For the past three months I have been spending a lot of time writing for a website Myfamilytrack.com. It is going to be launched in April 2010. At the same time I am preparing a membership program called “LeadingFamilies,” which is the same name as this website. I want to explain why I am doing this.

I have had the great privilege of working with thousands of students and thousands of families during my professional career. I have been in many places in the United States and around the world. I am very grateful for the opportunities I have had. One time after I had given a speech in Germany the people there lined up to ask questions and there were so many people the line they formed went down an isle and wound partly around the room. This was not about my excellence as a speaker or popularity. The questions they asked were heart felt and about fairly serious things. I have wanted to find a way to provide something for parents and married couples who can’t afford therapy when they have problems, who occasionally need a suggestion or two, and/or who just want more help in carrying out the plans they have for their children.

As the years have passed it seems to me that some of the challenges parents face are more challenging than a couple of decades ago. It also seems to me that some parents are not recognizing how threatening the challenges are until their children have very serious problems. I have, for instance, seen many parents and children when these same children have been using controlled substances or have been heavily involved in pornography without the parents knowing anything about it. They were good parents but they were busy. I have also seen parents do what they think was useful in their families but have found that doing some of those things with their children is not leading to success. I have also seen many great, successful, and committed parents.

All the time this is going on family psychology and family sciences have advanced to the point where there are fairly clear research findings about children and therapies which could be used to help people. Plus there are many sound principles that emerge from working with families. So, I am thinking it might be time to do something more. If you read this would you let me know what you think about paying a small amount of money annually that would give you consultations with child psychologists when you wanted to ask questions. For this same plan you would also receive success oriented information related to your children each year at the time of their birthdays. This is designed to help you prepare them for success the next or coming year. This will help you prepare your children for developmental changes they will soon experience.

Secondly would you also let me know if you have a desire to participate in a fairly intensive online training program to help you change your family, yourself, and control or better influence the outcomes you want for your children. On Myfamilytrack.com you will find specific resources such as marriage enrichment and parent skill building programs. Our plan is to make these easily available and at a very low cost. I would appreciate your opinions and suggestions if you would care to offer them.

We are currently underway, assuming the two programs I have described will be useful to people. So, what do you think? Please let me know.

It is fairly well known that spouses are often like intimate enemies who know each other well, sometimes love and care for each other, but because of their familiarity are in the best position to hurt each other. Feeling vulnerable to a spouse is not new, of course, but instead of simply recognizing this or protecting ourselves from potential hurt it would be a good thing to understand more about what this means.

For example, feelings of attachment which attract us to one another and then seal the deal often make us feel vulnerable because our feelings are exposed and this means that we don’t love another person without feeling open to them. It is natural for us to wonder how well they are going to treat us. If there is conflict where meanness is displayed, we might forgive each other and make things better for a time, but the hurt often remains and its memory influences us. Thereafter, we might avoid what we argued about. We might also become more observant, listening for rising voice tones, inflections, body movements, and etc. This can happen without being conscious we are doing so but in many cases we still become more wary than we would otherwise be. In more extreme cases we might try more than one form of dishonesty so we are not criticized for a mistake we make. We might change the way we communicate. Instead of “personalizing” some idea by saying,” I think…” or, “This is my opinion…,” we might say that “things happen,”or “some people think that….” These types of indirect statements move us away from the glare of responsibility (and vulnerability) and give us a momentary feeling of security. But all this has consequences.

The more we engage in avoiding potential hurt, the less confident we are about the extent we love each other. Here it is again. Love is usually open, tender, caring, and considerate of each other. We make ourselves more vulnerable to the other person as a sign of love and tenderness hoping that the other person will be stable enough and exercise enough self-control to never hurt us. Meanness tends to eliminate some of that.

As we go along in marriage it is easy for us to accumulate protective mechanisms like barnacles to a ship’s hull. Or, it is easy for us to find ways of reassuring each other that we can be trusted and we will love and understand. If you need to shed a few barnacles, the benefit will be that you can create a more trusting form of love. Instead of your spouse being an intimate enemy, he or she can become an intimate friend and lover.

