We have organized and introduced a character development program in over one hundred schools. We have learned that character education programs are very different and the difference can determine success or failure. For instance, many programs which schools use teach positive vocabulary in an attempt to understand honesty, responsibility, integrity, and other important concepts. While this is a positive step in the right direction, the term character actually means that an individual knows more than the meaning of concepts or has an academic understanding of the difference between right and wrong. We want our children to internalize these concepts and actually do what helps and does not harm themselves or other people. This may be easy to say but it is actually difficult to ensure unless a person who is learning is actually and kindly confronted with the consequences of positive or negative acts and has a chance to discuss (internalize) it. Learning about this, we proposed to teachers that they conduct short class meetings with students where all discuss a behavior (e.g. gossip. lying, cheating, exclusion, and etc.) that a student actually demonstrates. Plus, it helps them understand how it might help or harm someone. Further, after examining that idea, we suggested to the teacher that he/she always identify “what is better,” to help students learn positive actions that eliminated the need for some actions that are not so good. We discovered that this approach carried over to the playground, to the bus, and even to homes where children began to tell their parents what could be done instead of something that was not good which was taking place in their families. At first school personnel were a bit embarrassed when parents told them about the children’s comments but then realized this was exactly what they wanted. This is because students were applying the ideas in their lives outside the classroom. Students changed and improved their abilities to work with each other, felt cared for, and achieved more. We are excited about it. You can find this character education program on AchievementSynchrony.com Let me know what you think.

It is often true that drug use is involved in some of these cases but for many others suicide is related to a loss of a relationship, a failure of some kind, or intense conflict and problems. One mother reported that her tall, handsome, successful son came home one day from school, went into his room, and shot himself for no apparent reason.

I would like to know what you think. I am working on a plan that schools and families could use and I would be interested in your ideas. Maybe together we could identify social, emotional, and educational solutions that will prevent these problems. Thanks in advance.

www.achievementsynchrony.com

www.sportsmentalskills.com

www.6innovations.com

I have been in this profession for a long time and thought that maybe I could come up with something that would help out (which I very much wish to do). I believe many of us need to join ourselves in a common effort to bring skills, hope, and encouragement to parents. So, in the last few months we have created Myfamilytrack.com which provides on line tools for married couples and parents plus provides opportunities to communicate with experts for a very small fee. In the next week we will be launching Achievementsynchronry.com which is an approach for school teachers (and whole schools) to form partnerships with parents so that both family and schools promote achievement. We have tested this and found that something amazing happens when parents and teachers care enough to work together.

We are also launching www.Sportsmentalskills.com for parents who enroll their kids in sports and who would like to use sports to teach self motivation, character, build confidence, and other mental skills. It will have a program for new coaches of little kids which we hope will help both coaches and kids have a great experience. Lastly, we are also launching www.sevenInnovations.com which provides, what we think will be, a remarkable tool for businesses and any other organization who wishes to create and complete innovations they believe will strengthen them. It has a feature that allows the families of the employees to use the information on MyFamilytrack.com. Our tests with several companies indicate so far there are many benefits to business and to employees and their families.

We are already having many people enroll and we are hopeful and encouraged. But, we believe that to really help people for the long term there needs to be someone who is connected as a resource to them over the long term. This person, we call a consultant, can work at this from his/her home, teach classes if you wish, and communicate with and build a network of people to consult with. We will provide training for you and communicate with and help you. If interested you can make a good part time income and we believe your work will be interesting and very rewarding. If interested would you please let us know right away.

I believe what we have done and are doing has the potential of making real time differences that help people. Come and join us if you wish.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To subscribe to this podcast directly in your iTunes, click here.

To subscribe to this podcast directly in your iTunes, click here.

To subscribe to this podcast directly in your iTunes, click here.

To subscribe to this podcast directly in your iTunes, click here.

To subscribe to this podcast directly in your iTunes, click here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

If we have paid attention to the news we have seen how emotional this whole situation is, some thinking there is inequality and the law is perpetuating that and others thinking they are saving and protecting marriages. My feelings ran a different course and I would like to write about that.

I have wondered what the difference is between equality and fairness (or justice) and the connection between equality and freedom of opportunity. If people are not equal in every respect is there also the absence of justice and fairness between them? Can there be fairness and justice without people being equal? To answer these questions I have thought about our need still to seek racial and cultural acceptance. Where the fight for racial equality is concerned, people who wanted segregation tried to apply the “separate but equal” idea but then and now that meant a lack of fairness and opportunity. That was not and is not acceptable to me or to anyone I know. It seems like equality was then and is now necessary to create fairness and freedom of opportunity. But what about gender issues? Should the question of equality before the law be extended to the equality of boys and girls, men and women? If it is, what about the idea of gender differences, social and sex roles of boys and girls? Can we perpetuate appropriate differences between boys and girls without their being inequality in every case? How do we do it?

These are cultural questions which lead to ideas that influence us as parents and how we rear our children. Like it or not we rear our children in this cultural context and both they and we are influenced by them. What is fairness in our families? What is freedom of opportunity and how do we create and preserve it for each child? How do we feel equality and fairness in our marriages where there are many differences of opportunity required of men and women who work in a job and/or at home and also carry out different parental roles.

I believe we can’t preserve fairness and freedom just by adjusting our family rules (or civil laws) without creating relationships where we are involved in each others lives and care about one another. That might be part of the problem. If we knew each other better and cared more we might not need to worry so much about every specific point of rights, equality, fairness, and freedom. We ought to try it out.

There is quite a bit of scientific evidence that children who know their grandparents and are positively influenced by them have greater opportunities for emotional health and overall success. Apparently grandparents can add support for what parents do and in some cases counterbalance the mistakes we as parents might make. But, why would knowing about people whom children have never met exert influence? I believe there are a few important reasons and if we understand them we have another approach to help successfully rear our children.

An athlete who has a winning history tends to expect to win in the future. Adults with happy childhood memories tend to be more successful and happy in their marriages. Soldiers who understand their history tend to be more stable when fighting against an enemy who wishes to defeat them. These are examples of the principle I am writing about. When our children know about the people who preceded them, and form connections between themselves and these people, they are influenced by the qualities and sacrifices, and character qualities demonstrated by these people. Children need to know the people part of their own history rather than seeing their history as a set of events and happenings. When a growing child of today knows that someone immigrated to this country, for example, he or she can begin to see courage, sacrifice, a sense of adventure, and a willingness to work hard for new opportunities. This child is here, for instance, as a result of what someone else did and accomplished.

Having this knowledge makes it possible for a child to define his or her future using what has been learned from these former people. Even if they made mistakes, had problems, or something else their examples can be used to guide a child into an uncertain future. When the positive characteristics of these individuals are known they too can provide a guiding hand. Let’s consider just one example.

The idea of hoping and believing in a good future is thought to be essential for anyone’s success and happiness. We want our children to believe in themselves, the future, and their ability to match whatever requirements they are going to face. Where does that come from? It might come more naturally to some and it might come from parents who display optimism and courage. But, it can surely be influenced by learning that a child comes from a long line of people who had hope, who faced the challenges of their day and survived them, who developed strong values and adhered to them no matter what they faced. Armed with this knowledge a child can face his or her future with hope and even if mistakes are made they are more likely to recover, change themselves, and begin to live more consistently with the good things they know about. We should maximize this effective tool by teaching our children about all those who preceded them and then explain to them that it would be a good thing for them to honor those by living well.

Two familiar examples can illustrate. Males typically develop eight to ten months later than females until puberty or months afterward when males catch up. Knowing this, lets suppose parents are faced with the choice of sending a child to school whose birthday is just before the school deadline or keeping that child out for another year. If the child is a boy the best guess is to wait another year. If the child is a girl, then depending on mental readiness and social confidence, parents could send the child with greater confidence success will result. Here is a second example. Males typically prefer to spend time with activities which include rough and tumble play, building, using objects, and etc. Females usually prefer to put things together such as putting toys in a circle, arranging objects, and enjoying companionship as much as performing some activity. Should we make use of this knowledge when we buy toys or arrange games for them to play?

The language center in female brains is typically larger and more densely organized than in the male brain. The brain center for spatial relationships is typically larger and more organized in males than in females. Girls typically understand language better, see and understand facial expressions and emotional cues, typically do better with the verbal requirements of school while boys typically do less well with emotional cues but do better with hands on tasks to learn. I use the word typical because there are many individual variations.

Can any of these mental skills be advanced if we want to educate boys and girls to improve their skills. In most cases the answer is yes but it takes time and effort. We are revisiting the idea of same gender math classes and language classes so we can adapt teaching methods to specific genders. There is mounting evidence this might be helpful to both.

The important key for parents is this. We will find similarities between boys and girls. We will see uniqueness for each gender. If we worry more about equality between the sexes than we emphasize the need for understanding individual differences we might penalize our children. We can do both without making one feel less important than the other if we know how they are different and how we can treat each with appropriate care.

This happens, in my opinion, because the positive conditions we hope marriage will provide do not appear to create themselves or happen by chance. Love and happiness and all other positive qualities we hope marriage brings to us typically result from effort, skill, and a willingness to improve ourselves through behavior change and growth. Less than ten percent of married couples report they have a relationship which seemed magical from the start and which continues throughout their lives together. The other ninety percent either end their marriages, or live in some times of love and happiness combined with resignation, acceptance of less than desired, reduced expectations, obligations for the children, and guilt for mistakes.

This might seem like dismal view of marriage, and it could be, but I do not intend it that way. I believe these conditions exist because most people do not understand the axiom. Bad things happen because good things don’t. If we understood that idea, we would look around ourselves, find out about the good things which are related to love and happiness we feel, or hope to feel for our partners and immediately and persistently communicate more about love, do things which show love, and share in anything which can produce more of it.

This is not a simple process, but when a person follows it well, marriage improves. Here is one example. There is a great deal of evidence which suggests that if one person decides to work a little harder to do things which communicate love and happiness, that same person will feel more love and happiness even if the other person does not. What does that mean? It might mean many things but there are two conclusions I would like to suggest. First, it is clear that one’s actions produce some part of what one feels. If that is the case, and it seems true to me, then anyone could increase his or her love and happiness by trying harder to create those feelings. Another, and second conclusion we could reach is that if we can cause some of our own positive feelings then our partner is never fully to blame for our negative feelings. We would need to acknowledge that both how we act and how our partner acts are responsible. Try out both of those ideas out. Set aside three or four days a week and on those days display several forms of love, warmth, kindness, gratitude, and helpfulness. Do not measure your success by anything you want from your partner. Measure it by your feelings. Then, during the same week, whenever you talk about your feelings indicate they are caused by what both people do. “I am happy and it is because of what I am doing and what you are doing, so thank you for your part.” See if you can reduce defensiveness and threat. If you can do that, you might at the end of the week discover the truth to the idea that bad things happen because good things don’t.

Rather than simply recognize the inherent conflict between two areas of focus, it might be useful for us to think about how we could connect them and be successful at both. This idea does not occur to some people I know. I have watched people drive themselves to do and to accomplish their work-related goals participating in their relationships only for the purpose of achieving these ends. One man committed himself to make a million dollars one year and lost his family. He achieved one goal. Being something, like having integrity, is often considered unimportant if the desired ends can be achieved. In many of these situations people might be successful at their work but their family relationships are a shambles. In some cases, because of the lack of fulfillment their work gives them, they show the ultimate disregard for their family relationships by having affairs with like minded people they meet at work.

I have also known people who make their relationships as significant as their accomplishments. They form friendships with people at work which exist and are valued by them independently of whether they lead to greater achievement. They create harmony with their family and friends and their work so that good effort is given to all. Further, the value they attach to “being” something such as being honest and dependable seems to always be important. So, I know for many it is possible to be successful at both being and doing.

How then shall we live and what do we teach our children? It starts, in my opinion, with the formation of three guiding principles. (1) Give a bit more priority to our relationships. Make the work we do the servant of the relationships we hope to achieve. Do things, go to work and be productive, as part of what we do to ensure relationships are successful, valued, and important. Many new marriages end because one or both parties do not care enough about that relationship to work and be productive. We can show love by working to provide for each other. (2) Teach every relationship skill we can think of to children at the same time we teach achievement and work related skills. In our world of emphasis on doing, we are failing to set examples and to teach our children all the relationships skills which are possible for them to know. They can learn compassion, for instance, while they are learning to organize to be productive. (3) Focus on the human qualities such as friendship, sincerity, kindness, respect, and graciousness in every setting. These enduring qualities make people successful in relationships and in their work. We can do all three and not limit ourselves or our children.

This conflict will probably not include another discussion which I wish could take place. The bill is designed to support efforts by school personnel. In that setting school teachers may in fact have some influence if they organize the teaching plan well. Some of the curriculum materials are very good. But, they typically are not able to create a context of instruction where children can learn most effectively about sex and love, sex and commitment, the emotional and psychological harm premarital sex can produce, and sex as connected to the perpetuation of personal values. They typically do not have the emotional relationships with students which make their ideas and instructions powerful enough to cause most youth to learn and follow. This context is more effectively created in the home with parents and other family members. The problem is that parents typically do not talk to or teach their children about sex. Many research attempts show that 25% or less of the parents get involved. This is because they report that they don’t know what to say, they are embarrassed about talking openly about sex, and they don’t have the type of relationship with their children that comfortably allows such personal and intimate conversations. It would be great if we could have some combination of school and parental involvement where both did their jobs or could find a way to motivate parents to do the job.

This need is significant because for many the controversy about abstinence sex education limits the discussion about a related but less often talked about issue. This is related to the enormous increase in sexual information available to children from a very early age. This is not just pornographic material which is bad enough. Varieties of sexual behavior, as we all know, are shown in explicit and in fairly subtle forms in movies, on the internet, blatantly and openly in conversations with other youth, and many other perceived forms. What is talked about and how often it is talked or communicated about signals its importance for many kids. As a result, for many youth, the presence of so much sexual information in many forms suggests to them a “script” which is the most common norm for teens. Many are engaging in sexual adventurism which might seem harmless at first but which often leads to more than they think. This means that to be accepted and belong many think they must be able to discuss their sexual experience with others and not being experienced will result in ridicule. The biological and social motivation combine and many of our children get involved in sexual contact much earlier than they otherwise would. When youth have this experience and they are not prepared mentally or emotionally for it, the negative effects can be long lasting.

If we could identify the characteristics of a child who might be prone to these types of terrible and unhappy experiences, we might be able to help them be less vulnerable. Further, we might be able to ensure that more of our children are strengthened so they live better and more happy lives. I am not certain that we can identify every children precisely because to date we do not have a perfect method of identifying who will be vulnerable. But, I am writing from my own experience hoping it might help any parent who reads this.

First I will write about the the characteristics of children who may vulnerable to addictions. Then I will try to give suggested solutions. Children who might be especially vulnerable show certain indications. (1) These children are often quiet and self reflective. (2) These children may have some social anxieties which motivate them to be alone. (3) These children might have difficulty finding emotional fulfillment in their relationships with others and with regular activities. They often feel bored or empty where positive emotions are concerned. (4) These children often have depressed moods and seek to comfort themselves. (5) Children vulnerable to addictions might be high strung, very anxious, and susceptible to stress and tension. (6) They are often oppositional to parental authority and seek to comfort themselves after they have some conflict with parents. (7) These children might have difficulty changing a sad feeling to a happy feeling even when someone is trying to comfort them.

Now, what can parents do? Take a look at the emotional climate of your family and see if you can make it positive and keep it that way. You can do this by increasing affection. compliments, expressing optimism, and warmth. Next, spend time and increase communication time with family members including one on one time. Simple conversation with parents is very fulfilling for most children. Pay attention to individual children’s unique qualities in a way that lets him or her know that you have a personal interest. Emphasize the importance of self control and teach it actively by showing examples, explaining the benefits, and rewarding achievement of it. Focus on the importance of honesty and being honest. Teach it by talking often, emphasize its importance, and show examples of being honest yourself. Point out examples of honesty in other people and communicate its importance and the fact that you admire those who are very honest. You can also teach the ideas of responsibility and dependability which require self control. Show children how to recover from disappointments by doing something fun, talking with others, or thinking about hopeful things. Help them develop faith in God and develop behavior that retains that faith. Teach them about love and how to care for others. Lastly, show how their own actions have consequences for others that really matter.

We live in an age where there are powerful attractions for children. Technology reinforces habitual behavior that may turn into addictions. Sex and other stimulants are more readily available to children. For their sakes and for ours an ounce of prevention is truly greater than a pound of cure.

In my view, most schools have great challenges and where most teachers, for instance, are highly committed and skillful people there are some who are not. Many teachers have very large classes and once they develop teaching methods, the very hard work of teaching is made easier by repeating what has been developed and used in past years. Even if all teachers were highly competent they would still be dealing with more children less well prepared to learn and achieve. Many parents are working two jobs, both parents are working hard, many are single parents who often have neither enough time nor energy to follow up on school homework and/or teach successful skills. Many parents feel their involvement with schools is a public relations task, not worthwhile, or they are embarrassed because their children represent failure or some other problem. As a result of all these we do not have the type of system that best promotes children’s achievement. What to do?

We have tried changing the way parents are involved with their schools and we have seen remarkable success as measured by children’s achievement. Instead of seeing the partnership as a connection between home and school we have defined it as a partnership between teacher and parents who work together on behalf of the students in that very class. By giving teachers and parents a way to communicate about what each does, they can communicate about their children’s success rather than their problems. Parents appear to be more motivated because it is clear to them their effort can result in improved results for their children now, in the class they are in. We also gave parents and teachers a set of activities which we consider “participation strategies,” designed to help children succeed in both places. This idea came from the notion that often children are well intended they just don’t know what to do and if they did they would be less of a problem and more obedient and successful. Except in some rare cases we have found that to be true for most kids. I invite anyone to see a demonstration of “achievement synchrony,” by going to teachr.org to see a documentary film of this process.

You will see that parents can learn how to organize their families to ensure children have high level achievement motivation rather than assume this motivation is natural and will appear when they enter school. Teachers can learn how to help students be much more excited about learning and achieving. The best motivation for teachers are highly motivated students.

We are introducing this into schools and providing the materials for teachers at no cost to the school. If you know of someone, or a school who might be interested, please write and let me know.

Some used to think that individuals with these problems were weak in some way, but now we know that anyone could be vulnerable to these powerful emotions, even those who may not have had any previous experience with them. When they do happen, the experience is often so dramatic that we are almost overwhelmed. At first we might retreat and fold under the pressure and simply wish to sleep for long periods or avoid other people. Soon though we discover those forms of behavior do not lead to solutions and then we begin to look around for something better. What we do that eventually leads to success usually is based on our emotional economy.

It is the law of supply and demand. In an economic sense if the demands grow greater then supplies are used faster. In a business sense this might look like a good thing but when demand grows faster than available supplies, the business might fail because it cannot deliver what customers want. What happens to human beings when supplies run out but the demands still exist? Right now, you might be thinking that I am going to suggest that a person needs to take time to replenish themselves by resting and recreating. That might be useful but it is not the point of this article.

Every individual has an emotional “adaptation level,” which stays steady most of the time. When we learn about what is best for us we usually organize our lives to maintain this steady state. But, some use more energy than others to maintain it and some people can restore it faster when it is depleted. This means that the effects of living on us probably should be not understand as applying to people in the same way but as highly unique. In the interchanges between our own feelings and the influence of people and events in the environment, we go through several cycles of adding and subtracting emotions and energy. In a healthy climate we balance sleep, eating, positive attitudes and other “supplies,” with whatever the environmental pressure demands from us. We might even have a bank account for times when there are greater demands than there are supplies and we survive the run on supplies. But what about those times like holidays, traumatic events, or sustained duress? What do we do then?

Instead of approaching these seasons and times of high demand, like we ordinarily live, we can and should develop plans to add supplies. It requires only that we understand ourselves well enough to add a bit of discipline, organize a bit better, and know what adds benefit to us. It likely will be different in some ways for every person. Here are some examples.

Suppose I know what my own “adaptation level,” is. I might be very calm, in the middle, or quite vulnerable and easily stressed out. Or, I could look around and see how much strain I am currently experiencing. Then, I decide that I need to add supplies for me based on what I know. I do this either because of what is going on now, or because of what is coming (e.g. a holiday season). What works? Let’s see what doesn’t first.

It is easy to see why heavy drinking might be part of anyone’s experience. It changes what we feel. But, in the end it tends to make things worse. We might try some counterfeit measures like extra marital relationships, more drugs and medication, and do this to make us feel good. We think we need these as a coping response. These almost always are limited and have negative side effects.

For most people what does work is a combination of good sleep, eating, and exercise as the basics. After that it is spending time with supportive people and spending less time with toxic people. It is learning how to extract positive lessons from life experiences, developing a mental structure that gives worth or value to what we do. It is expressing happiness to others, feeling some autonomy from what others do or say, and thinking of ourselves as at least partly in control enough to make ourselves feel happier. If possible it might be good to add in a few moments of relaxation and etc.

