I have thought about that incident several times. It might be a good thing to teach boys to control their emotions. Or, it might be a good thing to provide an allowance for feelings communicating there is nothing wrong with that. One is not weak or inferior if he or she shows emotions. As I thought I about that I remember a man telling about his frustrating with a fairly mean and insensitive father. While he was telling about one particular incident where his father thought him to be too much of a pest and shoved him hard enough to knock him down. While the man was telling that “at that moment I knew that whatever would be important to me would never be important to my dad.” As I listened I noticed that he was crying and smiling at the same time. Noticing the incongruence of these two displays I asked him if he was aware of what he was doing. “I don’t want people to know how I really feel,” was his answer. He apparently learned that very well because his wife didn’t know nor did any of his children. His role in his family was very similar to that of his father. He was viewed as an angry person and was feared.

There are many emotional tools that make life easier for us. For one thing acceptance of our own feelings is very similar to the self acceptance that is part of positive self esteem. For another if we know ourselves with respect and understanding we typically are better at understanding others. This is because when we see someone and want to make inferences or appraisals of them we typically ask ourselves what we might think or feel in the same situation. One who does not know much about himself also often has difficulty understanding others.

Many of the best experiences in life involve emotions. Knowing love, knowing compassion, feeling tenderness, being excited, and having fun are just a few. Let’s open those doors for our sons by talking, sharing, and showing a deep understanding of them when they talk and when they join with us. They will be happier.

This idea has a major sub category that is even more influential. This relates to the fact that in our American culture we assign boys the responsibility of performing and accomplishing and conclude that to do so they need to ability to ignore distracting emotions to be successful. Instead of appreciating that emotions may serve a motivational factor, or that the best achievers are also interpersonally successful, and that those who are really productive tend to also be emotionally healthy.

As a result of this flawed idea males have more suicides, more crime, more mental illness, and a host of other problems which could be eliminated if we had a better idea of boys and emotions. For instance, we could help boys understand their own emotions by recognizing them and appreciating that emotions are related to their actions in some way. We could ask our sons, what they think and feel, and how their actions relate to or produce certain emotions. We could also teach them to recognize emotions in others and understand what to do in response to what other people display. We could have discussions with them about the important role emotions play in successful relationships. And, we could help them understand that the act of talking about feelings might lead to solutions to certain types of problems.

I recall talking with a man who in despair had attempted suicide. I asked if he had talked with anyone about what was going on in his life and whether he believe that talking could lead to a solution. His answer was “no,” to both questions. I thought, “what a simple thing that might seem to some, but to others being able to talk about what is felt is a major task.” I concluded to do something about it.

I created a little game parents could play with their children that would lead to understanding emotions and the ability to talk about them. It is easy. Write the names of forty emotions one each on a slip of paper. Give five to each family member and ask everyone to pantomime them in 30 seconds. Each person gets one point for each correctly guessed. When the first round is completed then reshuffle the papers and repeat. Afterward ask your family which emotions were the easiest to recognize and which were the most difficult. Then ask everyone to tell of an experience where they felt or experienced one of the feelings you selected. Lastly, ask family members to use the names of emotions and point them out when observed during the next week. It will be interesting.

We only need to make a few small adjustments to rear our sons with healthier emotional lives. The benefits include happier boys, better adjusted boys, and more successful boys. What is wrong with that?

I don’t know how good that advice was but she said her kids didn’t get upset when they finally went to school. You might ask what that experience has to do with children who have been to school and are returning. It is true they are already familiar with school and with some friends but the story illustrates an important but less obvious principle. All humans measure themselves by their ability to adapt to situations and be successful in them. The “adapting,” motivation shows up as early as eighteen months of age and continues throughout life. When that idea is applied to “going to school,” children are faced with the need to leave home and adapt successfully at school. Let me show you what I mean.

