patience, understanding, and child-relationship skills may be the cause

We can create behavior problems by misreading what the child actually needs from us to develop more caring, orderly, responsible behavior.

How we respond to a child’s behavior influences
the child’s future behavior.

One way to avoid creating behavior problems or making them worse is to practice reading your child’s feelings.  This requires observing the child calmly and perceptively to sense the emotion expressing through the child’s face, gestures, movements, sounds and words.

If you repeatedly, harshly hurt a child’s feelings, deepening the child’s sadness and distrust in you, the child is bound to demonstrate increasingly challenging behavior problems. From the standpoint of child behavior, it doesn’t matter if you do this unintentionally.

For children to behave well they need
to feel basically secure.

One common cause of overlooking a child’s feelings is over-relying on words to understand the child.  Even with the most verbally skillful adults, 75% of communication occurs on a non-verbal level.  To adequately relate with anyone we need to look and listen for the non-verbal cues of the individual’s present emotional condition.

Another cause of overlooking a child’s feelings has to do with our automatic reactions to the child’s behavior.

Automatic reactions miss the signs that
convey what the child needs.

When a child defies our direction, does the opposite of what she knows we expect, creates a mess or confronts us with any other challenge, to avoid causing more severe behavior problems, we need to base our response on how the child is feeling.

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Child Discipline Alternative To Saying “No”

By Bob Lancer
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

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Frustration and child discipline do not mix well

For easier child discipline, try telling your child HOW or WHEN she CAN do what she wants, instead of bluntly clashing against her will.

When it comes to child discipline, “no” does not always seem to work.

One reason for this is the natural, human tendency to go into denial.  When your child wants to do something, and you say “no”, a part of him that does not want to hear that, causing him to, perhaps unconsciously, pretend you did not say it.

But even when you have your child’s full attention, the word “no” may still not work well for you.  One reason for this is that it simply presents opposition, which will likely frustrate your child, and frustration and child discipline do not mix well.

One effective child discipline alternative to saying “no” is to redirect instead of merely to block.

Rather then simply saying “no” let your child know
what he CAN do instead.

For instance, if your child asks for a cookie, you might say, “You can have a cookie after you eat all of your lunch later.”

If your child wants to play outside, but it’s too dark out for you to allow it, instead of saying “no” you might say, “You can play outside only when it is light enough to be safe.”

If your child snatches something from her younger sister, instead of simply barking out, “no!” you might say, “You can play with that when she is done.”

By letting your child know what he CAN do, you diminish his natural resistance to opposition.

While it requires a bit more patience and self-control to replace your automatic “no” with a reasonable, positive response, it saves you the strain of a power-struggle.  It also helps your child to remain more calm and rational because children feel how we feel while we are with them.

For easier child discipline, try telling your child HOW or WHEN she CAN
do what she wants, instead of bluntly clashing against her will.

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Positive Parental Involvement

By Bob Lancer
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

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A sufficient quantity and quality of parental involvement is essential for a child’s healthy attitude and positive behavior.

A common cause of a child’s emotional and behavior problems stems from one or more of the following parental patterns:

  • The parent spends too little time with the child
  • The parent pays too little attention to the child
  • The quality of time spent with the child is marred by parental stress and strain

To even know how much time your child needs with you, you need to pay close enough attention to your child.

Positive parental involvement means that you are consciously present

Positive parental involvement means that you are consciously present, focused and sensitively aware of your child in the now


Perhaps a main reason why parents fall short in this area is because they don’t fully understand what it means to really spend time with a child.  Simply being in the same general area with a child does not constitute true parental involvement.

Positive parental involvement means that you are consciously present, focused and sensitively aware of your child in the now.  You are reading your child’s body language, voice tones and verbal communication (if your child is at a verbal stage) to recognize your child’s needs so you can respond accordingly.

Paying insufficient attention to a child allows the child to drift too far into troublesome emotional states and inappropriate behavior. The parent then involves himself with the child when the child’s behavior has become too outrageous to overlook, and then the involvement is characterized by harsh expressions of disapproval that sadden and antagonize the child, inciting even more problematic behavior.

Positive Parental Involvement Is More Pro-Active Than Reactive.

The parent observes the child before she drifts into trouble in order to recognize what the child needs to avoid emotional and behavior problems.

Positive parental involvement includes the parent’s ongoing dedication to the practice of the best possible self-control to avoid spoiling the quality of parental involvement with excessively critical, annoyed reactions that harm the parent-child relationship, make parenting more of a strain than it needs to be, and inevitably leads the child into more disturbing behavior.

As you bring positive parental involvement into your relationship with your child,
you and your child will both feel better and do better.

Receive your FREE Parenting Advice through this blog. Simply ask Bob Lancer your question and receive his Lancer’s Answer in this blog.

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