Now, lets suppose we teach these methods to our children so they can use them when they start school, participate in demanding school plays, when tests and grade pressure increase at school, and when friendships end. We and they would be able to handle life’s challenges better and we would have to spend less time dealing with grumpy, disobedient, and oppositional children.

His point and that of many other authors like him focuses on that fact that brains develop and change based on what mental task is required of them. Therefore, when faced with the impact of technology a child’s brain will form networks of neurons to enable it to better serve or master the activity required of it. When one part of the brain is being exercised another part will not be.

Some conclusions from this research are positive and some are disturbing where a child’s motivation is involved. Some positive things appear to be that technology can help children process information faster and in greater quantities. The reason they are disturbing is that many school teachers are telling about increasing numbers of students who are unmotivated. Many parents are feeling the effects of that from children who will not do homework or who put up a frustrating fight when asked to do it. They would prefer to spend time on the computer or doing something else with TV, e-mail, text messaging, games, and etc. Let’s see if we can understand why.

These researchers have discovered what they believe is a new mental state. It is called “consistent partial awareness,” which comes from doing several tasks at the same time and which is learned because the mental tasks required of technology do not include deep analytical thinking or reasoning. This mental state may be related to a shorter attention span and boredom, especially when children are faced with the form of learning that takes place in classrooms. This type of learning is where a teacher is talking and students listen and occasionally discuss, they read, and they work on projects which required sustained thought.

Other research has focused on the idea that surfing the internet activates and exercises parts of the brain which impact decision making. For instance, in the natural developmental path children make decisions using the temporal lobes or centers of the brain by the ear and below it. This allows them to be concerned for self preservation and focus on the simplest and central parts of a decision. But, it is not the most mature form of decision making. When mature adults make decisions they are more likely to use the pre frontal lobes, in the front of the brain, which are the centers for complex problem solving and permit an individual to take into account more things which are related to the decision. One of these is the impact of the decision on other people or seeing the potential consequences. Some initial research suggests that technology exercises and therefore builds the centers in the temporal lobes but not the pre frontal lobes. These means that individuals will be more self absorbed, impulsive, and less likely to understand the consequences for their decisions on others.

Lastly, for today, there is evidence that high users of technology are less likely to develop the centers of the brain which enable them to understand emotional and facial cues. This suggests that such individuals will be less comfortable in face to face communication.

To understand the possibilities of all this, consider the requirements placed on any individual student in a typical family or classroom. Work needs to be done, listening and attention are required. Rules need to be paid attention to and exist because parents and teachers are trying to provide healthy environments for every student. Students will be required to cooperate, be responsible, and succeed with one another. Now, what if your child is not able to successfully participate in this environment. He or she will become bored, display problems with conduct, and feel unmotivated.

What could we do? We need to place children in situations where they are involved with people and participate more often in social relationships. Then we need to structure their time with technology so what they do there is balanced with other experiences such as hands on learning, reading books, and participating in parent-child learning adventures. Learning can and should be interesting and exciting. Whether students find learning exciting may depend on whether their brains are exercised in the right places.

There are reasons for the fact that many of our children may not be motivated to achieve. One of these is the possibility that achievement motivation is not valued in our culture like it used to be. It can be included in stories, music, and other “influence,” methods so that children read, hear about it, and see it in action. But, our culture has taken a side trip on achievement and the whole idea seems less prominent in our literature and folklore.

We should also consider is what is happening in our schools. Consider the challenge facing teachers. Many do not get a lot of parental support and have difficulty managing students who represent real or potential problems with conduct and then disrupt the education of other students. They are measured by the student’s achievement test scores and so they arrange their teaching methods to focus on that outcome. This makes classrooms places where verbal intelligence and recall memory provide an advantage. When a child has less verbal skill and memory for bits and pieces of information they are left out of the main emphasis given by these teachers.

In some states, districts, and schools teachers feel unappreciated and teach like it. This means that instead of being enthusiastic and warm which requires emotional energy, many teachers husband their energy by developing work sheets and other devices to simplify their work and use them over again to reduce their work load. Thus, many of our children do not receive the energy which might encourage them on a day to day basis.

What do we do? Many of us motivate children by providing rewards for high grades or impose punishments if children do not achieve high grades. Others do nothing hoping their children will mature and see the importance of getting good grades. I propose something different.

It is not simply grades we are after. I believe parents could and should see schools as an opportunity for their children to learn academic material but also to learn the motivation to achieve. This is a life skill which they will need on many other occasions. The motivation to achieve will help them further their education, help them succeed in the work place, set goals and organize their lives, live up to their potential, and find life’s best opportunities for themselves. Now, how do we teach it?

There are several methods which I intend to write about in the next series of articles. Today, I propose that we consider this idea. Children can learn motivation by estimating and anticipating what they will do. For instance, we can ask children what they would do with a family problem, how they intend to solve one of their own problems. We can ask them to estimate the time it will take to complete a task such as homework, making their beds, and etc. We can ask them to estimate how much they can accomplish in a given amount of time, such as one hour. We can ask them to decide how they want to act in a social setting (a party) and then ask them if they were able to do what they hoped they would. Lastly we can ask them to set goals, develop a plan, and see if they can achieve them. Achievement motivation lies within the minds and hearts of those who have it. It can be taught.

In the mid twentieth century Gregory Bateson pointed us to the idea that when human beings communicate both cannot do so at the same time. As a result they take turns. When people, especially married people, take turns they unwittingly create one of three types of interaction. To understand this it will be important for you to understand a different way of thinking about your marriage. Instead of viewing your marriage from the point of view of thinking about your spouses’ individual personality consider both together or what happens when both people each have a series of one turn to communicate. Instead of two individuals by themselves we are looking at what the husband says and does AND what the wife does and says in justaposition. When two people’s statements and actions are examined together we can see that an “exchange,” occurs and one of these is to exchange opposite behavior. For instance, one is loud, the other soft. One talks a lot, the other is more silent. One is clean, the other is more sloppy. One may be dominant and the other submissive, and so forth. We often say that opposites attract but this is something different. When a total relationship is filled with these “opposite exchanges,” each person is preoccupied by the other and highly reactive to what the other person does and says. Both feel like they are controlled by the other and both feel great rigidity in their lives and blame the other for it. One or both may turn their negative feelings toward themselves and engage in self pity, self criticism, and self condemnation. When depression occurs one or both people tend to blame themselves as much or more than the other.

These three conditions: (1) reacting to other people and feeling heavily influenced by them, (2) feeling controlled, and (3) self criticism are the most common causes of a reactive depression. Why is this useful to think about? As we know there are some types of depression that are based on inherited tendencies and chemical problems. Too often, however, we attribute depression to some mental condition or a personality problem when quite often it is related to the intense emotional interaction in a marriage relationship. When people exchange a lot of opposite behavior the person who is depressed may seek counseling and discover some relief but will not be able to resolve the problem permanently. This is because the growth they achieve in themselves is quite often contradicted by events in their marriages. Most mental health professionals and MD’s are learning to ask about the quality of people’s marriage whenever they see health issues whether physical or emotional.

There are several things couples can do to resolve this problem and improve the quality of their marriage. This will give both people a stronger sense of freedom and more positive feelings. If you want examples of how to do this go to “improve your marriage,” on this website and check out the two training programs for married couples. These include one focused on communicational intimacy which will change opposite interaction to mutuality. You can find worksheets which you can print out and use at home. Plus, there are some “skill building,” flash programs that will help you learn new skills.

Making our marriages healthy does more than make us happy. They in fact contribute to our sense of well being which has positive health benefits. Insurance actuaries inform us that troublesome marriages and divorce typically cost us seven years of life. Unless we wish to shorten our life span this should motivate us to make every effort to create very satisfying relationships with each other.

Of course it is very important for parents and teachers to communicate about children’s education. But, in addition, much of the time parents want to talk about things that are not on a teacher’s list. Teachers feel obligated to address grades, tests, attendance, and etc. all of which are important. Parents want those too but also often want to discuss children’s social abilities, self concept or esteem, and other emotional qualities. These are usually saved to last and if a discussion is had about them at all, many parents report the conversation is often hurried and incomplete.

What then makes a good parent-teacher conference? These conferences are vastly improved if teachers know parents and something about the family of the child who is a student. They are improved if teachers are well organized (which they usually are) and make time for parental concerns. They are improved if the conference is part of an on going relationship which was created at the beginning of the year. They are improved if teachers send an agenda of possible topics in advance and give parents time to prepare for them. They are improved if parents come with specific questions to ask based on the knowledge they have about how the teacher has structured the classroom, the types of learning activities employed by the teacher, and some things about peer relationships their children experience. They are improved if parents leave with more than good or bad feelings but with some constructive ideas about how to organize their families to promote achievement and their children’s success in the future. One way we can all improve our educational system is first to prepare our children for learning and achievement better than many do and to participate in the process better than we often do.

All this takes a bit more time but the positive impact on the child is worth it. When parents do not have time or are willing to arrange and spend the time then there is less positive impact. Teachers are busy as well and confronted with numerous tasks and a lot of work. If parents and teachers give into their pressures, however, the person who does not benefit is, of course, the child. Like I say, “we can do better,” and for the sake of our children and the future of our nation, we need to.

We have developed what we believe will be a truly remarkable asset. It is a system we call “achievement synchrony,” which combines a teaching approach for teachers with parental involvement. Both teacher and parents use a simple structure to organize family and classroom for achievement. The idea behind this is that high achieving children typically come from homes where there is a match between home and school and because of this match they better understand how to participate more successfully at school. When this match does not take place children leave home and have more difficulty participating successfully in school. Often their lack of achievement is not due to a lack of ability but the result of “distance,” between home and school. When we create this synchrony, children work harder, get their homework done more often, and at higher standards. In addition, students feel accountable, the teacher has fewer conduct problems to deal with, and parents have better relationships with their children, have an easier time motivating children to do their family chores, and with less conflict. We have tested this with dozens of schools and hundreds of families.

Now we are prepared to make an unusual offer to schools. With the great need to improve educational opportunities for our children we have thought to do so with added money and greater technological involvement. Both these may help and may even be necessary. But, we have demonstrated that it is the people to people relationships that appear to be fundamental and when achievement synchrony exists between teacher, students, parents, and peers we see a remarkable rise in achievement of a variety of kinds. We also see better behaved children in school and at home.

We are now prepared to make this offer. The Legacy Foundation will pay for the expenses for one class if the school will pay expenses for one additional class. If at least two teachers use this approach in the same school, each has an ally who can provide support and be used to bounce ideas off of. In this way the school can actually see the program work over time and will eventually see how useful it will become for the entire school. Finally a school has a way to raise the level of preparation children have when they come to school. This appears to significantly impact a school’s ability to teach and educate. Schools who use “achievement synchrony,” see a 5% to 7% percent improvement after the first year and often more improvement in subsequent years. If you wish to see how this will work in your school please contact me via the comments for this blog. You can see a documentary of this program titled, “Closing the Distance,” on teachr.org free website we use to help parents and teachers communicate. It is also available for view on this website, leadingfamilies.com by clicking on the button titled, “close the distance.” Our goal is to improve education on behalf of children and to do that I believe we need to reduce the distance between people who work with children. I am very enthusiastic about this because it has shown that it will improve conditions for minority children and children whose backgrounds do not prepare them well to take advantage of education which can set a more positive foundation for their lives.

We can do better for our children and we can make it possible to give many greater opportunities than we have in the past. It is worth our time and attention.

The interesting connection between parental stress and children’s health was first recognized in the study of resilient children (those less vulnerable to emotional and physical problems). Researchers found that children differ in the way they react to the attachment they have with their parents. Some are highly reactive and other children are less so. This article deals with the highly reactive child.

In this research children were connected to a multi channel polygraph so researchers could see how all children in a family reacted. This device measured blood pressure, heart rate, and electrical levels in the skin. Here is what they found. When parents in the family had a sharp verbal exchange or were feeling higher levels of stress, some children reacted more strongly than other children. These were called “highly reactive.” This happened even though these children were not in the same room as their parents or in direct communication with them. Other children in the same family did not react the same way. The highly reactive children were found to be ill more often with stomach difficulties, allergies, colds, and flu like symptoms. In life they missed school more often due to illness.

The findings from this research suggest a clear connection between parental stress and children’s health. If the child is vulnerable or reactive to emotional experience they are more likely to be negatively affected when parents have stressful experiences. What does this mean?

Since life has stress in it, parents are not free from feeling and reacting to it. So, it is wise for parents to recognize that one or more of their children may be affected while others may not. Further, those children who are affected by parental stress may need more conversations to help them understand they are not responsible for it nor will they be influenced by it. Parents can also help children recognize these times and give them a “mediating,” thought or activity process which limits the extent of their reaction. Lastly, parents can give greater emphasis to the importance of positive, hopeful, pleasant, and warm statements and try and bring these into the family environment more often.

It would probably be a good thing if we all better understood what we react to and what we do not. It might help all of us to find ways to understand how our children are influenced by our emotional reactions. Most of us could benefit from making our homes and families a little more positive. Try it out.

I am acquainted with three longitudinal lines of research being conducted in the United States about the consequences of divorce. All three suggest that while in some cases adults benefit from divorce children usually do not and we do not discover that until the children are themselves attempting to create intimate love relationships of their own. At this time when trying to form their own relationships they are fearful, mistrustful, and find great difficulty in believing in the possibility of loving and being loved.

All of this suggests to me that from time to time we ought to reexamine our ideas about love and its significance. In this article I want to take a look at what full and significant love means to your children and to their future success. We live in a time where children are concerned that many who claim to love children also injure them and people injure them who do know how to love them by organizing a form of care that promotes their success.

We seem to appreciate that when children feel and participate in loving experiences they are more likely to have positive self esteem, have healthy childhood emotions, and generally thrive better than when they do not. Having reminded us of that I now need to propose that this outcome only works if there is a form of love that includes some specific ingredients. These include love as attention, predictability, warmth, encouragement, limits, teaching, and companionship.

If we really wanted to promote our children’s future success, however, we would also recognize they benefit from seeing us as their parents communicate love to each other, resolve differences with respect, and work toward agreement about discipline without arguing and bitterness. Or, if we cannot do that, at least do not blame them for our sadness and hurt.

Some adults do not naturally feel love for their children. Some who do have emotional issues that make it difficult to handle the stress and pressure of child care. Others, of us may become too busy to care well. In the final analysis most children can adjust to and live through some problems. Where love is concerned, however, there is clear evidence that children who grow up around love in their families tend to feel more hopeful, do better at creating love relationships themselves, and do better and finding many different forms of success.

There is also a line of research related to “dogmatism,” or how rigid a person thinks. Mental rigidity is holding firmly to pre-established beliefs and refusing to consider flexible or alternative ideas. Further, and quite often, a dogmatic person tends to also insist that others believe as he or she believes. Such a person is thought to have a “closed mind.” Open minded people consider many different points of view, tend to be better listeners, and to have better social relationships.

Why all the interest in people’s mental styles? For one thing, people who are field independent (refer to themselves for answers) tend to do better academically but less well socially. If such a person is in a marriage, for instance, his or her partner may feel isolated. If someone is married to a person with a closed mind, he or she is not only isolated but will feel rejected. When two people marry who are equally rigid then conflict is often frequent and intense.

Children can be understood in terms of their mental style as well and parents play a role in determining how open or closed minded children become. Since children are developing and growing they are vulnerable to parental examples. Parents who are rigid about some things often teach the same mental qualities to their children because they insist their children see and understand things from their (the parents’) point of view. Further, the parents in this case are often demanding about it.

Researchers speculate that this may be the means of transmitting political and religious values from parents to children. In our case, however, it is not enough to simply study human behavior. We want to understand what makes individuals happy and relationships fulfilling. That is why it is good to understand one another and learn to make successful adjustments to each other.

The reason for noticing this advertisement is because it made me think about times when it is very important to be slow and understand the importance of this idea. I wish you to know that I have gone through life trying to do as much as I could in as little time as possible. I have gone faster on some occasions than I should have. So, for me this is an important self-revelation. Let me show you what I mean.

While dating it is important for kids to know that sex is fast and love is slow by comparison. If they get too much sex too soon it can complicate the formation of love. When a child is having some trouble it is important to meet the challenge but then be slow enough to ensure the child learns correctly. When a child is faced with a difficult problem it is very comforting to know that it is possible to go slow and gradual. When parents are rushing through life moving kids, getting things done, working, trying to keep up with their over scheduled schedule, it is a most important thing for them to sometimes slow down. Kids typically don’t remember how many trips we made to ball games or the fast pace of our lives but they remember the times when we played with them, flew kites with them, took them on long slow walks, and spent enough time talking with them carefully and slowly listening to them.

Parents are often in a hurry to get through some stressful challenge and then try to remember them as times where great learning took place. Mothers wish an end to their pregnancies and then after a few years have past they are grateful they no longer need to go through that but would like to remember them better than they do or recover some of the pleasurable feelings involved. They can hardly wait for bedtime and then later wish for one more evening with a child or their family.

Older people slow down physically and they like it because they can watch a sunrise or sunset from beginning to end. They can listen to the refrigerator hum in the morning quiet, eat their breakfast without hurrying, and walking slowly to a patch of flowers and spend all the time they want looking and thinking. They can look at pictures of their children without having to briefly glance and move on. They remember the moment the picture was taken and the pleasures of that time.

Having learned at least that much from others I once suggested to my wife that we sit on a grassy knoll on the beach in Oregon and from five o-clock on we watched the sun set in the Western ocean. We talked, fell silent, and talked again. We held hands, leaned against each other, introspected, and sensed each other’s moods. We both have very vivid memories of the slowness of that experience. It was not slow and boring. It was slow and loving.

I have been good at discovering what others have already learned, but being slow at the right time is something I recommend to anyone. Where our children are concerned I plead with you to be slow soon and take advantage of moments that might not come again. And, if you do go slow enough please treasure each part of that time.

The idea of belonging is not new, of course, and this emotional condition is widely recognized as a basic human need. Most also understand that belonging and membership are considered a basic ingredient of emotional and psychological health. The evidence which supports this view is often found in the connection between isolation and several forms of emotional disorders.

Currently, however, social trends suggest that we give much greater attention to the idea of belonging. We are seeing many forms of separation caused by time spent with cell phones and computers, internet browsing, pornography addictions, extensive business travel, large numbers of people who have never married. This cluster of experiences suggests that more and more people feel and live isolated from others.

Where marriage is concerned it has never been easy for couples to get themselves together in a complete sense. They might have sex or have moments of intimacy, but many couples, perhaps a majority, feel unsatisfied about the degree to which they feel themselves fully connected emotionally mentally, and physically. Instead we have dominating spouses, dominated spouses, indifferent spouses, inattentive spouses, emotionally insensitive spouses, withdrawn spouses, busy spouses, and rejecting spouses. All these are forms of separation and isolation.

When couples get it right however they report that being together is one of the greatest rewards marriage has to offer. They appear to accomplish this by doing some of the following things.

1. They talk often and really listen.
2. They try to make most important decisions together.
3. They work more to understand each other than they argue over who is right or wrong.
4. They express a great deal of appreciation for each other’s efforts to spend time together.
5. They make sacrifices to create companionship time.
6. They limit criticism or eliminate it preferring instead to look forward to what each may want.
7. They talk about and create a shared vision of what each wants for the marriage.
8. They have identified things they have in common as well as things they do not.
9. They view their differences as opportunities to talk and discuss.
10. They resolve differences by thinking up solutions that give each partner as much as possible.

In light of the rewards which come in the form of fulfillment and peace, it seems to me we could all do better living in ways to get ourselves together with others and then teach these ideas to our children. Getting ourselves together in our marriages is often the beginning of getting ourselves together with our children.

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 by communicating there is nothing wrong with that. One is not weak or inferior if he or she shows emotions. As I thought about that I remember a man telling about his frustrations 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. He made this observation. “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, respect, and understand ourselves 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 the 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, we often neglect to communicate 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 lead 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 the horn in the car to get her attention. It will certain;y include eliminating harsh, critical, and condemning language which seldom if ever should 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 we would all come 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, 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 teaching 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 to do 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 and shares ideas 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 and children deserve.

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, 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 amount 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 to 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 focused on parenting and studied parenting with several names. Some of these are child centered parenting, positive parenting, authoritative parenting, autocratic parenting, permissive parenting, etc. While the ideas these concepts have generated may be useful they do not directly address the two pillars of 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, 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.

I will give an example. Today most people agree on the symptoms of attentional problems The most common include susceptibility to distractions, difficulty concentrating, failure to develop self regulation skills, difficulty focusing on learning tasks, interrupting others, failure to keep time, and mood swings or vulnerability to depression. Hyperactivity may or may not be a part of attentional problems. Now, having described the most common symptoms consider other parts of the issue.