In the classroom children are asked to apply methods of learning. These include listening, paying attention, asking and answering questions, regulating themselves to persist until a task is completed, remembering, using logic, and understand their own thought processes such as memory methods and etc. They are also invited to engage in achievement skills where goal setting and time management lead to success. Further, they are in a situation that is structured for cooperation, good communication, feeling and showing respect, being responsible and accountable. Now imagine that your home and family prepares children by teaching these practices. Or, imagine that you do not teach them? Will your children likely be successful at school? If you teach them they will feel less anxiety because they know how to participate and succeed. They will feel more confident and be more successful. If you do not teach them they will likely turn their anticipatory anxiety into something worse and could begin to imagine failure. What might have been a success opportunity can turn into something else.

One of the most startling research outcomes is the finding that high achieving students come from homes where the families achievement attitudes and etc. match those of the school. This suggests that low achieving students are not so fortunate. Instead of thinking of themselves as dumb or unable succeed our children deserve something better. We should take a look at how well family life and school life match.

This principle can be applied to whether children develop religious faith, whether they learn and apply work habits between home and work, and social skills in the home and elsewhere. Families provide a “cognitive map” for kids that leads them to pick those situations where they think they can succeed. Prepare your children for school by helping them go with the tools for success.

Families who do these sorts of things as part of their family life will help their children find more success.

I would like to suggest a solution. Instead of girls thinking they will be perceived as weak or some other negative quality, I think it would be a good thing if we reestablished the idea that girls and women were deserving of many displays of respect. These include standing when a woman enters the room, providing a seat for her, holding a chair for her while she sits, and not sitting until she does. It can also include dating behavior where boys actually come to the door for the girl instead of honking to get her attention. It will certain include eliminating harsh, critical, and condemning language which seldom if ever be directed at a women. In short there are many forms of respect we could teach.

I do not believe this weakens girls nor does it do anything negative to men. Instead, I believe these and other rituals of respect ennoble people who participate in them. These gestures make it possible for us to show our deepest positive feelings and taught when boys and girls are young they often carry over into adulthood and make it easier for men to restrain themselves where girls and women are concerned.

The other day some guy was describing his stress and said how this led to pornography. In his mind it was a logical progression to molesting his daughter while she slept. As I listened I wondered why there was no barrier in his mind which stopped him and why he thought any forced activity like that would be fulfilling in any way. His explanation was likely the truth as he knew it but it did not include years of showing regard and respect and tenderness for his daughter. Nor, did it include ample emphasis on self restraint as a very good way to be a mature man. She was molested and must suffer that, but he is also damaged by what he did and will suffer a long time because he did not regulate his impulses.

Is it so hard to teach that we can’t get our boys to regulate themselves? Is this impossible to learn? We only need to talk about it, ask them to delay gratification as part of their growing up. And, we can teach them to feel and show many different forms of respect for their mothers and sisters. If we want to we can even show them how to cleverly and diplomatically ask girls out on dates and successfully communicate with them. In all of this every boy ought to have in his mind the necessity of restraining his urges and impulses if they will harm the girl. I believe it is well past the time for this and I wish would we all get together and establish this as part of our parenting approach.

As he told about what happened he said the very next week they all worked better and his wife felt like she had a wonderful new tool to use in organizing the family where all the kids are home for the summer. The next week the work didn’t go so well, but they had a family meeting and talked over what was done well and what was not. Some improvements took place the following week, but still there were areas that could be improved. As they went along they made appropriate adjustments to account for special events and so forth. But, he said, when the boys know we are going to have a family meeting they feel much more responsible. He had discovered a way to promote accountability without yelling.

I have worked in this non profit foundation for the last few years and have worked to develop this parental approach and tested it in hundreds of families. We were apprehensive it would not work in some families where there was little leadership or where cultural conditions did not allow for this form of democratic approach. We were wrong. This method of using family meetings softens autocratic parenting because meeting with kids and organizing to create a “great family,” works better and takes less parental pressure to get kids to implement what was agreed upon. Where there is too little leadership parents have found the simple structure to be within their motivation and skill set. It only didn’t work when parents did not care what the kids did.