We work so hard to learn unselfishness and make every attempt to be concerned for others that it may seem strange to consider the idea that loving someone might be more for us than for them. The self centered life is familiar to most of us since most of us start out in life that way and examples of selfishness are all around us. There are many forms of it including over talking someone, cheating, lying, demanding that someone do something for us, affairs, excessive gambling, inappropriate drug use, an unwillingness to sacrifice, and criticizing the other person for failing to pay enough attention to us.

So what is this idea about loving someone and doing it for our own satisfaction? Before explaining, I think I should state that this is an often overlooked key to marital happiness and more of us would be happier if we learned how to use this idea.

The idea is derived from the notion that in marriage the outcomes we want most are to feel a great deal of love and happiness. Then there is more of both and each person is a better partner if each believes he and she are responsible for creating some portion of those feelings for themselves rather than depending wholly on the spouse to make them happy or feel loved. This is followed by the question of: “How does one person create those feelings?” Any sincere person who wishes to try out this idea will shortly come to the conclusion that creating feelings for himself will include saying and doing things which look like gestures of love for a partner, but which also have a reflected self oriented benefit.

Suppose a husband, for instance, sent his wife flowers as an indication of his love for her. She thanks him for them, but he says, “The flowers are for you but the sending of them is for me.” What does that mean?

He has found delight or fulfillment in the act of showing his love for her. This internalized reward for his actions will motivate other forms of similar behavior. She won’t care because she gets the flowers, but there is more. If she thinks about it, she will discover a new dimension of being loved. She is the person whom he finds the most delight in loving, she motivates him, inspires him, and he lifts himself to higher forms of behavior because of his love for her. That is much better than the flowers.

Some people are born more reactive to the environment than others. And some individuals grow up around excessive criticism and other forms of mistreatment which creates hurt and frustration. If both of these happen to the same individual then the result often is a very defensive person. More specifically it is a defensive, self protective brain which minimizes incoming information in order to protect oneself from potential hurt.

Most of us have heard the word “defensive,” but to ensure I am communicating I will describe the characteristics of defensiveness. (1) Difficulty accepting they are loved and often reject other people’s attempts to love them. (2) Fear of being controlled so they control others often by giving ultimatums or using absolutes such as “never,” or “always.” (3) Emotional aloofness and distance sometimes being close to their partners but withdrawing from them for even small offenses. (4) Wordy explanations for and descriptions of their own behavior, which is usually described as a reaction to or a victim of what someone else does, rather than an acceptance of responsibility for how they act (5) Contradictory behavior where what is said often is not matched by how they act, (6) A defensive person often forms a perception of another person, concludes this is what the other person thinks or feels, and then condemns them for it. (7) A defensive person seeks to get his way by swearing or demanding or arguing until the other person gives in.

As you might imagine dealing with such a person is difficult but it is possible to help them. These people often have tender feelings, care a great deal, and frequently do not know the consequences for their actions. So, the first step is to be willing to help rather than react negatively to this behavior by expressing anger and frustration. Getting angry at a defensive person obviously will justify to him or her that they are not cared for and their defenses are necessary.

The nature of the help typically requires that we be calm, warm, and persistent. But usually to be effective this will need to be accompanied by helping this person become acquainted with his or her feelings, his or her thoughts, and questions which help them make self descriptions (non judgmental) of themselves. During this process this person may falsely accuse, lash out, get angry and withdraw, and blame. These have to be overlooked while the focus is kept on “Let’s keep talking,” “empathy,” and “I can see your point of view.” Then it is often possible to invite this person to “understand, without agreeing,” with what you are saying. Inviting a defensive person to understand is an important step because it helps them avoid getting aroused. Once this happens they can usually be helped to listen better and discern between simple information and what might actually hurt them. When this happens it is then possible for a defensive person to understand that he or she is defensive and this sense of responsibility often leads to more balanced and humane communication. It takes time, but is usually worth it if a defensive person is able to make progress.