There is more than one type of attentional problem. One kind is based on the idea that the brain works inefficiently (especially brain neuron synapses) and a certain type of medication (e.g. ritalin) stimulates the production of a neural transmitter (dopamine) that helps the brain be more efficient. Another kind of attentional problem is based on the idea that the brain works too slow and receives more stimulation than it can handle, like a bottle neck, and children lose attention to external conditions because they are working on what is going on inside their brains. Another view is that the brain is working too fast and does not have enough information to keep it going well.

There are other types and there is still controversy about what causes it. Some, for example, still think that food, especially food dyes and sugar may be the cause. Based on my reading of the research there is no established link between food and this problem. Research has consistently shown that it is likely inherited because it is shown in cognitive disorders that can be passed on to one generation after another.

I have learned there are a few things parents can do to help out. (1) Change your parenting approach to address the child’s emotions before trying to control his or her actions. Learn to speak calmly and teach the child to focus on feelings and talk about them. Children in this situation typically are very anxious and need help managing their anxieties. (2) Create a structured rule environment where children can succeed and make progress at self management. This might include firmly enforced rules about bed time, meal time, social behavior, and etc. (3) As children grow older help them understand their own tendencies so they can talk about them and develop strategies for success. Children typically are very willing to understand themselves. (4) Practice cognitive skills such as memory, concentration, following directions after hearing two or three at one time discriminating between things that look alike, delay of gratification, and visualizing their plans. For instance, put six small objects in front of the child, give him ten seconds to look at them, then ask him to close his eyes while you remove one object. Ask which one is missing. Or, put a piece of candy out in the open and tell the child he can have a cracker now or the piece of candy in a few minutes if he is willing to wait. (5) Find them and reward natural talents where children can succeed. Many children with attentional problems may have strong rhythm and coordination skills, creativity, or the ability to build and make things.(6) Use a variety of learning methods where school is concerned, especially methods that will permit “hands on” experiences. Use see, hear, and touch methods. (7) Use medication only as a short term plan while behavior becomes stabilized then remove the medication and practice cognitive skills. If more medication is needed then use on an alternating basis between practice and stability. (8) Help children learn an internalized measure of their value so they are less dependent on schools achievement or social success for their self esteem.

We seem to be faced with increasing numbers of children who are diagnosed as having an attentional disorder. In my opinion, we need to help them, but we should also not forget there are many ways to promote their success and there are many who have attentional problems who have found areas of great achievement.

Until lately I have not thought that our ideas of space and time where matter where relationships are concerned. I have come to believe they are crucial and are so embedded in our lives they are often linked to a cognitive map we develop as we grow. In a family where much time is spent with each other family members often have a different mental map than someone whose childhood was in a family where members spent little time with each other. Families who live in the same place, for instance, appear to influence their children to stay close by. Families who move a lot tend to have children that move away from their home residence. When parents and children spend a lot of time together while children are young, the children often tend to spend more time with each other even after marrying themselves.

Further, our ideas about space seem to be learned in much the same way. The idea of “needing space,” which means being left alone, is another example of how people develop personal maps that include space and time. Some people need a lot of space away from others and some require less. Our ideas about when we need space and when we can be involved with others also can be part of this map. For instance, some individuals can stand little stress and want to be away to have their own space a lot more often than someone else.

As it turns out the ideas of personal space and the organization of time are two of the fundamentals which make or break relationships. A clingy person is desired only by someone who likes to be clung to. A clingy person who seeks closeness is often less attractive to someone who is highly independent and values his or her space. A punctual, on time person, values his or her time in this way and measures friendship or concern by whether the other person places similar value on time. Conflict in either of these areas suggests the possibility of other relationship problems. There are numerous other examples.

What does this mean? Probably a lot more than I am going to right about but at least a few of the following things. When selecting a potential marriage partner it would be well to get a good idea about how well you are matched on space and time. Learn how your friends think about those two things and examine if you can adjust to any differences between the two of you. It may save your friendship. Examine your own mental map and see what you believe about space and time. What you believe may influence where you want to live, how many people you want to live around, and how far you want to travel.

When do you want and need space from others and what kind of space do you wish for? What forms of time are important to you (just watch when you are on time and when you are not) and see if you are losing friends because you don’t pay attention to their ideas about space and time.

Some of us would do well to think a little more about space and time and if you don’t you probably will think about them when you have problems. It is easier to be proactive. The success of our friendships, marriages, and families may depend on it.

There are few family events more sobering that someone passing away. Even when the possibility is known in advance someone dying causes us to reflect and remind ourselves about things very important to us. I am old enough to have had both parents die, my in laws, a brother, and other family relatives as well. Professionally I have had the privilege of helping people who are terminally ill and their family members. I regard these experiences as a privilege because even though the emotions are solemn and sad, being with people during these times reveals much about them one ordinarily does not see.

Most of us are familiar with the grief cycle of denial, anger, resolution, acceptance, and eventually peace of mind. I have watched people go through those steps and even tried to help people move from stage to stage. In the process I have learned something else I would like to point out. It is about the role of death in families and how it is interpreted by them.

When I was in high school a student acquaintance was killed in a car accident. Because I knew her and traveled on the bus to school with her I was asked by her parents to be a pall bearer. I accepted without knowing much about that. As I watched her family deal with their loss I was able to begin my understanding of what death means to family.

I went to the cemetery and waited while the ceremonies were completed and was leaving when something very dramatic took place. In those days the officials didn’t wait until everyone was gone before they lowered the casket and as we were moving away from the grave they started the process. Hearing the associated sounds this girls mother broke from her husband’s comforting arm and started walking back toward the grave. Tears streaming down her cheeks she walked close by me saying, “don’t take my baby away.” She stumbled and fell to her knees, right in front of me, allowing her husband to catch her. He took her in his arms and restrained her while comforting her in the process. This whole scene shook me up a bit and has stayed in my memory. It made death and the process of adjusting to it very real.

From this family and many others I have learned that we can face death in different ways. Some of these are better for us and for members of the family. For instance, I have seen young couples give up on their marriages after a child dies. For some reason their love for each other dies too because they cannot get over the sense of guilt and blame they each feel for themselves and for the other. I have watched as parents children in accidents and felt their sorrow related to the missed opportunities which results. I have seen older people face death with grace and dignity. In all of it I have seen people face death with great courage and some with anger and resentment.

On one occasion a terminally ill man was so resentful of it he became grumpy, demanding, and very irritable. He made life miserable for the other members of his family. I had read an account where a therapist had helped someone face death by reminding him of a tomato plant and how it continues to ripen its fruit even after it is pulled from the ground. I tried that on him and it worked. He went home from my office sorry he was causing so much difficulty, gathered all his immediate family around him and apologized. He used his remaining time more positively.

I conclude from these and many other experiences that death gives us an opportunity to learn. Most importantly I have learned that the process of death and dying is subject to our own interpretation and most of want it to be full of meaning and importance. How we interpret death may be connected to religious beliefs or the absence of them but the awareness that we can choose how we interpret death gives us a sense of power that is very useful. Where families are concerned we can teach each other how to interpret it. We can use this tool as a way of comforting children, as a way of responding to our own loss, and as a way of facing it ourselves. For instance, we can understand that where there is great loss there was also great love. Where there is great sadness there was once great joy. Where there is great loneliness there was great belonging. Then, if we choose, we can think of the departed in those terms and remind ourselves of the many wonderful things they meant and will continue to mean to us. Having the choice to interpret death in a way that matters to us is indeed a wonderful thing.

When words are repeated they often catch our attention and when they are repeated in similar situations they seem more significant and may create more than casual interest.
For me, this is the case when married people talk about mistakes they have made and wish to excuse the mistake by describing it as small or little. One might say after making the mistake, “it is just a little thing.” The idea, I suppose, is that small mistakes should be more easily over looked and if one doesn’t do that then the inference is that the offended party is somehow unreasonable or unforgiving. While the motive for this whole business might be to limit embarrassment or shame, some small mistakes communicate something very big. I will give some examples.

A man saved for and purchased an expensive European car. He was very proud of it and loved to drive it and receive the admiring glances of other people. On one occasion, while he was at work, his wife took the car and while driving it, what hit by another driver denting the left front fender. When she told him about the accident, to her surprise he became angry at her and called her a familiar but hurtful name. When she recoiled he quickly realized his mistake and told her he was sorry and that he had just, “lost it” and she should not make too much out of it. But, she did.

On another occasion a husband and wife agreed on a business deal. When the husband was in a negotiation, he violated his deal with his wife and gave the other men more than what he and she had agreed. When he told her of what he had done, she was hurt and reminded him of their original agreement. He reacted defensively and blamed her for her lack of confidence in him, but then later he apologized. She found it difficult to accept what he had done. Was this a small thing?

On another occasion, a woman promised her husband she would meet him and their friends for dinner at a certain time. On the appointed evening she was forty five minutes late. She had been talking with one of her close friends and had failed to look at the time. This had happened more than once. When reminded about this she casually tried to make it look like the whole thing was overblown and unimportant. Was this a small thing?

By now you might be thinking that no one is perfect and I should just face that fact. Married people have to accept these sorts of things as part of being married. While many people are faced with some “small” mistakes and do not stay angry about them, other types of mistakes are seldom forgotten and quite frequently they are brought up again and again in subsequent arguments or discussions. They seem to have a life of their own and the memory of hurt lingers. On these occasions one spouse will blame the other for having too good a memory and failing to forgive.

In many marriages memories of these mistakes begin to characterize the relationship and both have their library of hurtful memories which are mingled in their thoughts about their relationship. Why are these little mistakes so hurtful and why are they remembered?

It is because these mistakes are not little they are serious because they are considered symbols of how committed, attentive, loyal, and loving one person may not be. When reasons for divorce are identified a researcher or writer might say it is because of disagreements about sex, money, or something else. But, even if a couple argues about sex or money inside those arguments is a growing belief that one or both do not demonstrate the priority that loving and being committed is of great value. In one case the man whose wife had a car accident could have asked if she was alright and since the damage had been done he could have controlled his tongue and avoided communicating to his wife that she was less important to him than the left front fender of his car. The businessman could have excused himself from his business negotiations and talked with his most important partner. All the people in the business negotiation would have understood. The woman who was often late could learn to value her word and her husband’s time. These are small things to symbolize commitment.

When it comes to the symbols of our priority in life, it is useful to remind ourselves that we want our marriage partner to love and care for us. We want our partner to be giving, loyal, and comforting. It is not a small thing if we want, even apply pressure, and then treat that person as if he or she is less important to us than something or someone else. This is true even if we have our own emotional reasons for the mistake. If we want commitment from the other person we need to show that same priority. It will ennoble us and reaffirm that we are “in to the other person” and know how to truly show the degree of our love.

Most believe that good work habits are an essential part of anyone’s success. And, most parents believe that good work habits are first learned at home. Therefore, work at home, in most families, is divided up among parents and children. From this point part of parents’ work is to get kids to do their work. It can be a real hassle. So, I offer the following suggestions.

Begin early. Start when children are young and invite them to perform a small task. If their language skills, at around three years, are good enough you can teach them to make their bed. This is done by following six steps: (1) show them, (2) practice with them, (3) invite them to do it by themselves, (4) while they are working leave for a few seconds and then return, (5) catch them working, (6) praise, hug, and smile when they are working and when the task is completed.

Add other tasks, show a positive example, teach cooperation, and label them as a “good helper, or good worker.” If you want to build “work,” into a child’s identity it is important for you to show a positive example yourself, give them tasks, and then build the ideas of working and achieving into their identities. Some children are more organized than others and will take to this more easily. Others will require more effort. When you show a positive example of work yourself, while getting them to do their chores, and then use positive labels to describe your children they will use the labels later to describe themselves. They are internalizing the meaning of the word as applied to them. When all of this is connected to the fact that work can be cooperative, which means that more than one person is required to complete the task, children learn their own work is essential for everyone’s success.

Increase their capacity for work. Everyone has some idea of how much can be accomplished in a certain period of time with a certain effort. Some learn that a lot can be accomplished and others learn a more measured approach. If you want your children to have a great capacity for work you can do the following. First, before they start their work (school homework is a good tool to teach this) ask them to estimate how long it will take to complete their work. Then, as they begin help them “self monitor” by organizing to be effective and then staying on the task until it is completed. For instance, many achievers talk to themselves while they are performing.

Teach standards of excellence. For everyone’s emotional health it is important to give allowance for children to get better and better at something rather than demanding perfection all at once. You can do this by asking children to evaluate their own work, pointing out good things, and then asking them to identify what they could do better. Then, with a little follow up they can see if it is possible to improve on their previous performance. Self evaluation by the children accompanied by guided participation from parents leads to better work and more emotional health. A lot of criticism and pressure from parents can motivate children to work but they work with fairly high levels of anxiety.

What about incentives and rewards? Many parents use positive reinforcement or token systems where children get a reward for doing their work. Positive reinforcement works and many parents swear by it but there is one caveat we should note. With some children if you use rewards they will not find the intrinsic pleasure or satisfaction that motivates them to persist to achieve at high levels. So if you use a reward system of some kind, watch to see if children stop working when there is no reward. If this is the case you may want to combine conversation, warmth, and asking kids to identify their feelings of successful achievement at the same time you provide the reward. Then, thin out your rewards to see if your children will continue working. If they do you have taken an external reward and helped them find internal fulfillment.

Does the nature of the work matter? Yes, it does but children need to learn to work at things they don’t like so much as well as participate in just those things they like a lot. To help motivate them use the “Premack Principle,” (after David Premack) which means that you put low probability tasks in front of high probably tasks. That is, they can watch TV after they get their homework done.

Going through the effort to teach good work habits is worth it. Children are productive, their sense of power and adequacy is raised, and they will receive more satisfaction with themselves. Plus, they will grow up and move out instead of staying with you so you can provide for them.

In any academic discipline there are interesting, even eye popping, discoveries that professionals know but seldom communicate with other people. These bits of information often have long term and very powerful impacts. Because of this it is surprising that the discovery is not immediately jumped on and there are many people competing to be famous as the author of it. One of these, in my opinion, is about the benefits of comforting children.

I suppose the idea of comforting a child seems so basic that everyone knows it is important. Or, maybe, we think everyone knows how and when to do it. Neither of these appear to be true. Not everyone knows how important it is and why. Not everyone knows how and when to do it well.

Comforting, for those who do know, is an act of kindness in the face of distress, pain, unhappiness, lost hope, or sorrow. It can be displayed as soothing soft voice tones, increased attention, listening to sorrows, holding and caressing, expressions of hope and encouragement. There are many other displays of it.

Some people have difficulty recognizing the emotional situation of the child and then discriminating a genuine need for comfort from annoying behavior such as whining, complaining, and other signs of malingering. So, instead of comfort they are likely to ignore the emotions, confront the child, demand that he or she face up to challenges, and/or otherwise react to the annoying aspects of the child’s behavior. This is often because they wish to end their own irritation.

The remarkable discovery made about the comforting process should make all of us work hard to learn to recognize when a child is in need of comfort and deliver it with tenderness, patience, and skill. This is because comforting is also a process of helping children transform negative emotions into something more positive. Helping them feel better is an emotional reality. When children are not comforted enough and over a long period of time they do not learn how to change their negative feelings. Later as adults when they are depressed or anxious they have no history of changing their feelings and are made more distressed by the idea their depression or other negative emotions may have no end they know about. Feeling something negative and believing you cannot change it is truly an unhappy experience.

For our children’s sake then it is important for us to value our ability to comfort them and start this process at the very beginning of their lives while they are infants and continue throughout childhood. It is a sign of very good parents who can help their children feel fear and become confident, face discouragement and feel hope, feel alone and instead become secure, feel sad and then feel happier. It is a good thing when parents can help children who feel physical or emotional pain by giving the right attention so they can face their challenges with belief they can be healed.

What we didn’t know was that this process, which may seem common to everyone, has lasting consequences for our children. When parents learn to comfort they are changing one set of emotions from bad to better and giving their children a much happier future.
Imagine the great gift this can be to your children.

It has been a privilege for me to know many people who have worked very hard to make their marriages successful. I have watched them tackle problems ranging from a small communicational difference to betrayal and years of conflict and indifference. As a group, and in most cases, they have cared about themselves, their relationship, their children, and the preservation of their families. To them I owe a great debt because they have demonstrated amazing commitment.

From them I have learned much and I believe I have some responsibility to share what I have learned with others. I am trying to do that in this installment. After working with many people I have been able to observe there are some qualities or characteristics that make it more likely a marriage will be rewarding and will last. I will describe four.

First is the willingness to control or regulate ourselves in behalf of the marriage. An example includes controlling our language so we don’t criticize or condemn our partners.
Another might be to control anger. The actual form of self control may vary from couple to couple and may also include regularly performing valued tasks such as regular meals, going on dates, communication, and etc. All these require that each person exercise enough self control to do things which promote the marriage and not do things which harm it. The absence of this type of self control is, in my experience, almost always associated with conflict and unhappiness.

The second idea is that of freedom. Marriages are more likely to last and be happy when each person has a sense of freedom of choice and ensures that the other person feels this same feeling. Controlling another person, indifference to the other person, demanding and complaining all rob people of their feelings of freedom and without freedom the sensation of love diminishes. A person’s need for freedom is unique in many ways and has to be addressed in a way unique to the couple, but its absence is a factor in every unhappy relationship and its presence is involved in every happy relationship I have known about.

Third, successful couples learn how to communicate to each other that their concern for each other is greater than the issues they are discussing. For instance, while making plans or making a decision one turns to the other and asks, “what do you want or, is this alright with you?” he or she is sending the message that personal desires are important in every decision. Happy couples seldom go past the point of making or carrying out a decision unless they know both are on board. Sometimes one may not get what he or she wants because both cannot get their way at the same time. But, over time, concern must be shown for the desires of each person or there will be trouble.

Fourth, each person understands how to make emotional sacrifices and will do so in many situations. The intimacy of a marriage has many forms and qualities. It is more varied and exciting when it is not restricted by the emotional limitations presented by one or both. For instance, when one cannot communicate about his or her feelings, the sense of intimacy may be restricted. So, to promote and preserve their union one or both must sacrifice a natural tendency (in this case it would be to be silent) in order to give the other something wanted and needed. When successful this form of sacrifice brings with it the most tender form of love because this form of love includes awareness of and gratitude for the sacrifice.

Personal stability, or self control, freedom, showing priority and concern for the other, and sacrifice are those qualities which people who are unhappy learn in order to make themselves happy and fulfilled. Those couples who do these things, in the first place, may have challenges in their lives, but they bring their marriages to a place of high fulfillment and live long lives of happiness together.

In the late 90’s I participated in creating a program to help school teachers teach character development. This program called, “Character and Competence,” was successfully introduced into more than 150 schools. At the same time I worked on a parenting program that was designed to help parents strengthen their family leadership by structuring or organizing their family to promote learning, achievement, and character. This was titled, “The Six Best Things You Can Do For Your Kids.” It has been used by many families and the responses from many parents have been heartening.

This last year we put both of these together in a local school in an approach to get parents more relevantly and effectively involved with class room teachers. This program is called, “Close the Distance.” Instead of asking parents to come to meetings at the school we asked parents to form an ongoing partnership with classroom teachers who also structure or organize their classes around the goals of improved learning, achievement, and character. The idea is that children benefit when they have good relationships with influential adults and the adults have good relationships with each other.

So far the results are truly exciting. We have filmed four families and the teacher who have agreed to show how they participate in the approach to close the distance between them. Two single parent families and two dual parent families are involved. The true measure, of course, are the results demonstrated by the children involved, but there are other benefits that seem remarkable to me. Because they feel closer to each other and feel like partners the parents believe the school to be more helpful and the teacher feels more motivated because she thinks parents are working with her. The children have come to believe they can learn more than they originally thought possible.

All this made me realize that in our modern society we are separating ourselves from each other in many different situations and at many different levels. Many families are less likely to have regular family meals together, have talking binges with each other, and play together. Between home and school many parents feel isolated and many teachers feel that a lot of parents don’t care. In some cases the sense of community between parents and schools has been lost entirely. Parents are pulling their children out of the public schools and either home school them, enroll them in private or charter schools, and/or anything else they can think of to improve the teacher-pupil ration which creates greater intimacy and personal involvement.

Our society is represented by growing numbers of children born without access to their fathers and growing numbers of single people who are unmarried and cannot find people acceptable to them. The implied isolation of these two bits of data are fairly obvious. Many immigrants are finding it difficult to feel as if they belong. We see more incidents of violence and violent crime. We still see gaps in our efforts to eliminate racial and ethnic gaps. Probably for many reasons we and our children are in a time when belonging, membership, unity, and involvement seem to be more desirable in some ways than ever before.