It is interesting to see how important families are to the children in them. They will work hard to make certain they do their part to create a good family and avoid the consequence of hurting someone else. They will adjust and improve how they treat each other in order to accomplish the same goal. Rules, an appropriate number of them, come to be seen as useful guidelines rather than coercive devices. Probably the most important thing is the fact that all family members are working together to achieve common goals. This strengthens the feelings of attachment that are often missing when families do not eat or talk much together.

Many of us need a sudden about face when it comes to our families. It is heartening to hear how more men are becoming more invested in being parents. And, it is no longer so socially regressive to want to be a mother and wife full time. I believe it is possible for everyone to get more of what is important to them and still have a great family if families work together, communicate together, and develop work, relationships, and rules which they apply.

I believe this whole idea of children’s freedom to choose begins when children are young and parents attempt to discipline by identifying two alternatives and asking the child to choose. Plus, we live in a time when political correctness suggests that people should not impose their ideas on others. I also think these parents, and others like them, are afraid of the conflict they believe will happen if they are definite about their ideas, and that being definite will take away a child’s freedom to choose. All of these create tremendous risks for children and potential disasters for families. To avoid these it is useful to consider the real freedom to choose.

Why do many parents forget they are typically wiser and more experienced than their children? Why do they think it is improper to teach, inform, persuade, guide, and limit their children in order to encourage, motivate, inspire, and sometimes insist on one course of action over another? I think it is because of some inappropriate notion they have about their responsibilities and their sense of freedom. So, I would like to clearly communicate my position. Just because children have freedom to choose their parents are not free from responsibility for what their children do, how they act, and the choices they make. Sometimes we would like to be free but we are not either morally or legally free from duty.

It is helpful to remember that for children there are two types of freedom. When any child, especially teen agers say they want to be free they usually are talking about the idea of “freedom from,” some forms of external control. They want to move away having family rules or parental constraints. They want the form of freedom which allows them to do what they want without the idea of consequence. Many parents buy that form of false logic even though it is wholly irrational to think that any of us are totally free from some forms of control, responsibility, and accountability. When people act without law or constraint and harm others, we impose law and restraint because they cannot or will not.

There is a second form of freedom which parents should consider. It is the “freedom to,” do things which is a psychological freedom made up of feelings, dreams, hopes, and positive experiences. This form of freedom exists when children are law abiding and obedient. It exists when children decide positive things for themselves and display the self discipline to achieve what they decide. This freedom is felt when children organize themselves to avoid harming people and instead do constructive, useful things. When parents are clear about what they want for and from their children, they may be imposing a bit of restraint on their children, but this does not rob the children of freedom “to” choose unless parents impose such restrictive restrains that children cannot say their opinions or act on their volition. When parents engage in effective forms of communication to persuade, motivate, and teach this does not rob their children of freedom to choose if they are communicating positive desires for their children and hoping children will choose a course of action that will result in their happiness and well being.

A high school student who disciplines herself to get good grades at the end of school has more freedom “to,” choose because more options exist. Children who organize themselves and manage their chores typically have more free time to play without guilt or parental constraints. Children who form positive relationships of trust with parents typically feel more free to act and select alternatives for themselves because they are confident their choices will be in the “range of tolerance,” provided by their parents.

I advised these parents to make a few changes in their approach to their son. To begin with it would help if they took the time to decide what they truly wanted for their son in terms of their values, social behavior, academic work, friendships, and etc. Then they needed to ensure they agreed with each other. Following this I proposed they start calmly telling him what they wanted for him and give him reasons why their ideas could and should be accepted. Their response was, “what if he isn’t willing to talk?” I proposed that he would talk and listen in return for the use of the car or money he wanted from them. They agreed and since then I have met with their son who is more positive about his life, and more willing to hear what his parents want for him.