The Pew Research Institute recently reported a national survey where they compared views held by different age groups. They discovered a fairly wide gap between younger and older people in regard to lifestyle, relationships, moral behavior, and religion. The difference, or gap, is as wide as it was in the 1960’s when there was a lot of generational conflict over the Viet Nam war.

The idea of a difference between age groups is likely related to social change and we know this because historically political or social transformations are often indicated by generational differences. Not all of these social changes are positive, however, and usually have far reaching effects which may not be seen at the time they take place. In the cases where there are negative outcomes for us we often treat them like a historian reviewing the causes of the civil war and suggesting that if only certain things took place the war could have been avoided. By that time, however, people had been killed and the country devastated.

So now, what if we are in the middle of one of those social changes and we either like or do not like the direction it is going. And, what do we do if we do not like the suggested trends because we fear the consequences for our children will not be positive. We do not have to accept what appears to be going on around us, but we need to understand what else we might do. I have a couple of suggestions.

We can realize that children develop and grow over time and this gives us as parents a great deal of leverage and influence if we choose to use it. We can help our children identify directions they are going and then persuade them we can help them be successful. In the process we can teach them values and methods which are designed to help them acquire the lessons of life we hope they will learn. Families are made up of older more experienced pathfinders and younger less experienced individuals just for that purpose.

The second thing we could do is realize that the relationship between adults and children provide the social and emotional context where the forms of thought as well as what children come to believe are first learned from these adults, adopted by the child, and then the child adapts them to fit his own desires. When adults teach children the structure of language they also teach children the structure of thought. What this means is that the amount of time, the quality of relationship experience, and the degree of effort given to the process make a big difference. It is no minor thing when families spend little time together if the lack of time means their relationships are of poor quality. Let’s look around and find a little more time, find ways to make the time we spend powerful, and then teach what we want our children to know with great consistency. They are going to need the best we’ve got.

Dorothy (my wife) and I had to organize ourselves during summers because we had eight children and they were all home from school and needed something other than the freedom to lay around and do nothing. We decided that we could find some work for them to do, practice the piano, and read or do other learning activities. These had to be done before anyone could leave to play with friends. Just to supply some order to such a big gang we met each week to discuss how we all had done and this gave us a chance to reinforce good things and encourage those who lagged a little. One year we asked our children what fun things they would like to do during the summer and we all added our ideas to create a pretty full schedule of something fun each week. We had pie eating contests, obstacle races, swimming parties, night games, visited the nearby dinosaur museum in Vernal, Utah which displays skeletons and other interesting things. We went to sports events and into the mountains to eat dinner and play games around an evening fire. One night we sat on the side of the mountain looking over Utah Valley to watch the sun set. We were lined up sitting on the hill side, which gave us an amazing view all the way from the Point of the Mountain to Santaquin. We made things simple by buying fried chicken and we ate our evening meal sitting like that. When we couldn’t see anything we packed up and came home.

I remember that summer. As the years have passed most of us don’t talk about the chores we had to do, the piano practicing that went on, or the books that were read. And, there were quite a few books read because rewards were given for each book each child read. What is talked about was the pie eating contest or something else fun. I should have expected that given that children love to do things that are fun. But I am surprised that those same fun things are what I remember too. I am glad our children love to read and to this day read quite a bit, but if I had to choose what I am most thankful for it would be that I had the chance to be with all of my children at the same time doing something that was just plain fun. We looked forward to each event. We were all excited. There were few arguments. We talked about important things going to and from each activity. The same things could be accomplished by working together on some family project, but as I watch my children with their children, I smile when I see them make choices to do something just for the fun of it. In their generation they are drawing themselves as parents close to their children attached to each other with love and fun. It is a very good thing.