What are the consequences? At this same time this sense of alienations exists we have seen a quadrupling of diagnosed cases of depression, increases in addictions, and increases in suicide rates. Are they related to social isolation? Probably no one thing causes any other one thing, but there is some evidence that some of biggest personal and social problems are the result of emotional and social barriers which some people cannot surpass.

We can respond to these current and future conditions by giving greater emphasis to teaching our children how to be more successful with others. This is not just a popularity program. This will require that we do a better job of teaching high quality social and friendship skills and a better job of teaching about the character traits of responsibility and integrity. These two qualities are among the most important when it comes to participating and belonging with others. Let’s get started.

Family life is often so hectic and busy that after all the meals, chores, traveling, conversations, and everything else, we feel lucky if we survive the day. Hopefully some of those times are fun and enjoyable laced with teaching moments that make us, as parents, feel like we are doing something useful. But, in the middle of this part of our lives there are things we should make certain we pay attention to. One of these is holding children accountable for what they agree to do and are responsible for doing.

On one occasion one of my children wanted to go out and play. I asked this boy, who was eight or nine years of age, to come home for dinner at a definite time in the evening. He agreed. He was playing in the neighborhood with friends and he could easily hear when I reminded him of the time. So, at the appointed hour and dinner was ready I let him know it was time for him to come in. Instead he and his friends went somewhere else and he didn’t come in for thirty minutes or so. Eventually he came traipsing in. When he arrived we had finished eating and I could have provided the consequence that he could not eat that evening. Some child discipline books suggest that course of action. But, I wanted to hold him accountable and so asked him if he would go out and ask his friends to come in to meet me. “Why?” he asked. I said, “I want to meet the people who are more important to you than I am!” A rush of feeling came to his face as he considered that awful possibility and he immediately wanted to make amends. We worked it out.

In the course of our relationships with our children there are times when we instruct, ask for, make demands about, and teach. In each of these times there is either an implied or very explicit message that our children are to respond to what we ask of them. Sometimes we ask them if they will agree to our requests and at other times we simply inform them of what we want and require them to carry it out. In every case there is a relational message from us to them or a promise from them back to us. It is a message of the importance we and they attach to the parent-child relationship. Most of the time children do not understand how important this is and need to be taught.

Accountability is about that relational message. What happens, if in the context of a relationship, someone makes a promise they do not keep? The possibilities include finding an excuse, telling how they forgot, lying, and ignoring the whole issue. In any of these cases one powerful, unspoken message is sent. It is about each person’s commitment, or lack of it, to their relationship. If a child makes a promise to a parent and does not keep it there is more going on than the promise itself. The child’s behavior is communicating something about himself and the value he or she places on his or her relationship with parents. Placing value or being indifferent to relationships is learned while growing up and often extends well into many other relationships. Success in relationships such as friendships, at work, in marriage, and later in parenthood depend on accountability. There appear to be large numbers of people who do not understand this.

So, when rearing children make certain you keep the promises you make to them. I saw a documentary about the life of a famous coach. His son described how, when his father was hired for the job he wanted, the first thing he did was to go to his son’s elementary school and tell him. He had promised to do so. When a child agrees to something, or understands he has been asked to do something by you, it is important to teach accountability. Accountability is about time and it is about communicating. When someone is accountable he or she will accept assignments, fulfill them, and then report how well they were completed in a timely manner. It is not just, “Make your bed.” It is, “Make your bed and come and tell me when you have completed it.”

Suppose you want to create a family rule. You could just impose it or you could discuss with children (if they are old enough) so they have a say in creating the rule at the beginning. When children know about a family rule and fail to honor it, do something more than impose a consequence for failure. His knowledge of the rule and his failure to keep it should be discussed in reference to his relationship with you. Ask, “What does this mean about your feelings for your father and me?” “Do you want to be a person who makes promises and then fails to keep them?”

Teach about accountability and help children understand it. Use examples and tell stories of people who are accountable. Then use the term when dealing with your children. Referencing your relationship and the way children can show respect for these relationships promotes accountability. When your children understand this important quality it makes it possible for them to be more successful in the future when it comes to making, keeping, and talking about other promises. Think about the many possibilities.

For the last few years more and more people have voiced concern about the impact of pornography and its addictive power. We have been told to make certain computers are in public areas and to put filters on every computer children use. We have also been plagued with pornography as it impacts marriages and it has cost many people what would otherwise be a happy marriage.

Many years ago, when marijuana first became available there was a controversy about whether it was actually harmful and at first there was not much evidence showing how harmful it was. Wise people still recommended that it be avoided and those who were wise avoided it. Eventually evidence appeared showing that it was actually worse than first imagined and had more lasting negative consequences for users than it was originally thought. The same thing is true about pornography.

Twenty-five years or so ago I represented my home state and testified at a series of legal hearings concerning potential harmful effects of certain types of television. At that hearing there were legal representatives from the major networks who asked for evidence that violence, sex, and other similar types of content was harmful in any way. At the time there was some fairly good scientific evidence about its potential for harm but it was not sufficient to conclusively prove that viewing violent and sexual content led to harmful behavior. Just because there was not conclusive proof did not mean that watching certain types of TV harmed people. But evidence has been found. The same is true of pornography.

The impact of pornography is different for different people, but the impact is substantial and very subtle. Quite often users think that if they quit any negative consequence for them has gone away. Not true. Here are some facts supported by good evidence. One exposure can be enough to addict some individuals. These addictions can last a long time and the motivation to be in contact with pornography gets associated with a variety of moods. Even when a person is not actively looking or being involved with it, the motivation to be involved may reappear over and over again throughout life. Addictions are accompanied by self-hatred, loss of esteem and self-control. For younger men and women addictions to pornography often result in a loss of productivity or the ability to accomplish work. In some cases pornography is a precursor to more harmful and violent sexual crimes including child molestation and abuse, rape, and assaults. One addiction, such as pornography, may lead to others such as prescription medication and other harmful chemicals.

Addiction is displayed in many forms of behavior and is therefore the most obvious result. There are other consequences which are much more difficult to detect but which have very harmful potential. Pornography not only communicates disloyalty to a spouse but it takes this disloyalty to a new and hurtful level. There are several possibilities and I will describe only one here. The person exposed to pornography begins to objectify his or her sexual partner and rather than using sex to achieve an emotional intimacy filled with tenderness and bonding, sex becomes an activity to gratify and because of that the sexual relationship begins to focus exclusively on one or more erotic outcomes. The emphasis on this outcome may be so focused that one person will push the partner past where he or she wishes to go. Even though one person makes it clear that something is not liked or preferred, the other insists and makes controlling demands suggesting that it is his or her right to this experience. Both lose self-respect and the one who is intruded upon feels unimportant and used. This disruption can last a long time and requires great effort to repair.

When children are impacted by pornography they often become seclusive and if not that, they attempt to hide what they are doing from their parents. Instead of a transparent parent-child relationship, the child begins to deceive. The duplicity in the child’s life not only takes the child away from parental support but it also creates significant amounts of distrust. Often the child’s feelings may range from withdrawn, depressive behavior to anger and resentment. When adolescents are involved the lying which often emerges may center on several forms of misbehavior, including inadequate school work, unwillingness to follow parental guidelines, and social-sexual behavior. This can have, as most know, significant and lasting consequences.

What should we do? Pornography is now so available and is used by so many it should be one of the first questions a spouse or parent asks when inquiring to see what might be at the root of some problem or some change in emotions. Such emotional changes might be due to drug use and so parents should also suspect that. Denying any involvement is the first line of self-protection but if one persists many children and spouses will confess, especially if they are tired of their own self-misery. Help can be obtained and hopefully relationships and individuals can be healed.

We all start out in life thinking we are the center of the universe and other people are planets that revolve around us. It is a natural thing for children to concentrate on themselves and think that everyone thinks or should think the same way they do. This is known as egocentrism. Often children are frustrated when adults don’t let them do what they want, when they want it, and as often as they want. But, in the process of making certain that other people’s ideas are considered, most children grow out of being egocentric. Most people learn to be aware of others, accept what others think, and consider other people as valid and important as they think of themselves.

Many do not learn quite enough. It might be true that all of us have some egocentrism. And, it is not all bad. Many professions attract people who believe strongly in themselves and accomplish much because they prepare themselves to possess great knowledge, communicate logically with persuasive evidence, and pressure or persuade others to agree. Some that come to mind are some business executives, medical doctors, and lawyers. I am not saying that all members of these professions are like this and I am not suggesting that egocentrism is limited to these professions. Men and women both can be egocentric and be in any profession or situation. Their strengths make it possible for considerable success at work, but at home, and especially in marriage this mental quality is often associated with real problems. Let’s consider the case of egocentric husbands and their wives who withhold.

When making a decision egocentric husbands believe their ideas to be better, far better. When having a disagreement they will argue to be right and avoid being wrong. They often will verbally punish (e.g criticize and demean). They will be critical of the pace someone goes to fulfill an assignment and will remind their wives of their slowness or inadequacies. They may, with an angry and condemning tone of voice, criticize a spouse or child who does not do what they require and point to the problems this creates for them. They will attribute their problems of unhappiness to the other person and communicate that they, themselves, are hard working and deserve more than they receive. If their wife, for instance, is having a hard day and feeling blue, this sort of person will, instead of comforting, often want to know the reasons for the emotion and act irritated that the depressed feelings are going to prevent the attention and warmth they want. Sometimes they will demean their wives for not bucking up and keep themselves in shape in order to fulfill their needs and desires. This can extend to her weight, to her sexual performance, and her social behavior.

What about their wives? Faced with this sort of behavior, and still emotionally attached, many wives develop a strategy of withholding whatever their husband desires. They may be passive when the husband wants activity. They may be late when the husband wants to be on time. They may withhold emotional warmth, sex, and affection. They believe they have been hurt, and they have been. They believe themselves married to someone who doesn’t care more for them than for his schedule, being right, and his needs. Sex, until it ends, is usually set up to please the husband and so she defends her position by collecting evidence that she is justified. Why does she stay with this type of person?

The reasons vary but often it is because she is strongly attached herself, doesn’t want to destroy the family, and she occasionally wants to win too or at least prove that she is not wrong as he would hope to make her. She is not happy and neither is he.

What to do? Usually this condition is not corrected without professional help. By then, however, one or both may have had affairs to deal with. But, if they both persist they can create something much better. The course of change usually includes each learning to stop trying to control or manage the other person and agree to focus themselves on controlling and managing their own behavior. (E.g. being positive and eliminate criticism and blame). Then they can be helped to discover what each other “wants” or “desires.” Finding two “want to’s” is not as easy as it sounds when someone has been telling the other what should and ought to happen. But if each can trust what the other person wants then they can practice treating them and acting toward them to give them exactly what is wanted. Why do that? Giving someone what he or she wants is the easiest and best way to get what you want if the other person is a loving and willing participant.

The next step is to ensure each person protects the other’s freedom to speak and act as he or she desires and totally without pressure or constraint. This takes some doing, because each believes that if freedom is granted the other person will use it to control or withhold. Lastly, they both will need to participate in several joint activities to actually demonstrate they can control themselves and participate fully with each other. In this stage they can finish the process by demonstrating their willingness to sacrifice for each other. This may seem like an involved process, and to some it is, but it is better than the other way.

In our day, because of the challenges many children encounter, it seems very important for parents to know how to help their children develop a strong and positive sense of conscience. While it is connected to ideas of what is right and what is wrong, conscience also serves other purposes. It warns children about the potential consequences for wrong doing. It helps children learn from their mistakes and motivates them toward doing something better. It should also be noted that conscience produces feelings of guilt over wrong doing. Some guilt is a very good thing if not excessive and crippling. That seems rare in the world we currently live in. We are more likely to see people without enough conscience.

The idea of conscience has been disputed over the years and in a variety of ways. It isn’t too important to revisit that debate, but I mention it to point out that some do not believe there is such a thing. Nor do they care about what it takes to help children develop it. Others think that conscience is vital to a responsible life and consider teaching about it among the most important things they do. I believe there is an inner voice which develops from part of what we inherit and part of what we learn. I also think that children differ in their abilities to help it grow and pay attention to it. So, based on that let’s consider two questions. How does a conscience develop and how do parents help children pay attention to their conscience?

Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, gives us some useful information. He proposed that cognitive development and language development start out separately in every child but eventually merge. The sign these two forms of development are merging is an “inner voice,” which children use to self-monitor and reflect on. From this point the inner voice he talks about becomes part of the human personality. This idea is generally accepted and clearly suggests that the inner voice is a natural or inherited part of life. Given that this is a natural form of development for most children, we can focus on how it can be shaped by a child’s experience and by parental influence.

Lets consider five things.

1. Parents will need to teach about what is right and wrong and label some, but not all, behavior as good or bad. Some actions, like social customs and social conventions (e.g. dress styles, some dietary practices, and etc.) change and should not receive these labels. But, where a human being may be harmed by something or someone, there is clearly a need for labeling those forms of behavior as bad and wrong. Further, if one believes in deity, then usually what people believe that deity commands will be considered what is right. There may eventually be more shades of gray for some people but a child’s conscience depends on knowing what is right or wrong. Ideas about right and wrong often become standards or universal principles of conduct. When children have their own standards of conduct that evolve from their notions of right and wrong they are more likely to have conscience. This is moral judgment.

2. To further promote the development of conscience parents teach that actions have consequences for each person and for others. These consequences may harm people and cause many different types of pain. Understanding consequences is a part of conscience.

3. Then, when children make mistakes or do something right parents ask children to think about themselves, to examine their own feelings and ideas. Introspection is an essential part of conscience development. This is in contrast to making too many rules and simply punishing children for breaking them or controlling children too much. If either of these happens children pay more attention to potential punishment or the need to win approval than they pay to their own inner voice. Introspection and self reference are key parts of conscience formation because they train children’s minds to reflect on what is within them.

4. Parents teach children that the reasons why they do something is often as important as what is done. Children need to examine their own motives and make certain their actions represent their motivations and feelings. This is emotional honesty, and it is essential for developing a conscience.

5. Lastly, parents can communicate their reactions to what their children do. You can ask your children to examine their own behavior by first describing the “situation,” (e.g. what happened, who was there, and was anyone hurt) and then by “describing” what they did in the situation. This guided examination helps children understand themselves. Parental disappointment and sadness at their children’s mistakes is also an important part of conscience formation. It produces remorse and sorrow for what has been done. But, when parents communicate continuing love for children, even though disappointed, the guilt children feel typically does not become crippling.

Here is the second question. How do parents get children to pay attention to their own conscience? This is important because people who do not sense a conscience may become so self-centered they know no law and exploit every condition for selfish purposes. Or, those who spend a lot of time doing what is wrong lose their capacity to feel their own feelings and with it often lose the capacity to notice their conscience.

Here is the answer or at least part of the answer. Children learn to pay attention to their own conscience by imitating their parents’ examples. It is important, therefore, for you to share your reactions some of the time to mistakes you make. You can also teach your children to examine their conscience at important times such as when they are about to make a decision or when they are about to give in to pressure from their friends. This will require a fairly good relationship between you and your children and it will require that you talk, explain, and review these times again and again. You can teach your children about these times and show them how to examine their own impressions. You can also ask your children to talk about their feelings and their conscience by asking questions like, “When you were about to do this, did you feel like it was the right thing to do or did you feel like it was wrong and still did it?” After a mistake has been made you can ask about a child’s feelings to establish that an appropriate amount of remorse and guilt is felt. This is helped by asking your children to identify the consequences their actions may have caused. This refers children to the idea that standards exist which apply to people and to many different situations. Lastly, you can ask your child to imagine what someone else is feeling after they have made a bad decision or made mistakes and invite them to see remorse or shame from another person.

In our current society we have many forces which suggest that conscience is unimportant. Where self-indulgence exists there is little time for it. But, we need parents who can teach it and we need more and more children prepared with an active conscience to represent the forms of behavior we desire more than any others. The ideas of right and wrong do not shift in the wind. What is right helps someone and what is wrong harms them. Unless we teach conscience we are going to see more and more people hurt by the excesses of others.

Children do not inherit confidence. Some might be more adventurous than others, or be willing to take more risks, but confidence is usually a result of a child doing something to earn and learn it.

Confidence should not be confused with self esteem. Although there has been much attention given to the importance of self esteem the last few years, the process of creating confident children is not the same. Where self esteem is a set of positive thoughts or feelings had about oneself confidence is a motivation to do, to perform, to accomplish, to participate, to change and improve. If we thought about it we would conclude that is it not just self esteem but it is confidence that spouses, school teachers, coaches, friends, and employers want and admire as well.

How did we get confused? When researchers studied high performing individuals they were able to measure that high performing children or adults had high self esteem and concluded that self esteem was the cause for it. And so many thought they had discovered the tool that would make children more successful. This was a mistake. There is much that suggests that self esteem is the result or conclusion of something, but there is little evidence that it is the cause for much. Too much emphasis on positive self knowledge has now led to the idea that we have many children who believe themselves entitled to praise and rewards without having to work for it.

Some even believe that the focus on self esteem has created the conditions for adolescent suicide. This is because real events appear to be less interesting than what the over-praised and indulged people think should happen to them. Anything less is discouraging and upsetting. Instead, it is confidence that is the cause for great achievement.

Examine the methods used to create confidence. It comes from hard work and achievement. It is the result of participating actively in high quality relationships where there is love, compassion, fun, acceptance, and a bunch of other good things. It appears to be the consequence of obedience to good and appropriate rules, and of a positive attitude. It is related to the “achievement motive” where one takes reasonable risks and persists until goals are achieved. It might be helped by praise and compliments or the use of rewards, but these appear to be less important.

I propose that we focus ourselves on creating confidence so that our children will try out and achieve things of importance. I propose that confidence will help them go out into an uncertain world with the motivation to master it. I am convinced that it is confidence that will help students learn better and act nicer to each other. Confidence does not eliminate anxiety; it competes with and overcomes it. It is confidence we want more of.

The idea of punishment for misbehavior has a long standing tradition. Punishment is designed to deter some actions and make certain the child avoids repeating what is undesirable. It is an idea deeply embedded in our parental thoughts. We just accept that punishment is a reality. It is like we all know that punishments are necessary for some things and so instead of questioning whether they work at all we tend to focus on finding the one’s that work.

There are at least two problems with this. First, we may get into a standard approach to children’s misbehavior and become so routine that we prevent ourselves from looking around to see what else we could do. Most parents threaten, scold, restrict or remove privileges, limit freedom (i.e. sit on a chair), isolate the child (i.e. sending a child to his room), or spank. There are many types of punishment and we could and should have a variety of responses at our disposal. Secondly, accepting the necessity of punishment puts the parental response after the child’s actions and as a result we are trying to control behavior from a less powerful position. If we really want to control behavior we will take the offense and get our children to focus on what we want them to do more than pay attention to what we don’t want.

In addition, when we are more reactive we often fail to see that we may be one of the reasons for the child’s misbehavior. In this case the child’s behavior will change only if we do. This happens when two children argue but only do it when a parent is in the room. Arguing is designed to get our attention. Or a child gets angry at other children but the anger is connected to our lack of attention or involvement.

What is the best punishment? It is any form of constructive parental response that reduces the behavior we don’t want and puts something successful in its place. Here is how it works. When a child misbehaves a parent can ask two questions. “When does it happen?” and “What would be better?” If the misbehavior typically happens in similar situations or around the same people the problem is likely due to the circumstance and the best course of action is to change that. If not, then a parent can think about what positive behavior could exist that would replace what is undesirable. Here are some examples.

Suppose a child gets into several different arguments, teases, bothers other children, and does all this in the same morning. It looks like he is just a trouble maker and needs a firm hand. But suppose after thinking about it you discover that all this happens and draws you in to solve it. The best punishment might be to require the child to spend time with you, listen to you read a book, and eat something good. Or demand that he allow you to tickle him a lot, caress, or hug him. Why? Unless there is another reason, the intensity of the child’s emotions probably reflects an unmet emotional need and the best thing to do is satisfy the need with affection or warmth. Next, suppose a child frequently fails to come home on time or when he is called in from out-of-doors play. You may wish to punish him for disobedience by not letting him go outside for a few days. That might seem logical and it might work, but you are more likely to change the misbehavior if you purchase an inexpensive digital watch, place it on his arm, and show him the numbers which would appear in fifteen minutes or a half an hour. Then send the child out to practice coming back “on time” when those numbers appear. In this case the “punishment” is designed to eliminate the misbehavior by producing what the parent wants. Plus, the child gets to practice numbers and has a watch besides.

The point is this. We should not get into a punishment rut and use the same things over and over again. Further, we could think of a variety of things to do that are creative and would solve some situation and produce better behavior than what we are getting. All most parents care about is getting successful, more mature behavior from their children. Working toward success is better than continually paying attention to what we don’t like or want.