It seems to me that some people are divided over whether churches are a good place for morality to be taught. These individuals often worry about the idea that some people, whom they may not trust, will legislate morality to them and to their children, teaching a narrow type or different kind than what they want. Churches are designed to be influential and so it is a reasonable concern. Churches and religious teaching are a logical link to questions of morality but they are not the only authority on the matter. Some civil or secular ideas are useful too. The question, then is what to do. Take a look at the section in this website titled, “One Year At a Time.” It is designed to give ideas of what parents can do each year of their children’s lives.

Others, who may know more about morality, think of it as something they want for their children but may not be certain how to teach or educate them. Still others are very interested. Both of these groups listen in an effort to see what they might learn. The point of all this is fairly easy to understand. There appear to be so many divisions among us, and we do not wish to have conflict over it, that for many the decision they have made is to not teach much about it at all.

I am not certain what others think about this, but this whole thing scares me. Not because I am worried about the ideas inside the domain of morality, but because children who are not taught to live it are often those that hurt us and themselves. I remember when I first started doing research about moral development. The more I read the more excited I became because it was easy to see that the ideas in moral development gave purpose and motivation to every other form of education at home and at school. It has in it the most wholesome, constructive, and positive ideas I have ever found regarding the best way to organize families and teach children.

I will include one of these here. Any idea taught to a child about right and wrong or good and bad can be strengthened if parents use a one line application adage. Does some form of behavior help or harm people? The reason this idea is so powerful is because it is distributed throughout our society in both general and specific terms. This idea is the basis for virtually all of our moral relationships. If you wished to think of morality in terms of laws and legal processes, for instance, you would discover that what helps or harms someone is the root question of our entire jurisprudence system, including legislatures and courts. This is not to say they always do what is right for every person, it is merely recognizing the obvious. People debate about what will help people the most and what will harm them the least.

Religious doctrines and dogmas are the same. Why is something a commandment or a doctrine? We may disagree about the substance of either of these, but we can easily see that each is based on someone’s notion of what helps people and what harms them. In this case the helping or harming might have spiritual or religious implications. so it will be important for parents to pay attention to what is being taught and decide whether you agree with it. Even inside the same religion there are a variety of view points where morality is concerned.

So the stage is set for our families. If you don’t trust others to teach your children, and even if you do, how about learning about morality and teaching it to your own children? Parents provide a cognitive map which children use to make judgments about others and decisions for themselves. When your children face conflicting problems and challenges to decide how they will act or what course of action they will follow, what ideas will be in their minds which serve as guidelines for them? I propose you consider that along with other possibilities, the idea of examining any course of action from the point of view of helping and harming someone will generally lead to better decisions and judgments than many others or natural impulses.

We should not be afraid of morality but instead see it as the opportunity it really is to teach our children how to succeed individually and with people. If we teach it well, it is not narrow or restrictive. It is not a set of burdens that weigh our children down with excessive guilt or shame. It is a framework that motivates and inspires. Those who know it and live it say it is among the most important of all knowledge.

I am not a very negative person and I don’t think I am grumbling about how much better the past was than the present. I think the best of times is right now. Having written that, however, I am making a plea for us all to do something better and reach into the past and take a lesson from those years. As a boy growing up my parents taught several displays or methods of showing respect. In my parents’ teachings I learned to stand when a woman entered the room, open doors for a woman, defend a women who might be disadvantaged by some unfair treatment, stand until a woman is seated at dinner, use respectful voice tones and language around women, be circumspect in public, to see each person as unique and avoid categorizing one woman into a group of all women. I had it clearly emphasized how to communicate with someone in authority, be considerate, and etc. I am not claiming I always do those things or have always done them well but from what I am watching now, I believe we ought to give greater emphasis to teaching these social skills. I believe there are good reasons why we should.