We have learned to think about time in more than one way. For instance, when it comes to marriage we often hear or read about the importance of spending time with each other, or taking time to nurture this important relationship. Then we learn it is a useful idea to correctly gauge when to tell a spouse something which may be difficult to say or listen to. This idea is reduced to “timing is everything” and we learn the importance of this because most of us have said something at the wrong time and have learned that even good intentions might result in something else.

There is a third use of time which is familiar to everyone except as applied to marriage. We all know that we have a past, present, and future. We are often encouraged to live in the present because the future cannot be predicted and the past has passed. Where the emotional benefits of marriage are concerned, however, this application of time can be used another way. Criticism and blame are almost always in the past because they are statements describing something which has already taken place. The more marriages become unhappy for either person the more they communicate about things or events in the past. When quarrels about something in the past become more elaborate and habitual people often add absolutes such as “you never,” or “you always.” This often leads to a partners debating the inaccuracy of such statements but locks the couple into thinking that whatever causes unhappiness is not going to change.

I once told my wife that “I can see you sitting there filled with love for me.” After laughing at me she agreed. Then I explained that I hoped for that to continue and thought maybe I would promote that goal by loving her. Then I discovered that it is possible to have conversations in the present about current things and in the present about future possibilities. Hope, love, faith, charity, and other positive forms of behavior almost always lie between the present and the future. If couples learn to say instead of criticizing, “I would like…” or “If we worked together on this we could…” they might be able to move themselves away from a negative past into a more hopeful future. As it turns out, happiness is connected to hope and the belief that things can get better. It is a great use of time to talk about things in the present as they might out in the future. Getting the good things we hope for is more likely if we can communicate clearly about them and care enough to help each other get them.

Somewhere and somehow current generation parents have learned that asking young children to make choices is a good way to limit their frustration and increase their compliance. So, when children are asked to “come and eat,” or told,” it is time to go to bed,” they will be given a choice to get them to do what parents want without an emotional episode. To avoid that, a mother might say, ” would you like to eat right now, or eat in five minutes?” assuming that the child will in fact do what he or she chooses. Or, a parent might say at bedtime, “do you want to to read a story or put your pajamas on first?” There are times when asking the child to make a choice is a good strategy and may lead to compliance. It is also true that if we actively teach children they have a choice in most things they may begin to feel that no one can tell them what they should do and they will develop feelings of entitlement and actually begin to resist parents at other times. The problem is, however, that if we don’t teach children to choose and instead exert excessive control they may be unable to manage their lives, become angry and resentful, and the outcomes will be undesirable. But, this is not the whole story.

There are three other things I believe parents should think about. (1) There are sometimes when children will need to be told what to do and they should obey. These are times when there are no choices other than to do what they are asked or not. For instance, if children want to do something that will harm them, if they want to do something which is reckless, or when they are in danger we would not want them to deliberate about the options. How do we teach children when those times are and that they should trust and respect their parents enough to do exactly what they are asked to do? (2) Most parents hope their children will learn that consequences for themselves or for others will almost always follow their decisions. How to we ensure that children learn this vital lesson? (3) We want children to mature and become independent. How do we use decision making to ensure they improve their abilities to make decisions, have confidence in their decisions, and at the right time move out and away from us and live their own lives?

Let’s suppose there is an answer for these questions. It will include the idea that decision making is a critical skill and we can and should teach our children how to be good decision makers. In addition, we need to add a lot of communication with our children so we can teach them about all aspects of making decisions including: (1) identifying what the decision is that needs to be made, (2) gathering information about it, (3) considering the options and the potential consequences for each, (4) selecting the best option or one that feels the best, and (5) carrying out the decision. By teaching this or other fairly simple methods of making a decision we can also teach variations. For instance we can teach our children about different decision making times, tell our children when they can decide and when they cannot, and help them make that adjustment. If we start when they are fairly young we can help them understand the idea of consequences and learn to consider those before they choose and decide. We can also understand the sequence of letting our children make small choices while we make big ones for them. This can be followed when they are older by forming partnerships and making decisions together with them. Then, later, we can help them learn to make their decisions on their own. We will be confident in their abilities and can be less anxious abut them because we will have taught them to be good decision makers.