Many people think that providing added sensory stimulus to infants will help them be more intelligent. Infant stimulation means to provide extra visual opportunities, unusual and interesting sounds, more tactile (touch) experiences, increased varieties of smells and tastes. This, it is believed, stimulates the senses and creates more brain growth than would be the case if added stimulation were not provided. Parents put pictures in babies’ cribs, play classical music, increase their massaging and caressing, and when appropriate introduce new foods and smells.

This idea was given a boost by an anecdotal story famous in developmental psychology. It is about girls attending a Catholic school who helped nurses in a foundling home. As part of their school work they were assigned to spend time providing care for abandoned infants. This consisted of feeding and changing them each day. Someone noticed that some of the infants grew faster, gained weight, and thrived in other ways while some did not. A little investigating revealed that the girls liked some of the babies better than others and those they liked best they spent more time with. Sometimes this was only thirty minutes. This was enough, however, for the added stimulation to give these infants a boost in growth.

This apparently true account may have led scientists to investigate the effects of other forms of stimulation on intelligence. Over the years much research has been done resulting in the conclusion that in fact some stimulation makes a positive difference but there is a ceiling on how much can be accomplished. That is, it is not true that the more stimulation parents give their babies the more intelligent they become. Some stimulation appears to benefit children up to some limit.

Much of intelligence is inherited and if infants have inherited more then greater possibilities might exist. The point is this. If you want to give your children every advantage you would provide a variety of stimulating experiences. This may include talking, singing, and making interesting but unusual sounds when you are changing a diaper or spending other time around the child. It will also consist of providing a variety of things for the baby to see and hear early in his or her life. Further, it will consist of much touching, hugging, caressing, rolling, massaging, and loving. It will also include providing the baby with interesting things to touch and taste. When these things are taking place the nervous system is active and benefiting from receiving sensory messages. When it is active it stimulates brain and muscle growth.

When babies spend too much time alone, as in a crib or fenced in area, they may not be able to move enough, touch enough, or spend enough time with people. All these may limit stimulation and may limit what could be.

What does this mean? Generally we needn’t organize big campaigns but we do need to provide a lot of contact and be with babies a lot of the time. In an age where parents are busy and sometimes ignore their children, hoping they will sleep a lot, it is crucial instead to wholly commit to their growth. As it turns out, parents are usually tied emotionally and physically to their children and stimulation benefits parents as well. This contact may not make us more intelligent but providing the right kind of stimulation for infants makes us feel good and is a sign we are very smart.

Marriage is the one relationship where the idea of intimacy suggests both a condition of the relationship and a pleasurable reward for doing something right. We become intimate by virtue of the things we share and for many the experience of being intimate is one of most sought after pleasures marriage offers. The process is like this. First we become attached then we deepen our feelings. We acquire more detailed information connected to these feelings and share several different types of emotions and emotional experience. This process creates mutual feelings so profound that many couples can sense when they are close and when they are not. While some people like the distance, most, who enjoy intimacy think of distance as an unhappy experience. And, when they are not close they usually desire to spend time being with each other in order to recapture the sensation of intimacy. In a real sense once intimacy is achieved there is no such thing as a divorce because even if separated legally or otherwise the two people will retain some feelings for each other.

This same intimacy, as every married couple knows, has a dark side to it. If there is conflict each knows the other so well that if the choice is made each knows exactly what to say or what to do to inflict the most exquisite hurt. When this happens each person is the other’s intimate enemy. The emotional pain, once felt and once created, is also memorable and will last a long time unless healed. Many who have had an intimate enemy cannot move toward greater intimacy in marriage, or if divorced, marry a second time without feeling considerable anxiety. The process of healing is one of great tenderness and patience.

One person, where the hurt is less intense and malicious, can calm an intimate enemy. This may be true except where one or both people are abusive either out of habit or malice. Here is how it works. Stop hurting the other person by saying or doing hurtful things. Display “acts of altruism” which means doing something at a small sacrifice for the other person without demanding anything in return. At the same time attempt to improve communication (increase the amount of shared information going between the two brains involved) by asking open-ended questions (e.g. “I’d like to know about….” or “Can you tell me….”) and listening without rebutting, defending, or withdrawing. (Note: In cases where a person is married to a very malicious spouse who intends to hurt, it is not necessary for a spouse to stay in that form of communication). When possible allow that the other person’s observations about you may have some truth that you would consider. When you describe your feelings or ideas do not explain your actions by using the words or actions of your partner. Attribute everything you do or say to your own thoughts and feelings. (e.g. “I am saying this because I am thinking…”) Calmly ask your partner to eliminate his or her hurtful behavior. Lastly, do not give hurt in return for hurt. Keep yourself steady especially after the other person has said something mean. Being able to regulate yourself will give you a greater sense of freedom and will communicate your unwillingness to be an intimate enemy yourself.

Sometimes the foregoing doesn’t work, but it is surprising how much one person can do to eliminate hurtful things if done right. At the end of doing what has been suggested it is often the case that each may say to the other, “It is me, isn’t it?” Apologies accepted and better behavior can change an enemy into a trusted companion.

As more and more people decide to home school their children we have had the opportunity of comparing home schooled students with those taught in our public schools. Where many thought home schooled students would do less well on national college admissions tests the results so far are just the opposite. Home schooled children, as a group, actually score higher. There might be many explanations for this including the idea that public schools have to take all students and their results are affected by the fact that many unmotivated students attend.

In my opinion this conclusion overlooks something. Because we traditionally think that academic learning is mostly a function of mental abilities, it does not occur to many of us that the reason home schooled children often do better is because of the high quality relationships which exist in the home school. To dramatize this idea I could also add that typically the best teachers in public or private schools are those that are qualified in their subject area, but in addition, are very competent interpersonally.

I find that to be very interesting. If the activity of learning is purely individual and depends exclusively on one’s mental abilities then we could assume that social abilities or relationships with others is less important in learning environments. Yet high quality relationships between teacher and learner and among learners appear connected to the speed and depth of learning. The most obvious conclusion for this is that good relationships are motivational and bad relationships are not. While that may be true it is not a complete picture.

Let’s suppose the activity of learning is connected to many other parts of the human brain and personality. When the right type of sociality exists brains function better. When the positive emotions of good relationships are present then interest is more likely to be sustained and persistence to complete tasks is also greater. When firmness is connected to respect more information can be processed. When relationships between people are positive there is less anxiety, more security, and greater willingness to risk failure in order to learn something new.

If all the forgoing is true, and I believe it to be, then preparing children to learn well requires more than good mental abilities. Teaching children to respect, admire, love, befriend, cooperate, encourage, compliment, belong, and help others belong may be essential elements of remarkable learning, at least for young children. The question we should consider is whether teacher-student relationships are receiving enough attention in our efforts to improve education.

What does this mean? For one thing any effort to improve education, and improve learning, should include searching for socially competent teachers. Further, it should include helping children, who are young and growing, acquire high quality social and other emotional skills which permit them to develop high quality relationships with people. Failing this, I believe, we are missing an essential element in our search for methods to improve educational opportunities for our children.

David Johnson, from the University of Minnesota, conducted research comparing cooperative and competitive educational approaches. He wrote that in most cases cooperative approaches were more effective than competition. This is interesting since most classroom environments employ competition as a motivational strategy.

Does this mean that competition is bad? No. It is further evidence that children derive some motivational or mental enhancement when certain types of relationships exist. This is because “relationships” form the context for learning. For those who wish their children to learn well, we have a couple of choices. We can teach subject matter or mental abilities alone or mental abilities and subject matter connected to positive relationship skills. Teaching positive social skills may be the means of enhancing mental abilities and improving learning.

Not all teenagers are angry of course but if your child is, you will wonder if he/she is the only one. For many parents angry teenagers are hard to understand and even harder to help. Let’s examine some of the reasons why teens get angry and then review one or two methods of helping them resolve it.

Keep in mind that anger is often the brain’s signal that something in the environment is felt as oppressive and anger is used to get someone or something to “back off.” Further, anger is often connected to the motive of self-destructiveness and one should be alert to that possibility. The most common reasons teenagers get angry are listed below along with a way of identifying the type of anger. These are not listed in any particular order of importance or frequency.

1. Anger is a reaction to imagined or real pressure (stress) coming from the demands of many people including friends, family, school teachers, and employers. This anger often includes the element of pressure and conflict plus descriptions of people who are believed to be too demanding.

2. Anger may be felt and expressed when a teenager has made a mistake, is embarrassed or ashamed, and is not willing to face responsibility for it. Usually the anger is only about one thing or situation and is often accompanied by an excuse. Anger is an attempt to hide the error.

3. Anger is associated with a reactive depression and shows up as blaming others, isolating oneself from others, reduced performance at school and elsewhere, and sadness. This anger shows up in many situations.

4. Anger is a response to perceived unfairness. This may be perceived or actual unfairness of parents, friends, or employers. It may be associated with the loss of someone or something loved. The loss of a friendship or relationship is often accompanied by anger. Anger will include defensiveness and will usually be directed at someone.

5. Anger is a reaction to failure and the possibility that a dream cannot be realized. Anger is associated with low self-esteem and pessimism.

6. Anger can be a response to mistreatment by peers such as being excluded or bullied. Anger is often associated with revenge.

7. Anger for some individuals is more likely during periods of rapid growth where the brain becomes much more reactive to stimulus conditions in the environment. This anger has no pattern but shows up with extra concern for looks and other image issues.

8. Anger is manipulative where an angry teen directs the anger at parents who won’t give him or her what is wanted. Anger is focused on getting something and is temporarily solved when the teenager gets what he wants.

9. Anger can be an emotional expression of a gang or peer group whose members are also angry. Anger will be directed toward some group of people like the police or other other gangs or some ethnic group.

10. Anger can be the result of feeling entitled to something after having been too indulged and without having to work or be responsible for achieving. This anger is connected to accusations of adults who are described as failing to perform as the teenager desires.

If you are faced with an angry child you might do the following. Keep a record of when your child is most likely to express anger and then identify what type of anger is involved. Instead of being afraid of the anger keep yourself (e.g. your voice) as calm as possible, indicate you are interested in understanding what is going on, and attempt to learn about it by asking questions about it. In some cases it is a good thing to draw the child’s attention to the fact that you are affected by the anger and need to know what it is about. Show your hands shaking or the flush of your face or the concerned look you feel.

Usually an angry teenager has many reasons for the feelings. When the child, usually a boy, cannot or will not talk about the anger you can encourage talking by indicating that you will give what the child wants, such as money or a privilege, in return for a conversation. The conversation needn’t be complete; just beginning the asking and listening process will help out. If the teen still will not talk then you talk about your love for him/her, your concern, and your willingness to help. Keep talking and tell stories and other things to maintain the conversation and diminish the angry feelings.

I believe we are seeing more anger expressed in a variety of forms. Suicide is still one of the top two or three causes of adolescent death. We are seeing more violent crime that stems from the anger youth feel. Anger and stress show up in self-mutilation. We seem to have more anger in our families than I can remember. I am worried about it.

Healthy infants come into the world with many different abilities. Two of these are called “synchrony” and “cadence.” These are labels for something every parent has observed. Children react and respond to what other humans do. They do this is a rhythm or pattern. For instance, infants will imitate when a parent sticks his or her tongue out and will do this at three days of age. If the mother will hold up her child within twenty four inches of her face, or visual field, the baby will respond to a smile by giving a “recognition response.” This synchrony takes a higher form later on. For example, when a parent plays a game of peek-a-boo a handkerchief is placed over the baby’s face and the parent suddenly pulls it off. This delights the baby who responds by surprise and giggling, thrilling the parent. It is noteworthy that when children cannot do this, it is usually because some cognitive problem exists and parents should see a professional.

Synchrony and cadence mature and show up later as taking turns when talking. As language skills develop children usually learn that two people cannot talk and be understood at the same time. One must talk while the other listens. Taking turns during communication is later applied to games, to walking together with other people, and to sharing toys.

Cooperation is a more mature form of synchrony and cadence. Cooperation involves each person doing something in response to the other. Children ask parents for what they want and parents respond by giving, paying attention to, and providing for. Children like to please parents and often do as they are asked. But, in most cases parents have more than one child, get busy with their own duties, and start talking to and telling children what to do. With all the talking, it doesn’t take long for children to learn that if they don’t respond right away to what parents ask, nothing is going to happen, at least for awhile. In many cases, when children do not respond parents continue to ask or tell them, even raising their voices in an effort to communicate, “You had better do what I ask right away!” When this doesn’t work well some parents add something else to get compliance by counting “one, two, three…” Counting usually involves the threat that something bad will happen to the child if he doesn’t obey. Parents count and children learn numbers, at least the first three. What often happens however, is that children learn to resist and parents learn to nag them. In a strange way this does not result in more immediate obedience. In fact telling, asking, nagging, and threatening often leads to more or continued disobedience.

What can parents do? Follow the “two request” rule. When you have asked a child to do something, ask only two times and then go get the child and physically move the child to do what you ask. Why? If you do not then your talking and etc. are likely rewarding the child’s failure to comply which is what you don’t want. While following this rule apply the idea of synchrony. Spend some time talking and playing with the child. Invite the child to help with household tasks so you can do them together. Compliment the child for doing things on his or her own. Take turns helping each other. Reinforce the idea that in “our family” we cooperate. Cooperate while sharing things. For example, when sharing an apple you cut it and let the child choose which half she wants.

After you have cooperated together and it is working, start teaching your child to perform his or her own chores while you do yours. You can do this by age three. First demonstrate what you want done and have the child practice while you are present. Encourage, compliment, and praise. After you are certain the child knows how to perform the task leave the room for a few seconds and then return. Catch the child working and praise or catch the child not working and refocus her or him. Point out that when the child is finished he should come and see how you are doing on your chores.

These are all forms of cooperation and they work better than nagging. A last note. Nagging a lot often produces something called “mother deafness” which means that children learn to ignore when parents speak. This is not pretend. They actually learn to shut out of their minds much of what you say believing they hear the same thing over and over again. Save yourself from this problem by getting kids to cooperate.

We have settled an old debate about children. Because we didn’t know any better many thought children were like blank slates filled with possibilities but with very few mental or emotional abilities of their own. We now have learned that at birth they are highly developed and bring with them several inherited abilities. Children bring with them more than one type of intelligence including numbers, emotions, language, space, and time. They are born prepared to communicate with people and survive in a world where these abilities are required. We literally ought to be reading to our babies on the way home from the hospital.

Because of these amazing abilities children and adults are able to benefit from one of the most valuable and influential experiences available to human beings. It is called the validation experience. It takes place because humans have strong emotions which are linked or tied to the situation they are in and one person can understand another and then validate what he or she sees and feels. And because this exists for all humans it is possible for one person to understand and validate something about the other.

A woman I know told of how she discovered how much her father loved her. The story goes as follows. When she was thirteen she was sewing at her mother’s old Singer sewing machine and ran a needle through her finger. When her father came to help he stood behind her, grabbed her left hand in his to steady it, and prepared to pull out the needle. When he crouched over her she felt something wet on her cheek and looked up to see tears cascading down his cheeks because of her pain. This validation experience stayed in her memories for her whole lifetime.

There are many ways the validation experience communicates a powerful and lasting emotional message. Being told we are loved by someone important to us when we wonder how anyone could love us is one example. Another is when a parent attends an event important to the child and their eyes find each other in the middle of the play or game and for a moment that communication is much more important for them than what is going on around them. The validation experience takes place when a husband learns something important about his wife and then uses it to love her. He may know her favorite color and bring flowers of that color. The flowers are important as an indication of his remembering an important event but the message that he knows her intimately is more important. She will feel that he “knows” her.

The reasons the validation experience is important for children are that it confirms their existence and their importance. When children believe they are important and valued they tend to behave better and are more compliant to parental influence. It is wise, therefore, for parents to be very good at validating their children. Here are some things you can do.

Put a child’s school papers in a place where you can easily see them, such as the breakfast table, and ask your children to tell you about their successes at school. Just the fact that you are noticing them and their performance will be important. Pick out positive traits that cannot easily be observed, such as “intelligent,” “friendly,” “hard working,” “honest,” and “loyal.” Label your child with these positive traits when you see them acted out and then use them on more than one occasion. You will able to watch the child work hard to display them again and again so you will notice.

One of the most powerful validating experiences is to comfort a child who is sad, afraid, or disappointed. Another is to recognize a nonverbal act and understand the emotions behind it and ask the child if he is “excited,” “happy,” and etc. When you can say what a child is feeling, the child begins to feel significant.

These experiences make parents highly influential. They motivate children to listen and to trust. More importantly, perhaps, they confirm to a child that he or she has great worth and importance. This has life-long meaning and significance.

I once read an account of a creative therapist who was asked to treat a child who displayed explosive anger. The child appeared to have little self-control when there was even a little frustration. The explosiveness included yelling, throwing things, breaking things, the use of violent words, swearing, and other displays. In this account when the therapist had the child alone in his office he, the therapist, began to yell, throw couch cushions around, stomp around the room, and use threats about a pretend person. After watching the adult for a few minutes the fifth grader said, “Calm down mister. It’s not good to get this mad.” Then, as the story goes, they had a talk about what to do to control anger which led to a solution.

I tried it out with a child one time and achieved a very similar result. A nine year old boy helped me get control of myself and I quieted down. I felt a bit foolish but letting him see what “out of control” meant seemed to work for him. But as it turned out it wasn’t the whole solution. His anger episodes, though modified somewhat, continued. He still had trouble in some situations and I had to look deeper for potential causes and solutions. For instance, I wanted to know if he had some inherited problem. Was his explosive behavior connected to an attentional problem, childhood cognitive disorder such as schizophrenia, or some type of emotional problem?

What had happened in each situation where he exploded? Was he around the same person or persons so that a connection existed between these people and his explosive behavior? What triggered the anger? Was there someone in his life who set an example of explosiveness? How intense was he about new situations or any situation? Did he get angry when he was alone or was there some social purpose to the anger such as revenge or a demand for needed attention? Was he usually a quiet calm child or one who was on the emotional edge most of the time?

After finding answers to these questions I was able to have a better view of him and his situation. He was in a family where there was a lot of conflict between his parents. One of his parents tended to have adult tantrums which had not been disclosed. This boy was not well-liked at school and often was left out of play during recess. So we began to fix those things. I invited the family to come to my office and learned that communication in his family included considerable blame and criticism. They still stand out to me as the “blaming” family of all time. Whenever something happened one or both parents openly blamed a child, who defended himself and in turn blamed someone else. When this happened a great deal of intense and volatile anger emerged. The boy in question just had the most intense symptoms. He also had other self-control problems and displayed other forms of social and emotional immaturity.

An explosive child is a diagnostic category by itself. This category is based on findings that something is wrong with the child such as an inherited cognitive or emotional disorder. This is often the case and is why an explosive child should be brought to the attention of a professional. It is also true that explosive anger may be a learned form of behavior; learned because it is a part of a child’s experience with friends and family. In some cases both are involved.

The first thing parents can do is to collect information about where, when, and with whom explosive episodes happen. Then, determine how frequently they take place and how intense they are. Once you have this information it is possible to obtain professional help that will enable you to develop a constructive strategy which usually leads to a solution. Explosive children are in trouble and they need help because their behavior will make them feel out of control and filled with other disturbing feelings. To them, they are controlled by someone or something other than themselves and this feeling leads to a continuation of their unhappiness. It is often the case that truly angry adults believe they are controlled by others. Explosive anger usually does not resolve itself by the natural processes of brain growth. If left without a solution it often leads to a variety of other less desirable things.

Some people like to be cared for because they feel a sense of security and a modest amount of pleasure. Most of us like to be passive about some things or express our anxiety in some situations in the form of passivity. But, a person with a pattern of passivity is different. These individuals find so much pleasure or comfort being passive that they are willing to submerge much of their initiative to ensure that someone else will care for them by assuming psychological responsibility for them. Passive husbands and wives, while they might just be passive in relation to their spouse, are usually like this in more than one situation.

A marriage relationship where one is passive usually has another in it who is active and often in demanding terms requiring the first to do, say, or be something. The more the one demands the less the other person responds. When they have conflict one will lecture and the other quietly but stubbornly listens. The passive one may actually agree to do something but then will not. Both feel controlled by the other or the marriage.

Let’s focus on passive men and think about passive women another time. In marriage these men often do not extend themselves to start conversations, propose suggestions for new activities, or provide leadership for marriage and/or family activities. As time passes and real life decisions come up many women learn that in order to get something done, or done in a timely manner, they must assume the initiative and start and do things themselves. Some women like this and also like that their husbands are not very assertive. In this case the marriage seems like it is just right. Many other women, however, want a full partnership where their husbands are at least equally involved and will take their turn assuming the responsibility for leadership. When women want this and do not get it they my be resentful and feel very angry. Unless they are watchful their frustration will be shown in a litany of criticism which belittles and demeans their husbands.