One reason why many males are passive in relation to females, in social situations, is that boys have no agreed upon forms of behavior to display. The forms of social behavior are highly situational and all will benefit if we know in advance that in certain situations there are certain types of positive behavior. Once learned they let men do something active and feel confident about how to treat a woman. Some girls might appreciate these forms of respect and some may not. To some girls standing or waiting while boys open doors appears to them as weak and helpless rather than seeing this gesture as an agreed upon social ritual that lets one gender show respect for the other. Most women would appreciate male assertiveness, not dominance, as a form of confidence. I believe the feminine movement in the United States might have had positive objectives but their methods of attacking males as a means of trying to achieve equality was misguided and destructive.

I also believe that our girls could stand a good dose of emphasis about showing respect for fathers and males. We can teach girls to express opinions, voice assertive ideas, and exert control over themselves without at the same time belittling, and condemning. When girls participate in the rituals of respect they have one additional way of interacting with men other than using their bodies as the sole enticement. Both men and women are ennobled when men and women show respect in many different appropriate ways.

As the incidents of verbal and physical abuse and other forms of mistreatment increase in our society it seems like we would recognize the truth of the idea that the antidote to that is rigorous training in the art of respect. After having my experience as a child I am dumbfounded that any man would mistreat his wife whom he wants to love and care for him or that any father would allow a son or daughter to hurt their mother. Likewise I can’t imagine why a woman would belittle her husband when talking with her friends. We don’t have to allow this to happen in our families.

When we go to some social setting we can teach our children what to do and practice that before the event itself. At meal times, for instance, we can teach our children about etiquette and manners. In addition we can single out many different versions of respect and describe them and their effects on people. Instead of sitting down when someone approaches to show we have greater status, unless we are infirm or a woman, why don’t all of us men stand all of the time to show regard. We can give a woman our seat on a bus when there are none available. We can help a mother with young children. We can practice many forms of respect in our families. Then, when we go out together for a sit down dinner, we can practice as well until our children learn how to act. We can point out positive and negative examples of respect and discuss the positive and negative consequences. There are, of course, many other methods.

On one occasion when I was leaving to go on a date, my mother asked if I had a clean handkerchief. I thought, what is going on here? She had me get of the car, return to the house, and get a new clean one. I finally asked her. She told me this most interesting truth. “You will be surprised,” she said, “what impresses a girl. Girls pay attention to things boys don’t.” That experience has led me to check and inspect my handkerchiefs regularly. I am impressed with the power of my mother’s teachings. We can and ought to as powerful and we should do it with regard to respect and honor for each other.

There are two family principles parents can take advantage of and use this time to teach children some very important life lessons. The first is that children who can adapt themselves to different situations are typically more successful and healthy than children who cannot adapt well. Adapt means to adjust to a circumstance with positive emotions, correct language, and appropriate behavior and motivation. The second principle is the idea that parents can structure their family for different outcomes or purposes. This family structure becomes the environment or the conditions which children first adapt to and then use as a cognitive map in many of the situations they will face outside the family. For instance if you want children to be successful in school then structure your family for achievement, learning, and character. They will learn in the home each of these three important skills and then go to school better able to succeed there. (In fact fact, check out the new “Close the Distance,” which will soon be part of this website. You can have dramatic impact on your children’s school achievement). If you want your children to live your religion in a certain way then it would be a good thing to structure your family by applying religious practices and teach religious lessons that they will find in your religious activities. Social skills can be taught in the same way. You can structure your family for sociability, friendliness, inclusion, and mutual involvement. Important emotions can be taught in a similar manner. If you want your children to be good at love they will need to see parents love each other and feel loved and loving and do loving things. Failing this your children will learn something else, because family life is not neutral where nothing is learned.