A few years there were seasons of the year for given sports and sometimes during the year where I lived there were no sports teams in operation where youth were concerned. This is not the case now because basketball, for instance, and other sports are year around activities, excepting a brief lull during winter. Even then, aspiring players are asked to participate in conditioning programs or in other ways attempt to build their skills.

I have had the opportunity to be a coach for my children’s little league sports. I have played high school sports and knew a little bit about basketball, football, and baseball, but at the time I began I had no experience being a coach. I became involved because some of my older children had played on teams and were coached by people and I was not very pleased with all of them. Some of these coaches were skilled teachers but didn’t treat the players well. They yelled at young kids, they put too much pressure on them, and they were so competitive they displayed a lot of intense frustration if they lost. Some coaches made the effort but their work required more time than they thought, so the kids lost the opportunity to learn.

Sometimes parents became too emotionally involved and their sportsmanship suffered a bit. I have observed parents yelling negative and abusive things to opposing players and display anger triggered by referees or umpires who didn’t do as they wanted. And, over the years I have had the experience of men and women who didn’t spend a lot of time coaching attempt to influence how I did it. This was especially the case when they worried about how much their child would play.

The reason I mention these experiences is to contrast them with other people who understood that sports and team building offers a terrific time for parents to teach important lessons. One of these is to help children become self motivated and discover that being a self starter is more mature and more satisfying than depending on someone else. For a sport, they will get themselves up in the morning, they will practice on their own, and they will desire to be on time because that is usually what their coach asks them to do. It is also possible to use sports to teach that a player has responsibilities to others and needs to obey rules and work hard to help rather than hinder their team. You can use sports to help teach dependability and the importance of being accountable for what you do. Overall, sports can be used to improve a child’s sense of achievement.

In this same vein it is possible to teach children there are consequences for decisions they make. What they do or do not do matters because they are involved with other people. If parents saw these opportunities they could use the same communication and reasoning about the individual child and the other members of your family. What they do or do not do matters to other family members and may help or injure them.

In this time of year we will have a lot of opportunities to teach children. We thank those who spend the time and effort and we can teach our children to respect them by setting an example ourselves. It is a good season if we take advantage of these opportunities.

I remember riding along with my father one day talking about anything that came to mind. He asked a question wanting to know something I had thought about and I gave an answer that wasn’t anything special. But, I could tell that he was a bit impressed with what I had said. My dad wasn’t one who gave a lot of verbal praise or compliments even though he was a pleasant and genial person. So, when I noticed that he liked what I had said a feeling of pleasure went though me that I have not forgotten. I can’t even remember what I said, I only remember that he liked it and the feelings I felt because of it.

As the routine of our lives goes by it is sometimes hard to remember that to our children we are important for many reasons and one of the greatest reasons is our ability to give approval and recognition of them. They are never free to not need that from us. I have noticed that if we do not recognize that then it is often the same thing as if we have forgotten that we hold a huge asset which we can use to influence them.

When this ability to approve is coupled with clear expectations which we communicate to our children, the amount of influence doubles. It is one of the most powerful forms of influence if it is sincere, not to frequent, and is in response to something real. Although we need to give our children clear feedback about their successes and their failures, it is nearly always a good thing for us to have high expectations (still achievable) and then give them a positive response when they make progress or accomplish good things. Quite often these moments are very small, like the conversation with my father, and perhaps we don’t attach much importance to them, but our children do.

Part of the memories I have of dad include the times when he said something about me and it helped me feel like he liked me. As a result of this I tried to learn how to work hard like he did, be honest like he was, and care about others like he did. He died many years ago but he is still influencing me. I often wonder at the power of his influence. I loved him, and because I believed he loved me, what he said lasted longer than if he had used a pattern of criticism and confrontation. It was a small experience, but a very big lesson.

For some reason