If this were just a marriage problem it would be bad enough, but this condition often extends into parenthood. Struggles with passivity between parents often embroils children. A passive man will spend some time with children but will sit on the sidelines of the real drama of family life letting his wife occupy the primary role. He might make excuses about himself and justify not participating except in a token manner. He might be absent large amounts of time and from many important events. In the worst cases he might be inadequate in other ways in addition to his role as a husband.

In turn a wife will feel growing amounts of stress and demands on her time. Increasing amounts of frustration may lead her to consciously or unconsciously train her sons to “not be like their father” and/or to form tight emotional ties with one or more of her children that are not healthy but will satisfy her emotional needs not met in the marriage. This condition twists the life of the child who, instead of being accepted for himself, has to grow up demonstrating certain forms of behavior in an attempt to satisfy both parents. Both parents are typically more extreme in their opinions and their emotional needs than either would be if both were mutually involved and passivity did not exist.

Some passive men lack the social and emotional skills to actually be assertive in marriage and family. They can benefit from learning from what other more successful men do by reading books, attending seminars, and/or going to counseling. Other men have emotional agendas where their passivity is a form of aggression against women and/or an expression against their lives. Not doing reasonable things to please someone, or not doing what someone wants, or not participating when participation is important are fairly effective ways to display aggression and dislike. When this is coupled with defensiveness, where the man blames his lack of involvement on the wife who asks for it, a true and very powerful cycle of hurt and anger is often created.

What to do? Usually both need some professional help to rearrange the balance of their relationship. A new balance can be achieved by helping both address their emotional behavior, make adjustments away from being “caught” or controlled by the actions of the other and achieve greater focus on each person’s separate and independent actions. This will require the end of coaching, cuing, demanding, criticizing, and blaming. It usually also requires that two people learn how to participate together in the same decisions, activities, and other marital experiences. It also requires that each person learn their actions are a function of their own choices and not responses to what the other person says or does. When this is going along nicely it will be necessary for both the man and the woman to understand their motives for their behavior and to talk about the emotions which underlie the passive and demanding conditions of their relationship. He can understand the resentment and the insecurity that underlies his passivity and talk about where it comes from and what he can do about these feelings. Even though habits have been formed, his increased awareness can be used to help him stop less successful things and start something better. She can understand her anxieties and resentments and she can talk about and accept responsibility for how she expresses them. She can learn that anything motivated by resentment or fear will typically not lead to a good result.

Once the emotions are talked about and understood a couple can identify a more positive set of outcomes which can be achieved by modifying how they participate with each other. Making and carrying out bargains are a good strategy here where each asks for and gets something from the other. Most passive men like the experience of being responded to by a caring and adoring wife who supports and encourages. An angry woman likes to respond and support when a man assumes some responsibility, expresses his opinion, displays initiative and then does all these from time to time to show respect and regard for her. It is typically hard work but it can be rearranged to achieve a better synchrony.

University faculty members divide the department curriculum among themselves. Usually people are hired with specialties so that collectively the faculty provide the knowledge base for a broad and deep enough education for students who major in that discipline. Occasionally, however, some rapid developing area will emerge that doesn’t fit with the background of existing faculty and new classes must be created. Someone will need to go back to school. That was the case for emotional development and me.

For years in the study of child development and family sciences, children’s emotions and how they mature were occasionally discussed but was not a major focus. Little by little, however, new research began to appear which pointed to the fact that this area of development deserved much more attention than it was getting. So after discussions amongst us, I was selected as the person who should tool up in that area and develop a graduate course. At the time I was a junior faculty member and it seemed like I had been left to do what no one else wanted. I began my study with that attitude in mind. It didn’t take long though for me to find out that I was learning about something that was not only very important but was amazingly interesting. I eventually wondered why and then regretted that I had not pursued this subject area long before and felt a bit sheepish that I had begun with such a bad attitude.

I read about many different theories of emotions and how they change and mature. I read about many different types of emotions and how they are experienced by people, how they affect our physical responses, and how they are displayed or expressed. Love, for instance, is in the brain but we think of it as related to the heart because when a person feels this emotion muscles near the heart area tighten. Consequently, we have heart-felt feelings and we “love with all our heart.” It is wrong, but it is better than the truth. Who would like to say, “I love you with all my brain?”

As my interest increased so did the range of my reading. I read numerous accounts of how different emotions are linked together and read about the controversial idea that some are inherited but in a way that is not usually understood. The epi-genetic theory, for instance, suggested that emotions, or the basis of them, are biological and exist in our brains at birth. Then as our brains grow these emotions show up at different times throughout childhood. Anxiety is an example. Newborns do not show signs of anxiety nor do they show evidence of attachment to specific people. They can be comfortable with many different people, even strangers. At about five to six months of age when they begin to be attached to specific people, and they display object permanence (e.g. they remember objects even though they cannot see them), the first signs of anxiety appear. We will see later that this emotion is one that most consider to be inherited and so based on this theory, it must lie inside the brain waiting for the right combination of brain and body to bring it out. This theory has not received extensive support but it makes me wonder if our whole lives are marked by new emotions as we first mature and then go through the aging process.

In the middle of all my reading I learned the most current theory of the day proposing that children inherit five emotions. These five show up in every culture and therefore scientists believe that anxiety, disgust, anger, surprise, and a mild form of pleasure are inherited. Shyness, therefore, is not learned but is inherited. These five are considered the first or primary emotions and all others appear to be based on or are learned from them. Now consider this interesting idea. Because there are primary emotions, there must be secondary or higher order emotions.

That is what scientists propose. Emotions are organized with these primary emotions at the bottom of a stack of emotions and other emotions like love, gladness, happiness, and joy are at the the top of this stack. These along with other positive emotions are called “higher order emotions.”

You might not see right away what this has to do with you or your children. But this idea can give parents very practical tools. To simplify, I will provide an example. When someone is feeling a lot of anxiety (stress) or anger, etc. their brains will focus on the primary emotions and will not release higher order emotions. If a child has high anxiety then he or she will not feel love or loved. So if parents or school teachers create conditions of much threat (anxiety) for the child, the child will usually get angry and stressful rather than learn the lessons adults want to teach. If a child is mistreated during childhood then he/she may not learn very much about love. If you yell much, coerce, threaten, treat meanly, and so forth you are not going to help your children be motivated to receive your affection nor motivated to trust you and receive advice. This does not mean that parents should not correct their children or provide limits for their actions. When children make mistakes and are anxious about them the first thing you could do is calm them before trying to discipline them. In fact it is good practice to reduce your child’s anxieties before you try to do anything else.

When adults are feeling sustained stress for a long period of time this principle of basic emotions suggests they don’t feel much love either. I have noticed that people tend to make the poorest decisions when they are anxious and have collected some small amount of evidence that suggests this is when people are more vulnerable to a variety of temptations.

As the years have passed I have learned to treat my study of emotions as one of the very best things I have done. I suggest to anyone that emotional development is rich with ideas about child development, parenting practices, and mental health. I am going to write a series of posted articles about emotions to share the most interesting things I have learned.

I consult and train a group of university softball players as a sports psychologist. I frankly am amazed at their athletic abilities and have been happily surprised at how talented they are. The pitchers have several different pitches and can throw at sixty-five to seventy miles an hour. Many have true guns for arms because they can throw such long distances. During one game the girl in right field threw out a runner by rifling a shot from the warning track next to the fence directly to the catcher behind home base. My jaw dropped.

More importantly than anything though is that they are amazing young women. They have high-quality character and they understand how to work hard. Because of that and the goodness of their coaches this consulting activity provides a great deal of fun and at the same time a wonderful opportunity. I get a chance to see what I can do to help talented people improve their performance. Their team already plays at a high level, having won several conference championships but they want to do better and go farther. So for me, it is a very interesting challenge.

I believe that the ideas that work with them can work with anyone wishing to improve. So I share them with you hoping that will be the case. First, it is important to recognize that you are already a quality person. This is what these young women are. Working with great people who will implement what they learn provides a chance to examine what it is that helps people get better. I have the following suggestions.

To begin with I teach that they will be better individuals if they are willing to work hard and improve themselves for the sake of their team. Most of us do better when we work hard to contribute to something greater than ourselves. I have asked them to be considerate of each other, eliminate all negative forms of behavior, and if they can it will help if they actually learn to love each other. That is not easy given the fact they are very competitive and it would be easy to give in to the feelings of people who want to win at everything.

I have introduced the idea of continuous improvement which means that we organize everything we do with the focus of getting better. These young women have been asked to think of errors or mistakes for less than a second and after each game we talk about what we have done well and what we need to do better. All of them have selected work-related goals to improve their physical abilities. They work every day or every other day improving their foot speed, coordination, or range of movement.

We have also addressed the idea of confidence and I invited them to think about the fact that confidence is not an idea but a conclusion reach by achieving at least four things.
(1) Hard work and achievement
(2) High quality relationships
(3) Positive feelings
(4) Obedience to sound principles. Obedience requires self control and self discipline.

When it comes to game time we have addressed the idea that mental toughness (not giving into fear) comes from the ability to focus, develop and maintain composure, being confident, and competing with intensity. Lastly, they have been asked to be much more concerned about how they play than being concerned about the team they are playing and we go one day at a time.

I know these are probably very familiar to most people but I am happily surprised that when girls of this caliber implement such ideas they have real power. They have had long winning streaks, surpassed their past achievements, won several individual awards, and are having a great time. It is clear their individual performance is much better than it used to be.

These are principles that anyone can use to improve their own performance or help someone else. Parents can use them with their children and sports enthusiasts can use them to get better as well. Employers can use them to improve job related performance. We might even be able to use them on ourselves. Getting better, continuously improving, is where part of life’s excitement is. I hope more find it.

It is pretty well known that men and women differ in the types of mutual activities they enjoy and prefer to do. To achieve a sense of companionship or mutuality, for example, women, according this notion, prefer conversations and men prefer some type of physical activity such as playing tennis or riding bicycles. For a woman conversations permit her to get emotional meaning because of the connection between language and feelings. Words are linked to emotions through the process of learning and using language. Talking with someone, therefore, can be satisfying and pleasurable because feelings are felt and shared. To a man, shared feelings come from the activity rather than the conversation. Why are we different? Scientists believe there is an inherited difference in male and female brains which predispose women to language and emotions and men to organized activity and function. As women mature their ability to feel and express their feelings improves which may or may not take place for men.

This situation has tremendous impact on the quality of marriage when we consider how relationships form and are maintained. For instance, to form a loving relationship in the first place two people might go through the sequence of attraction, acquaintance, intimacy, and attachment. Marriage, or living together, then takes place because both people wish to increase the frequency and intensity of all these. When someone advises us to keep dating or to renew our feelings for one another they are really recommending that we go through this sequence again. Or, if we are separated from one other through work, being busy, or some other reason we feel a strong need to do something to erase the feelings of separation. We do this by communicating our desire and attraction for one another, participating in things which let us know more about one another, being together to feel intimate, and refreshing feelings of attachment.

The differences between us leads to different strategies. A man, for instance, might wish to have sex to feel intimate with his wife. A women wants to have intimacy through conversation and affection prior to sex. A man might wish to have sex when he feels distant, even if it is right after an argument, and this seems unbelievable to a woman who doesn’t feel like having sex with someone she is distant from. A woman might ask for the couple to go for a walk so they can talk and the husband will say “Ok, as soon as I am done with…” Since he may never get done doing whatever he is doing, the couple may go on very few walks together.

This leads to a very common marital problem. In the pursuit of intimacy a man may ask his wife for sex more often than she wants, may try to motivate her by the promise of new clothes, money, and etc. And, he may discover that the more he does this the less motivated she is. What is going on? Both of them will be feeling a need for intimacy and both will discover that sex cannot do for both of them what the man thinks it will do. This problem may widen to include a marital affair. If a man has an affair hoping to find greater intimacy with a woman other than his wife she will want to know about his feelings for the other woman. If a woman has an affair the man will want to know about the kind of sex the couple had because he will be worried that someone will be better than he is.

To achieve a more complete intimacy a couple needs to understand the power of attachment. This is the emotional bond or tie which gradually forms between them, but once formed will last forever. It is established in the first place because each person creates emotional exchanges with the other. If one feels something and it is responded to by the other, attachment will form. Attachment is desired but often makes us feel vulnerable. Once we feel open to and trusting of the other person we want some indication the other person feels the same way and will protect this very personal and exclusive feeling. That is the point.

In conversations listen to pay attention to the speaker first, as the source of the opinion, rather than agree or disagree with what is said. Select mutual activities that both enjoy and be willing to try out new things to show that being with that person is more important than the activity. Show respect and affection for each other regardless of the situation so you know that each is greater or more important than the circumstance you are in. Continue to learn about each other and then use what you learn to symbolize the personal and intimate knowledge you have. (e.g. Giving flowers to a woman is made better if the color of the flowers is known to be her favorite. Giving clothes to a woman is made better if they are the preferred style and correct size). Marriage can be a sustained experience of great intimacy and attachment for both people which brings the greatest satisfaction and fulfillment.

I have had the opportunity to spend time helping married couples who have felt a lot of unhappiness. I have listened to many who felt just in their descriptions of how they had been mistreated, ignored, criticized, and/or condemned. Their problems were quite real and often very painful. I have, as the years have passed, been a bit amazed at the number of different causes for emotional pain. One young couple stood out as an example. According to the wife, both were being very affectionate with each other and moving toward something more passionate when they heard a car honk. The husband got up, went to the door, and greeted a few of his high school buddies who wanted to go bowling. He turned to his wife, said a few excuses, found his bowling ball in the closet and left. Now, a few days later they were in my office. After she tearfully told this story I turned to him partly out of surprise hoping he would use the opportunity to explain.

He said, “well I have known these guys for a long time and we were friends before I was married.” I quietly asked him to not talk further because he was making more trouble for himself. Then he asked me, “well, what do you think?” I probably should have been more diplomatic but but I thought I had just heard a new definition of “dumb.” Since he didn’t understand what he had done that was so wrong I explained that he had possibly communicated to his wife that he was more committed to someone other than her and perhaps even communicated that he did not love her very much. This dismayed him because that was not what he thought had happened believing instead that he was only rightfully spending time with friends. We all looked at each other and began to enter a discussion about what could and should take place if a man, or woman, marries. Each had their own ideas about fidelity and love.

I have thought many times about the potential for marital problems. There are many possible and different types of problems and based on that number one could think the potential for unhappiness is quite high. If this is true, and many believe it, it seems like it would be a good thing to study the nature of these problems, as I was doing, so they could be resolved. While thinking about that on one occasion I had cause to reflect about a lesson I learned while a graduate student studying psychology. I had been taking a course designed to train counselors and had spent a lot of time studying abnormal behavior and learning about diagnostic categories for the mentally ill and for several types of emotional disorders. The more I studied the more I began to feel a heavy weight or a negative emotional burden of some kind. It was strong and persistent enough that at first I couldn’t shake it. I could see myself in some of the descriptions and wondered if I had mental or emotional problems I had not known about. I even considered admitting to myself that I had more than one type of problem just so I could stop worrying about it.

One day while thinking about this feeling I wondered if there were as many descriptions of healthy and successful behavior as there were categories of the abnormal. As a change of pace in my studies and hoping for a brief vacation from the pressure I felt, I went to the library and looked for things having to to do “healthy,” “happy,” or “successful.” I found quite a few articles and studies about “effective human behavior,” and “wellness.” They were positive and they described what people could do to make themselves into better people with better relationships. My feelings of gloom began to disappear.

I took one lesson from that experience. Here it is. “Bad things happen because good things don’t.” Over the years I have applied that lesson trying hopefully to help people resolve their marriage problems by getting them to focus on what is more effective and useful. Instead of just working to solve their problems so the sources of their unhappiness could be eliminated I learned that my task was not complete unless they also learned how to create a better kind of love. With that in mind I have noticed something about marital problems and about love. Problems appear to be like magnets because people try to defend themselves, are indignant about being treated poorly, and may seek to correct or control the person who is believed to be causing the problem. When individuals turn to control or defend themselves against one another they lose the motivation to create a relationship built on positive experience. Many then discover that an exclusive focus on problems and their resolution may actually compound the problems. Love, on the other hand, is a growing improving kind of experience. It requires that people trust, feel a lot of freedom, act with purpose with real creativity, and develop and use a set of love skills. These forms of behavior are in a very different category than problem related behavior. These skills, or practical forms of behavior, include several kinds of attention, intimacy, communication, commitment symbols, interest, and loyalty. Most couples with problems spend little time focusing on making themselves better at these forms of behavior.

As a side note, I believe that before marriage hardly anyone has had much of an opportunity to learn about these forms of love. Perhaps children of loving parents have an advantage because they have seen examples, but even those people do not have a chance to apply love skills in their effort to love another human being. If we wanted our children to succeed in marriage it just seems upside down to me.

As a result of this I have tried to learn more about a better kind of love and have attempted to teach these skills to people I have had the privilege of coming to know. When married couples can stop arguing and learn to solve their problems they can also learn to love each other better. Once committed to this course of action their lives often improve until they understand the idea of a better kind of love. This love follows real investment on the part of both people, given and received over a long period of time, and it is better, much better than what most of us begin with. There may be hundreds of ways to communicate it, and it gets better as we learn more and grow more. When it comes to creating marital happiness, I believe it would be a good thing for us to give much more emphasis to the skills we need to love one another.

There has been much written and said about stress, or more accurately duress. From many writers we have learned about causes and cures and many will work well, at least temporarily. From this body of literature we have also learned that people inherit a level of brain reactivity. Some of us are much more reactive to pressure than others. Those who are highly reactive are more likely to have allergies, miss school due to sickness, feel less than fully healthy, and will have emotional ups and downs. Some of the ups will be pleasant and rewarding. The downs will include intense anxiety, depression, melancholy, anger, and some forms of sadness-despair. Those who are less reactive seem to have the better of it because they appear to have more pleasant feelings and are less likely to experience roller coaster emotions.

What this means is that anyone wishing to understand the effects of pressure or duress should also understand the effects of pressure on themselves. Here is why. Many think the cure for stress is to get themselves out of a stressful environment such as working less, getting rid of guilt for mistakes, stopping stress producing habits, getting away from toxic people, and etc. Any of these may help. But, what if a person takes his vulnerability to pressure wherever he goes? For many it will only be a matter of time until things add up and he is in a similar situation wondering why he keeps having these problems. Surprisingly, in my experience, it often does not occur to such people that they and their own mental characteristics may have anything to do with their problems. After all, it appears to them that other things, people, and events cause their distress.

Now let’s consider something else. Events such as loss of a loved one or loss of a job, or a calamity does in fact create distress. So, now in addition to the person and the pressures one feels, we have the possibility of having to deal with life events which are often the source of great distress.

Let’s apply all this to the role mothers and fathers have with their children. As individuals they might be highly reactive or low reactive. They live in an environment and participate in work, home, play, school, hobbies, and etc. Further, they might suffer a child’s illness, disability, failure in school, or death. Even if they are low reactive people parents are in a “perfect storm,” where stress is concerned. What are the best things for you to do and is there anything that will provide a permanent solution?

For most of us there will probably be some type of pressures of one kind or another so it does not seem realistic to assume that you can always create a wholly peaceful life. Although some people seem to do this. For those who cannot, the key is to create a stress management problem that they create themselves, for themselves, and maintain by themselves. Consider the following and choose what you think will work for you and then try out your strategy.

Do not separate from those people, events, or activities which build and add emotional or spiritual uplift. Spend some time regularly participating in friendships and etc. that build. Do organize some portions of the day to give yourself a sense of control. You don’t have to be extremely organized but some form of it appears to be necessary. Create a positive form of parenting so you are teaching more than you are punishing or arguing. Create a family environment where you actively teach children positive forms of communication, love, affection, and etc. Give yourself decision rules so you can say “no,” to some requests made of you (e.g. I will say one “no,” for every “yes,” I say). Dispute pessimism so you don’t let yourself think negative thoughts without replacing them with something positive. Push aside some of your duties occasionally to do something pleasurable for yourself such as taking a hot bath in the middle of the day or stopping house cleaning to read a good book for a half hour. Identify the situations you participate in regularly and identify what you want from each one and describe to yourself how you want to participate in them. This will help you be less controlled by the situations you are in. Moderate your level of reactivity by learning to control fear or anxiety thoughts by focusing instead on what you want and hope for. Train yourself at the end of every day think about what you have accomplished or have done instead of thinking more about what you have not completed.

Lastly, change your level of reactivity. If you have suffered a loss of some kind you must change your feelings by thoughts and by learning to focus on something more positive. Forgiveness is a good thing, expressing gratitude more often, serving others helps, and finding out what you can learn from your experience. Memorize good poems, listen to good music, focus on what you can do more than what you cannot. Learn to assert your opinion more often. Practice adapting to new situations, such as meeting a new person or going into a new place, by developing a strategy you can use effectively. Examples include gathering information about the people and the place which is/are new. Then, learning to think about a strategy that will help you succeed in that situation. Systematically avoiding every new thing will make you more distressed, not less.