Suppose then when you had more time with your children you limited TV watching and video games. You regulated cell phone use and text messaging. Create a starting time for chores and asked for chores to be completed well before any time was given to play. You might also suggest that children read a certain amount and practice a weekly character trait like “cooperation,” or “respect,” each week. In order to set this in motion organize a family meeting where every family member talks about having a “good family,” and all agree to set and achieve these goals in order to have a good family. Have a follow up weekly meeting, to ensure consistency, and review what has been done the previous week and praise achievement and request better work when that is needed. After a couple of weeks teach the idea that certain forms of behavior help the family and each other and other forms of behavior harm people, including the person and the family. Use that idea to help children apply what you are structuring.

Based on the research we have conducted with this model of leadership you will be amazed at how much easier it is to motivate children and influence them toward goals and values you aspire to. One lady said,”I love this, in twenty minutes a week I can create more order in my family than I can spending all of my time trying to get them to do what I ask.” If you want a sample of activities you can do with your children click on “the store,” on the menu bar and look at the “Family Solutions” book to see if that will help you. The book is inexpensive compared to most books that size and will show you how to implement this model of family leadership.

The point of all of this is that we need to be much more proactive in organizing and leading our families. The concepts of parenting most of us were reared with placed parental actions after their children’s. This means that we are reactive to what our kids do and feel like we are spending most of our time trying to get them to stop doing something or trying to get them to do something we want them to which they do not want. Quite often this starts a struggle between parents and children that takes many different forms, most of them not happy. Family leadership is a better idea, in my opinion, because it lets parents plan, take the offensive, and exert the type of influence they want.

The content of the messages is sensational and certainly needs to be understood, but there is something else which was not addressed in the article that I believe we should focus on. In my opinion it deserves more attention. We have not successfully adapted to the inroads technology has made in our families. For instance, every minute parents or children play video games, watch TV, use computer games, and etc. is a minute they are not spending with each other. I am not suggesting that all entertainment be curtailed. But, I propose the obvious. Spending time talking, listening, playing, working on projects, praying, learning, and etc. is also time that builds the emotional ties that good relationships are based on. I am as interested in new technology as anyone, but as someone whose professional life has revolved around mental health, child development, and the family I see things from that perspective. It takes a certain about of time and attention and awareness to create and maintain good family relationships. These relationships provide the basis for healthy child development, moral growth, and other forms of success. If the basis for good relationships is not provided or is lost the emotional ties that make parents influential with children are not created. It is as simple as that. And, if those ties do not exist when children need the security of parental wisdom and encouragement from parents’ example they do not find them. I have seen that on many occasions because many of the children and youth I have seen professionally have not been blessed with these powerful and influential emotional attachments with their parents.

This state of affairs implies something else. We need to change our views of parenting to one of family leadership. Here is why. There are two essential pillars of good parenting. These are adjusting our family practices to the individuals in our families and to the environmental conditions we rear our families in. For example, it makes a good deal of sense of have more family rules in a threatening environment than we do when we live where there is less threat to our children. Failure to have more rules when they are needed and less rules when appropriate affects children’s morale about the way their parents lead them. As it turns out this is a major issue for children of every age and affects how willing they are to accept their parents authority.

For years we have been focused on parenting and studied parenting with several names. Some of these are child centered parenting, positive parenting, authoritative parenting, autocratic parenting, permissive parenting and etc. While the ideas these concepts have generated may be useful they do not directly address the two pillars to good parenting mentioned above. Instead, and in virtually every case, they place the parents responses and reactions after those of the child. They do not describe how parents can organize a plan of action for their families and their children. These are better found in the idea of family leadership because the term “leadership,” implies the idea of vision, strategy, forming allies and unity around the strategy, focusing on individuals, and measuring progress toward some objectives. This very “proactive,” orientation appears to be needed to compensate for the intrusion of technology on family life. If parents are passive in response to technology then gradually family time will include more time with the computer and etc. ignoring the need for the essential conditions of high quality family life.

We are late in responding because we did not know how to anticipate what would happen to us and our children, but having seen what happens when we do not get ourselves focused we can learn new forms of leadership and make our families compete more successfully. Our children deserve it.