Once you apply the methods you have selected you will have a more permanent solution to stress that will work for you. It will be your method, one you have tried and tested, and this is what makes it work. You will be doing something you have chosen. It will be proactive and reduce your level of reactivity. It is better than anxiety related stress or stress induced depression.

For over twenty five years I have taught about how children develop, grow, and mature. It has been one of the best experiences of my life. The college students were smart, interested, and fun to teach. The knowledge base of developmental psychology is extraordinarily interesting. It also brings to one’s awareness many other things about human life. For one thing there are several types of growth. These include emotional, mental, physical, language, social, and moral development. All these are studied during infancy, childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. Specialists work in each of these areas and often live their entire professional lives researching and teaching about them. When the thousands of studies are finally published and available to anyone it is possible to see the enormous effort that is and has been underway to understand our children. When I had the opportunity to read widely and deeply in some of these areas something happened to me that I had not expected. The knowledge I acquired about development led to a perspective I have come to value a great deal and would like to share.

Imagine that you can see something from its beginning, along the way, and until its final stage. Jean Piaget, for example, is a famous cognitive psychologist who observed his own children and created a most remarkable view of how children’s mental processes develop. He identified four stages including “sensory-motor” where children learn from their senses and integrate senses with movement, “preoperational” where children think and reason without much logical mental organization, “concrete operations” where children think about physical parts their world, and “formal operations” where adolescents think and reason with logic and well-defined mental processes. Hundreds of people have studied his theory which has brought to light support as well as questions.

Suppose now that you understand his description of development from beginning to its final stage. One day, as I did, you will likely look at all of it and ask about the value of knowing this information. You might have a flash or two of insight like I did and make the following conclusions. For one thing, it would occur to you that if you know how the natural development takes place you might be able to make it more successful for your children if you provided the right type of parental leadership. Leadership in this case means that you have some idea where children are developing to and you do things which help them be successful rather than allow chance or some unhappy event increase the possibilities they will be unsuccessful in their efforts. For instance, if you knew how children grow mentally you could provide extra sensory (sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch) stimulation to them in the early years of their lives. You might put chocolate pudding on the kitchen cabinet and let a three year-old finger paint in it because it will stimulate creativity and brain growth.

If you knew the importance of social and emotional growth you would make certain you were predictable, caring, warm, comforting, and interesting during the first two years of your children’s lives so they could form secure emotional attachments with you. Attachment, secure or insecure, might be the basis of all other relationships children have the rest of their lives. You might also develop a teaching model of parenthood where you take your kids out and around talking to them and showing them the world in sight, sound, and touch. This you might do instead of a using a punishment or neglect model where you simply react to what your children do. You might make certain you laugh with them, have fun with them, and communicate every positive emotion such as love, warmth, tenderness, gladness, cheerfulness, and happiness just so their brains will learn many more positive then negative emotions.

After doing all this you watch your developing children imitate you and then it might occur to you that you need to be whatever you most want them to be. So you use adult rather than childish language when you talk to them, avoid displays of unstable anger, use wisdom instead of rashness when making decisions, and speak to them about the best things life has to offer. You will read for yourself and to them, you will display creativity so they will, and you will demonstrate optimism because you want them to know about it. Plus, you will encourage them to come along with you and find life as a great adventure. In short, you will have provided excellent family leadership.

I was listening to a couple of parents tell how they motivated their children to perform their chores. They asked their children to compete to see who could finish first. They had found out that if they said, “let’s see who gets his/her work done first,” their children would run to get things done. On the surface it seemed like a great motivation. Then as they continued their conversation they told how they worked hard to treat their children equally even going so far as making certain that all got a shirt when one received a shirt or article of clothing or the girls all got dolls when one received it. As I listened to them I was reminded why they were visiting with me. Their children quarreled often and the older ones had had several intense arguments.

There are probably many causes and situations for sibling rivalry and arguing including a lack of emotional maturity, annoying one another, crowded conditions, and a perception of unfairness. Conflict is greater when parental stress and intensity are greater, when parents are less engaged with their children, and when emotional and financial resources are limited. But, if two parents intended to increase arguments and children’s rivalry they could have not done more than what these parents were doing. The roots of many arguments are competitiveness and perceived similarity. These two conditions do not permit children to “differentiate” or see and appreciate the differences between them. Nor do they allow children to learn how to respect themselves and be confident in themselves more than they worry about what someone else might do.

So, what is the solution? Stop asking children to compete with each other in the performance of family tasks in order to get parental approval. They might compete in sports or some other setting but not to get attention and affection. Secondly, make certain that children are, in some instances, asked to learn how they are physically, emotionally, mentally, and socially different (but not better than or worse than). Help them understand that each child is unique and so is everyone else and they need to learn to appreciate the difference and unique qualities of people and not dislike those who are different than they are.

When the parents asked how to do this I proposed the following. They could spend time actually talking about the qualities and characteristics of each child in turn. They could do this at meal times and even set up special evenings to recognize each child’s achievements and personal qualities. They could stagger bed times so some went to bed earlier than others. Further, they could select as many groups of chores as they have children and, other than personal work such as making beds and etc.) they rotate the children through these chores so that each child performed each group of chores one week at a time. (This may not be possible for families where children are too young but parents can help those children). Having learned for myself, I suggested to the parents that they reduce the amount of TV watching time and increase family conversations and game playing among the children. Lastly, I proposed they teach cooperation, empathy, and service to their family members. They could find and create little lessons and small activities which emphasize the importance of these crucial social skills.

In very short order the number of arguments, as measured by the parents, diminished. Children were doing better at their chores and the emotional climate of the family was more stable and peaceful. At least in this case, the suggestions seemed to work well and I believe can work well for many parents.

As the years of my professional life have passed along I believe I have noticed more anxious children and children whose anxieties are more elaborate. I have wondered, as a result, what is causing all this. But, I have learned that finding the cause for more anxious children is not the same thing as solving the problem. I believe it to be most important for us to educate parents and teachers about children’s anxieties and what to do to help them. This is because anxiety shows up in many different forms and it is often mistaken. Then the wrong strategy is selected and when used often causes more difficulty for the child. Instead of helping an anxious child we add to his problems because we do not understand well enough.

Anxiety is an inherited emotion that can either be minimized or enhanced by experience. All children have some anxieties but some inherit more than their share. When this happens it is quite possible that anxiety impairs children’s lives in a major way. Charles Schaefer and Howard Millman described anxious children in the following way. Anxious children are scared easily and look for additional things to be afraid of. Everyday situations can overwhelm them. Highly anxious children are less popular, less creative, and less flexible than others. They are more suggestible, more indecisive, more cautious, and rigid. Their self-concept is relatively poor, and they often feel more dependent on adults. Anxious children often do poorly in school. It is likely that their anxiety interferes with their ability to learn efficiently.

Why are children overly anxious? Here are some of the most common reasons:

• They inherit their anxieties
• They face inconsistencies from adults
• They learn an inappropriate perfectionism
• They are reared with permissiveness and neglect
• They receive a lot of criticism
• One or more adults may inappropriately tell of adult problems
• They may feel guilt about something they may or may not have done
• Parents may model anxiety which the children immitate

Here are a few of the best ways to help children:

• Recognize the anxiety as the root of other problems such as social avoidance, bullying, being dominated, or avoiding performance tasks
• Avoid criticizing them for these anxiety driven forms of behavior or expressing disappointment in them
• Begin a campaign to reassure your child he can do well and he is cared for by you, always
• Teach your child to relax by giving her mental images of safe and calm places and experiences
• Help them to use this procedure just before they enter an anxiety producing situation
• Promote confidence building experiences that you share with him, such as going to new places, meeting new people, and trying out new experiences
• Help her focus on the feelings of calm, peace, and confidence. Ask what these feelings feel like
• Turn anxiety into being busy and involved with some activity
• Show him when you are calm and confident
• Teach the child to focus on the positive and interrupt and distract when the child complains, says negative things, or belittles himself or others
• You may need to consider professional help. Choose someone who has a strong background dealing with children and with anxious children

Anxiety is a worrisome emotion. It feeds on itself which means that when a person is anxious the thoughts, feelings, and actions which accompany that feeling often lead to more anxiety. As a result anxieties can move from one to many situations, from one trigger to many. It is therefore, best to resolve it as quickly as it can be recognized and effectively dealt with.

Setting and maintaining limits for children is very difficult for most parents. For one thing parents must say no to something. Then they will need to define the boundaries for what a child could and should do and what they don’t want the child to do. After that, parents must impose some restrictions that will regulate a child’s behavior and establish controls when the child is unwilling to accept the limits. This process will be easier if, as children grow, they naturally develop increased abilities to self regulate. It is more difficult if children do not develop the mental skills which aid in self regulating. Children with attentional disorders, or some other cognitive problems, are considered difficult to rear because they do not self regulate, or are slow in developing this ability, and have a hard time learning to keep their emotions, words, and actions within limits the parents set. They are considered a “child of the environment” which means they are heavily influenced by the stimulus conditions they see in people and situations.

Most successful people, however, live within some self imposed or learned limits for their time, their emotions, their language, their money, their work, and their social communication. People have to self regulate in order to be punctual, to control their anger, limit their words to not hurt others, manage their money, organize their work, and do positive rather than negative things around people. Whether children have a healthy set of limits depends on their combination of inherited predispositions, what they learn from their own experience and what parents teach them.

Because some form of limits characterizes all successful men and women, parental love can be tied to the idea that teaching children healthy limits is in fact a profound form of love for them. I once listened to a wise and experienced counselor who had seen hundreds of parents and children professionally. He almost always talked about control and how to establish it. He advised people to define what limits they wanted in several areas including children’s chores, how they expressed their feelings, their language, their use of time, and their social behavior. Whenever they “misbehaved” he advised that children were not in control of themselves and suggested to parents they tell their children that very thing: “You are out of control.” Then he proposed that parents give their children a choice to bring their behavior under control and if they could not then the parents would help. Help usually meant sitting on a chair for as long as parents wanted them to. When the children would not sit on a chair he advised the parents to straddle the child to control their weight on the child and not hurt them, but sit on them until they were willing to sit on the chair. Then he proposed that this “calm chair” be used as a device to help children quickly understand the need to “be in control of themselves.” In this manner he helped parents establish a sense of parental authority which didn’t hurt the children and gave them a practical way to teach limits. Children learned to behave much better because they were being taught to act within limits in several several different categories of behavior.

I wondered what people would think about that because it seemed very basic and a bit primitive to me at the time. But the parents loved it. It gave them new found stability and control when dealing with their children and helped them clearly identify where children needed to be regulated because they were not mature enough to regulate themselves. They learned their choices were to control and regulate themselves or someone else might. It is a lesson many people would benefit from if they knew and lived it. Because of the great effort involved until children learned, the parents he taught soon discovered that this was in fact a form of love by parents for their children. I have thought since that this form of love may be one of the best children ever receive.

There has been and probably always will be an ongoing debate about the success or effectiveness of any child management method. For instance, spanking has its proponents and there are many who disagree with it. Recently another discipline strategy has been found to be much less successful than many parents think and researchers have that it may be harmful. This is the practice of isolating a child as a punishment for misbehavior. Giving a child a short time out may be a good step to help him calm down but we have learned that isolating a child for misbehavior is not a good practice. Here is why.

For one thing children’s toys, and sometimes TV’s, are in children’s bedrooms. So if parents automatically send their children to their rooms they are sending them to a playroom where children can be alone and do a lot of fun things. Another reason to stop isolating children is that isolation by itself may not communicate any meaning to the child. If a child is mistreating another child for example, and a mother has asked for the child to stop and the child persists, simply isolating him does not ensure he will learn better ways to treat other children. In fact, as some have learned, without instructive communication isolation may lead to anger and resentment that motivates hurtful behavior in the future. Lastly, isolating a child teaches him that when he misbehaves he should leave the presence of his parents.

The sequence is this. There is some form of conflict with another child, a misbehavior or disobedience of some kind, and then the parents say in effect, “Go away from me.” Done repeatedly during the early years of childhood, this practice effectively teaches children that parents aren’t going to talk things over, they aren’t willing to listen to mistakes, they are going to reject if mistakes are made or a rule is broken, and the solution is simply to go away from the parents. Then later in life when mistakes or misbehavior occurs, which problems are often much more serious and dramatic during adolescence, they are often compounded because there is no early correction. Teenagers often feel so hurt by their own mistakes they may think there is no way to correct what they have done. Then, having done something terrible they conclude it doesn’t matter any more what they do in the future. What could have been one incident of misbehavior now becomes far worse and when this happens during the formative years when the misbehavior adds all sorts of problems to a child’s overall identity.

What we want to do is to communicate to our children that when they make mistakes they could and should come to us right away. So instead of “Go away from me,” we should teach, “Come to me.” There are probably times such as calming or separating a child from others when a time out or brief isolation might be useful; but if we brought our children to us, we could learn to comfort, to help in the process of calming, and instruct them about what is better behavior. This is a form of love that children will benefit from. It is not permissiveness because children will still have penalties for wrong doing, but is a type of love that lets children understand that mistakes do not mean rejection by their parents.

As a student of family psychology I was surprised when I read that criticism by parents in American families occurred ten times more often than praise. Later I discovered some of the reasons for this. Parents usually have more than one child and try to regulate the older ones with words. Parents get busy with their own activities and use criticism as an attempt to minimize their time at disciplining or they have habits of criticizing learned from other people. When these conditions exist it is easier to let a child go along until he does something wrong and then point out inadequacy than it is to teach and encourage constructive behavior.

Later I read how criticism sometimes creates a language code in families. Parents who say, “Be quiet,” “Get off the chair,” “Stop it,” are criticizing but also teaching their children to listen to very short sentences. The length of parents’ communication with children influences their attention span and may affect their social skills and their academic performance. Encouragement, on the other hand requires more words and children with encouraging parents often have longer attention spans.

I began to realize that the problem with short communication is one thing, but there was another flaw with criticism. Verbally criticizing a child points out to him what he has done wrong and does very little to give him a positive way of acting. If we want our children to succeed, we should focus their attention on whatever form of success we want for them and then motivate them to achieve it. For instance, if we want children to learn social skills we must teach about listening or giving compliments and do something other than point out their mistakes. If we wish our children be successful at school we probably should teach them about due dates, work habits, organizing their work, and do something more than criticizing them for failure. What is needed besides criticism?

Encouragement is often ignored in terms of its power to give children good goals to pursue and motivate them to achieve. Further, it is positive and builds relationships parents have with children rather than weakening the emotional tie. Why don’t more people use it?

It is pretty easy to do. You can express confidence in children when they fear trying something new. When they act helplessly you can say,” I know you think you can’t do this, but I know you can.” You can express optimism when children fail or make mistakes teaching them to recover from both. With your children you can help them set high goals because you know they can do it. You can praise and point out their accomplishments. Criticism may be necessary from time to time as part of constructive feedback parents give their children but it should never humiliate or embarrass. Combined with less frequent criticism, abundant encouragement makes it more likely that children will live more confidently themselves and encourage others.

When it comes to educating our children we are in a new and potentially pioneering era.
Many of the old problems still exist as do many of the successes and benefits, but we are realizing at least one new way we can advance our children’s learning. New brain research along with the willingness to test what has been discovered has yielded results which suggest something teachers and parents should do. In my opinion we should attach much more importance to gender differences. The reason for this is easy to understand. If we want to increase student receptivity (learning) to what teachers teach, then we should take a look at how students’ brains receive information. We can continue to individualize on the basis of age, readiness, and learning style because we can improve learning by adjusting to unique abilities. We shall see later though that knowing how to understand and use gender differences will have greater impact on learning than understanding individual differences. By knowing how boys and girls learn differently we can adapt how we communicate to them, because we will know how their natural mental abilities influence the way they learn.

First a few ideas about male and female brains. According to Leonard Sax, the author of Why Gender Matters, , researchers have made the following discoveries. Brains are structured by the x and y chromosomes. Male brains are more specialized. The female brain is more integrated. In studies with premature infants, females are positively stimulated by music, male infants do not appear to respond the same. The reason: females hear better than males and their brains process sound differently. Girls hear parental voices as louder but are more easily distracted by noise. In some research with infants, girls prefer to view and are more accurate in assessing facial expressions, boys appear to prefer looking at moving objects. Girls prefer red, orange, beige, and green. Boys prefer black, gray, silver, and blue. When viewing an object girls discriminate to identify what the object is and boys view objects to identify movement and locations. Girls like to draw complete objects and boys attach action to their objects. When giving directions girls will give landmarks such as buildings and colors. Boys will give actual distance and reference points. Where feelings are concerned boys and girls use very different mental processes. Regarding negative feelings, girls show a developmental improvement in their ability to understand and communicate their feelings. Boys typically do not make many changes. Even as young adults, boys have more difficulty understanding and communicating about their negative feelings. It is not true that girls are more emotional than boys. It is not true that girls are naturally more cooperative than boys. It is not true that boys are naturally superior in math and science.

Do boys and girls act differently in social situations? Yes. Girls act similarly when they are alone and when they are with other girls, but adjust how they act when they are around boys. Boys adjust their behavior from being alone and when around other boys and typically will take greater risks in order to impress the other boys. Boys, too, adjust their actions when around girls and may accentuate their status, prowess, and other forms of maleness.

There are several other differences but these will suffice to make the point. There are small differences between what boys and girls can do but there are major differences in how they go about doing something. So, for example, would girls do better in math if math was taught specifically for girls? Would boys do better if math was taught specifically for boys? Yes is the likely answer.

What does this all mean? First we probably should give greater consideration, as parents and teachers, to learning and applying what we learn about gender differences. While it is a very good idea to address individual differences to help us understand uniqueness, individual differences are not as great as gender differences. This means that to buy toys, create learning opportunities, and form relationships we could help our children by giving greater emphasis to the significance of gender. Consider the following examples. Boys will improve their performance if they receive positive and negative feedback if it is constructive. That is, boys improve when they understand what they do well and where they need to improve. Girls do better with encouragement. Boys can be challenged as individuals to do better and girls are more motivated to improve if their individual effort is linked to pleasing someone. Both will work to help groups. Performance improves if boys understand they are part of a team; girls benefit from friendships.

It would be a good thing for us to know more about gender. If the differences are as large and fundamental as research suggests then gender is a primary tool we can use to improve conditions for our children. Ignoring it as something which influences how children learn can create unintended problems during parent and teacher communication with children.

I believe where political correctness is concerned we will soon see the true folly of the idea as measured by two things. The idea of being considerate with others who are different than we are is a great idea gone wrong. The reason I believe this is that trying to blur and submerge aspects of our identities and personality in order to respect others is a flawed idea. Here is why.

Understanding and appreciating cultural diversity is a great teacher. We have tried to teach our children to accept and befriend people who are different than they are. It is like learning a second language. By knowing something different about an alternative language we learn more about our own. Knowing and communicating with someone different from us helps us learn more about and understand ourselves better. Developing children become more mature socially when they understand many and respect cultural identities about people who are different than they are.

In contrast, let’s examine what happens to us and our children if we use the blending, blurring, submerging emphasis given in political correctness. Fewer people will dare to say what they think, reflect on our differences, and preserve their own identities because we are worried about someone else. Almost everyone will be the loser. We will eliminate celebrations and other markers of culture because we can’t do everyone’s and in that case we will do no one’s. The net result of all this is interesting. Instead of greater compassion and acceptance for others we have and will have increased self absorption.

It is like the current demand faced by public school teachers who are asked to teach without representing any particular value. A teacher, to satisfy this requirement, must submerge what he or she believes in order to not offend. This is not possible in most cases because virtually all teaching is value laden. A better way would be for the teacher to identify a certain concept or opinion as his or her value, show the benefits, and include it in a discussion of competing ideas as well.

Years ago when at the University of Minnesota, I was directing a training program for counselors for minority populations. The prominent politically correct idea at the time was to be color blind about people’s skin color or ethnic background. This seemed to be a logical extension from the idea we should eliminate words hostile to someone and their race or culture. When meeting with various groups of people I didn’t find one person who wanted their counselors to be color blind to them. They wanted instead to have their skin color and cultural identities to be recognized and to mean something real and positive. In that condition I met and grew to love many and was able to teach counselors about the true benefits of appreciating the significance of culture and cultural backgrounds.

We can all turn this around and be much more mature about this matter if we start teaching our children about their own cultural heritage, about themselves as boys and girls, and to appreciate the qualities that make them unique and distinct as individuals. When they are clear about themselves they can more easily recognize that it is possible to declare themselves with true intent without arrogance or superiority. This is better than organizing ourselves to limit everyone just so we don’t offend one or two people.

In child development literature a writer has identified “stranger wariness,” as the beginning of prejudgment and bias. This concept suggests that children simply are wary of people who are unfamiliar and feel a little anxious when coming in contact with them. Unless channeled correctly, or unless it is cultivated, it can grow into selectivity, indifference, and then something worse. Children can easily be taught to overcome their natural wariness of those who are unfamiliar by learning more, not less, and by open acceptance of and knowledge about one’s person and culture. It would be good to teach children to learn about and appreciate one another rather than minimize and submerge qualities that make each person significant It would be nice if politicians applied this same principle.

Eric Fromm wrote in his book, “To Have Or To Be,” that an age old controversy had existed between two lifestyles. One is to do things so you can have things and the other is to be something so you can become better. Humans appear to be motivated by both but one, according to him, is more fulfilling. This is the idea that we should give greater emphasis to being and becoming. Some think that here in 2007 we are in the “me” generation where people spend more time thinking about themselves, what they should get, and caring about what they want more than they are willing to care for others. I see some of that but I also see many people caring for, serving, and giving to others. So, I wonder about our society and what we are teaching ourselves and our children.

When I read and think about ideas like these I link them to the less-than-happy people I see in my travels and my work. They seek out professional services because they are not happy, come to lectures and ask questions because something is missing in their lives. They are often wealthy but their children are not successful, or they are successful in other achievements, but something is lacking in their lives. Sometimes they are not wealthy or successful and are frustrated by their condition.

There is reward for material things, social status, and influence. Many seek and find those rewards but people describe them as temporary and therefore they require periodic “fixes” to maintain. This is because organizing to be productive to do things and have things also causes some stress. When there is too much emphasis on these things the stress increases and people are less likely to feel other rewards such as love, warmth, tenderness, and the like. This makes their pursuit a bit hollow for them and the rewards temporary. What could we do otherwise?

There is an inner form of satisfaction, or reward, for certain forms of behavior that seems to also be rewarding. This comes from a focus on making oneself a better person. Becoming more honest, more loving, and more compassionate, for instance, has built-in fulfillment that lasts beyond the moment. This, I believe, comes from the idea that we are developmental people and continue to grow and improve as long as we live. When we develop or grow to some better form of behavior we receive an inner confirmation that such growth is a good thing. This effort usually has less stress tied to it and therefore people can feel greater and more positive emotional rewards.

When we search for activities and methods of creating growth most people look in art, music, and other creative expression. Many find doing something for others and belonging to compatible groups very satisfying. Whatever the enterprise, if we can feel ourselves being something better and trying to become a better form of the type of person we would like to be, we then feel calmer and more satisfied.

There is a simple test. Try spending one hour a week, for two weeks, expressing gratitude to other people in your life. In this case, try to use all the methods of showing it to as many people as possible in that hour. If you are happier after doing this, how would you explain this result? You would need to conclude that you have produced the happier feeling yourself, through your own actions. Then you would also need to evaluate whether a very positive “being” behavior like gratitude has the power to fulfill you. If, as I have learned, you will feel happier then it comes from being and becoming something better.

I worked as a consultant for a local school district a few years ago helping them implement a federally funded reading achievement program. I sat in on meetings where the high school principals selected the participating students. Most of the principals were home grown, so to speak, and had lived in the town or city where the school was located. As the students’ names were mentioned the principals attempted to identify who should be selected by asking questions about them. Sometimes a principal thought they knew the parents of this student and asked about them by name Often, the parents of the low achieving student had been a classmate of the principal and the principal knew them also as low achieving. As I watched it became clear that the students who were being selected were often second generation students where parents in the first and their children in the second had poor academic records.

Does this mean all family members were less intelligent and therefore unable to achieve? Perhaps, but probably not. Then what does it mean? We discovered that parents of low achieving students pass on their attitudes about learning and their work values and habits to their children. For instance we found that many parents stopped their children in the middle of their homework to either play with them or make them do their home chores. When parents were asked to teach their children a certain skill (e.g. spelling) many parents communicated their own inadequacy by admitting they “had never been good at spelling.” Their children often parroted the exact statement and feeling when faced with a similar task. When asked to identify a positive memory of school they could share with their children, the parents often could not. In an attempt to find one, one woman told of slipping and hitting her head on the ice and then described how the school nurse was nice to her. Not very positive.

There is a great deal of research where the findings indicate that parents create a learning environment of some level or another in the process of rearing their children. The extent and emphasis parents give to learning and to particular subjects often transfers to student interest and achievement levels in the classroom. This fact is well known by educators but we still have not figured out how to get parents who had their own negative experiences make a new and better family learning environment for their children. Many school districts spend large sums of money in this attempt. What would we do if we could?

I can describe what was done in this project which seemed to work well. First, we asked teachers to make home visits to these students and meet the parents in their world. When parent-teacher conferences were held more parents came and appeared to be less threatened and more open to being involved. Second, we asked parents to come to the classroom and spend a few hours assisting the teacher. This was done to give the parents greater awareness of the requirements of the classroom such as due dates, teaching strategies, and so forth. Third, we taught the parents how to teach specific skills to their children and gave them the materials to be successful. Fourth, since many parents displayed a restricted communication code in their homes (e.g “shut up,” “stop it” and etc.) we showed the parents how to expand their family communication by giving longer explanations when making decisions about family rules and by creating opportunities to talk more with their children. They learned to say, “Well let’s talk about it.” This was done so that both parents and children would be able to mentally process more words.

I can’t recall the exact results from this project but I know it was successful enough to be re-funded. While the school environment makes a big impact on our children, our children’s first learning environment, and perhaps the most influential, is the one they find at home.

Behavioral scientists have made great strides in their ability to research and uncover interesting, but hidden knowledge. Like any branch of science, however, there is a lag between new findings and what people generally know. For instance, over the years psychologists have created tests and conducted research about the descriptions of, and causes and effects of different personality traits. A trait is a fairly permanent form of behavior which is displayed in many different situations. Introversion, or social shyness or social reticence, is an example. A large testing industry has developed to measure these traits and exists for many different educational, business, and psychological programs. Most personality tests yield information about a certain trait or cluster of traits to characterize an individual’s life or personality. A modern version of such a test is the one which measures your personality color as red, white, blue, or yellow.

This research matches the layman’s way of interpreting people. Most of us, when making judgments, think about people by using trait names such as “kind,” “nurturing,” and etc. We do this even though there is more than one way to look at and understand your spouse. For instance, while all the emphasis has been given to studying personality traits, a less familiar but equally important finding has emerged concerning personality traits. As early as 1938 researchers trying to develop a test to measure honesty discovered that a person’s display of honesty often depended on the context or situation that person was in. This led to research about the influence of the social situation on how we act. In other words, how a person acts could be associated with the people he or she is with, the emotions of the situation, its purpose, and the setting or physical location.

For married people this means there is more than one “reality.” Suppose you are wondering why your spouse is acting a certain way that you may or may not like. And then suppose you form a judgment that your spouse acts a certain way because it is in his or her personality. At first glance you might think, “He has a bad temper,” or “She is selfish,” or “He learned to be critical from the way he was treated by his parents.” Or, you might think “She is a very giving woman,” and “He is a kind loving person.” Then, as a process of interpreting how and why your spouse acts a certain way, your judgments become a reality that you keep using even when there is evidence your spouse doesn’t act that way all of the time. Once you pin a negative label on your spouse, for instance, you continue to see your spouse in that manner even if there is contrary evidence.

I have seen many people who do this. A husband, for instance, might say, “My wife is cold and indifferent. She does nothing loving that I can remember.” If the wife is in the same room she might defend herself by pointing out several instances where she in fact did very kind and loving things for her husband. Even though he will reluctantly admit she is right, why doesn’t he see her accurately and why is he likely to dismiss the good things she has done? He has diagnosed her personality and given her a label and even though there is evidence to the contrary he will likely persist in seeing just what his judgment suggests. Unless, that is, he is given an alternative way to view his wife. This view, which is often more accurate and real, is the idea that her actions are influenced by the situation she is in. In other words, one reason why she acts as she does is because she is married to and communicates with him. In order for her to make changes, if that is what he wants, the chances are good he will need to change as well. Viewing the other person’s actions as being influenced by us and the situation the other person is in always helps us be a bit more humble than if we just make judgments and attach a label.

Most of the time when parents discuss their ideas of child management the conversation ends up being about how to control children, when to control them, and what methods of control work the best. This is because anyone who is an experienced parent knows that choosing a type of control is one of the most difficult decisions parents face. This is because children are different and if parents err and use the wrong type of control or the wrong amount of control with a given child, they may actually harm their children.

Questions about why parents select a method of control show that parental decisions usually involve two things. One is their tradition of control learned from their own parents. The other is what they know about their children and attempt to use this knowledge to create a method that is matched to the needs of the children or goals of the parents. It is, or should be obvious, that children are more likely to be harmed when tradition, as the basis for control, is applied and parents apply it without having positive goals for their children or apply it without knowing the emotional needs of their children.

This situation can be avoided and parents can be more confident about how to control their children if they apply two principles. One principle is to apply the least amount of control to get their goals achieved and eliminate some forms of control (e.g. too harsh, too rigid, or too permissive) as being ineffective and potentially harmful. The second principle suggests that control can be administered justly and sparingly if parents communicate with their children more than they control them.

This principle is appropriate for our day. Busy parents and children often fail to communicate enough. Watching TV, videos, and computer games also reduce parent-child communication. If parents and children do not communicate enough they do not have knowledge, emotional attachment, and the ability to use informal influence. When there is not enough communication parents resort to scolding, restricting a privilege, grounding, spanking, and/or isolating a child in his room or elsewhere. When parents use these methods without sufficient communication children feel the lack of emotional interest and concern. In these situations a cycle may develop where parental attempts to punish and control are met with children’s anger at the lack of emotional satisfaction Then, the more children are controlled the more they will react negatively and parents will get the opposite of what they hope for. All this can be avoided, and parental attempts to control can be more effective, if they communicate more than they control.

I grew up in a generation where sex was not openly talked about by adults to children. So that is my point of reference when I say that we are much more open than we used to be. I want to point out that openness about it has not seemed to resolve, or even given methods of resolving, the challenges married people face in their sexual relationship. And, it seems to me there are great numbers, perhaps a majority, of couples who simply get along, maybe survive, in their sexual relationship rather than find complete fulfillment. Although many married couples find their sex lives to be less than they desire, it doesn’t mean that everyone is having less sex. It is more like the philosopher Rollo May’s view that we are living in the New Puritanism. The Old Puritanism was no sex but lots of passion. The new version is lots of sex and no passion.

When Master’s and Johnson’s famous studies were reported it opened the door for more sexual knowledge and understanding, at least from the perspective of physical performance. Following their landmark reports others wrote about the mental and emotional aspects of sex suggesting that the brain was the most important part of sexual response. And, that sex is not something one does to another person, or for them, but with them. But for some reason much of the knowledge acquired in these settings has not transferred to the practical and everyday lives of men and women. We still see a variety of problems where couples cannot get themselves synchronized to be good companions for each other. As a result where we have the potential of a wonderful and human experience to be shared with the one we love, sex is instead often much less than that.

So, I propose an ethic for passion. Sex is more passionate and satisfying when it is designed and participated in to meet a variety of physical, emotional, and psychological desires. No part of this can be ignored in the totality of one’s relationship. When sex is isolated from the context of a total relationship it may bring temporary passion but eventually, in my experience, the temporary passion is replaced by the routine which is less passionate. The evidence for this is found in the following ideas. Women are more passionate and responsive when they have high trust in their partner. Men tend to find greater fulfillment when erotic experience is linked to a deep intimacy and feelings of approval. Further, many couples who report having a great sexual experience tend to be those who communicate often and well, who frequently display love for each other, who successfully make mutual decisions together, and in many other ways make certain they consider the importance of both people.

Contrast these with the situations where one partner wants sex more frequently than the other, perhaps applies too much persuasion, and, as a couple, they have no way to resolve the difference. Or, when one person withdraws from sex because of anger and frustration and won’t participate in attempts to find a solution. Or, when two people communicate so poorly or so seldom there is little companionship. Or, when one frequently feels a great deal of stress and instead of taking the time with a companion to join themselves together in warm cadence of feelings simply wants a stress release. Each of these illustrates the absence of mutuality.

Mutuality (some call it intimacy) is a matter of getting ourselves together in a condition of synchrony. What one person does is matched by what the other does in a mutual activity. Synchrony is where practical methods exist to join two people together at mental, emotional, and physical levels. Men and women may differ in how they achieve this condition. Women usually want to talk in order to feel close to a partner and men may want to have sex to feel close. When they have been going at a different pace during the day it is wise to take time with each other in order to rejoin. This mutuality can be created by making certain you ask about and learn what your partner thinks about and wants in many situations. It can be created when you show as much concern for your partner during decision making as you show for what you want. It can be created when each person shows desire for the other, pays attention and recognizes highly personal and unique things, feels and shows empathy and compassion, feels and displays gratitude, and participates in the process of affection. Mutuality and the synchrony it creates precedes passion.

Several years ago I taught a graduate course on systems theory as applied to families. I organized individual students into “families” in which every student was required to study, help each other review for tests, and assume responsibility for each other’s success. On one graded project the “family” received a group grade so that every individual was affected by how their family did. I did this to simulate communication and other interaction in a real time family. To show how a family might be influenced by its social community I organized a second level system to simulate government, schools, churches, and so forth. During the course, as time pressures began to affect student compliance with expectations they themselves created, it became clear that students in the “community” (e.g. government, and schools) entities began to procrastinate their responsibilities and eventually failed to perform. Conflict appeared and some groups sought to exploit others and some actually attempted to deceive others. While all this was going on, each individual student was a participant in their family system and had responsibilities there plus their own work to do in the way of tests, papers, and projects.

Coincident to the deception in the community, which most in the class were aware of, some families stopped meeting as a group to help each other, and the members in them started to fend for themselves. When it came time to turn in papers and individual projects, more students than usual were late with their work and the work was less satisfactory in many cases. A few of the students who complained more about fairness and grading practices were also those who excused their low performance by blaming others.

I used this method because in earlier classes students had worked cooperatively together in the community and in their families. Their group performance was much better than when students worked by themselves. I know this example would at best be a small microcosm of a larger social system and it is probably not be fully representative. Nevertheless I was very impressed by what I was witnessing even from older more mature students. It seemed fair to conclude that people in human organizations can be heavily influenced by standards which they believe others comply with or disobey. When government officials, church and school officials display immoral behavior it is no small thing. What I thought I was witnessing was the relationship of public morality (or immorality) on the display of private morality or individual choice. I also know that it works the other way as well. Individuals who are act without integrity often display the same behavior in public positions.

When some deceive it can influence people in different ways. Some may use what they see to justify their own irresponsibility. While this is not earth shattering news it motivated me to research and address questions about what parents might do in their families if their social system of schools, churches, governments, and social groups around them could or could not be be relied upon or if they, as parents, had confidence or felt little trust.

What I learned from reading widely, researching, and eventually ended up writing about was that parents can help children develop a private morality regardless of what other people do, but it requires a special kind of understanding. For instance, during the 1980’s and the decade thereafter, Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning was prominent. He had proposed that the development of morality in children was related to brain growth and children’s ability to reason more maturely. In my research I learned that if people thought that morality was about mature reasoning and thinking, this approach worked only in small specific situations and was seldom applied in other places and times. Parents who tried to teach their children a sense of right and wrong using this approach typically scolded and/or punished their children for doing what is wrong. This was not very effective in teaching them to actually do what was right when choices involved other persuasive people. Children often seemed more likely to be confused about what to do when situations were new. They seemed more vulnerable to someone’s bad example or influence.

In contrast, when parents focused on spending time and creating strong family relationships children began to understand their moral responsibility in a very different light. When parents taught about right and wrong in the family context of positive relationships, children were not more vulnerable to other people’s influence if they applied their teachings to actual family relationships in a specific way. Children were more likely to develop a strong private morality when their sense of right and wrong (morality) was tied to the idea that morality helps people and immorality harms someone. A lie is wrong because it harms people. Honesty is right because it helps. This type of private morality transferred to other situations. That is, if parents taught the principle, “What helps and harms people?” children more likely applied this teaching in many other situations. It became clear that this (what helps and harms people) was a more fundamental part of private morality than anything else people used to teach their children about integrity, right and wrong, prejudice, exploitation, and the like. When children have a broad understanding of what helps and harms people, including themselves, they are less likely to be heavily influenced by what other people do and are more willing to do what they believe is right even if they are alone in doing it.

I then took this approach to public schools and invited them to use it in the classroom. In over one hundred fifty schools many teachers used this idea to motivate students to improve achievement and reduce misconduct. Students were asked to develop the ability to make judgments about others based on what would help or harm them. It might be an idea that is right for our time.

One of the most interesting educational and child development discoveries in the last ten years is related to brain growth. This discovery identified “windows,” which are times or periods in a child’s life where rapid brain growth makes the brain more vulnerable to influence. The findings are these: (1) brains grow from birth to the early or mid twenties. (2) Part of brain growth includes the creation of neural networks which manage learning, memory, and other important functions such as language, numbers, and emotions. (3) The more dense and elaborate the neural network the more intelligent and effective a person is. (4) Brains are very adaptive and can be influenced by conditions in their environment. (5) The right type of stimulation during the right “window” can result in more elaborate neural networks and affect the hard wiring of the brain for a life time.

This means that inherited abilities like language, emotions, and numbers can be significantly enhanced by bringing children into contact with the right type of stimulation during the appropriate window or period of time. To make this even more understandable, let’s consider an example. Neural networks for emotions naturally grow rapidly the first five years of life. There is a network for positive emotions in the left brain hemisphere and one for negative emotions in the right frontal area. Imagine that a child is brought into parental contact that consisted of abundant love, happiness, comfort, warmth, tenderness, safety, gladness, cheerfulness, hopefulness, and etc. These “environmental stimuli” result in a larger more elaborate neural network in the left hemisphere and a less large or elaborate neural network in the right hemisphere. Or, imagine that during the first five years (the window of learning for emotions) a child is brought into abundant contact with anxiety, anger, abandonment, neglect, abuse, sorrow, lack of security, and etc. This stimulation increases the likelihood that the right hemisphere network for negative emotions will be larger and more elaborate in order to manage these emotions. By the time two children are five and starting kindergarten, for instance, one child upon seeing and meeting the teacher would think,”This is going to be fun” and then feel excited. Another child who had experience with negative emotions might see the teacher and think, “I don’t know her and I had better watch out.”

The truly revolutionary idea is that brains are adaptive and can be influenced by what we as teachers and parents do during these windows of learning. Suppose we wanted to improve a child’s abilities with language and numbers. The window for rapid brain growth for language and numbers is from birth to approximately ten years of age. During that time period let’s suppose we enrich our child’s experience with activities designed to stimulate the areas of the brain which think about and manage language and numbers. We could, according to this idea, significantly enhance their neural networks and “make them more intelligent” in these areas. If you want to try this out click on the “free content” area of this page, register, and then go to brain growth activities for young children Therein are several brain growth activities for parents and teachers. The reason for both is that when teachers and parents both use the activities the child’s brain is more effectively influenced because there are two environments which require and provide similar stimulation. Apparently, we can in fact influence how intelligent our children become, at least in the areas of language, numbers, and emotions.

You might be surprised and saddened to learn how many kids (boys) drop out of school when they are bright enough to do well and succeed. You might also be surprised to learn about the number of boys who suddenly seem unwilling, unable, or unmotivated to do anything else but lay around the house. If one of these children is your child or pupil, then you are not only surprised, you are very worried.

There are many reasons why a boy or girl in their early teens becomes disgruntled and begins to complain about school teachers, school work, or other forms of achievement. One of these is a mismatch between a student’s’ abilities and the tasks they are required to perform. As a group, children’s abilities might actually be better than in previous generations. But, conditions in schools are different. Schools have changed in the last twenty years and there is typically more work and the type of work is often less interesting and exciting, especially to the male brain. To understand this let’s consider two types of learning.

Taxon learning is learning about facts, figures, and bits of information. Locale learning is about actual experience with hands-on opportunities. In the last twenty years, partly because of the “No Child Left Behind” emphasis and partly because of a nation-wide commitment to focus more on math and science, schools have increased their emphasis on taxon learning. This favors girls’ brains but not boys’ and, for this and other reasons, we are seeing many more boys, and some girls, less interested in school achievement. This is due, in part, because their abilities do not match up with this change in emphasis. Further, taxon learning is easier to measure with traditional paper and pencil testing procedures. The increased emphasis schools are giving to this form of learning matches up with a new emphasis on required testing. This doesn’t go unnoticed by teachers. Many teachers, faced with all the required tests, have developed their own motto, “No teacher left standing.”

Even though the foregoing might explain some portion of why boys are unmotivated, we are still faced with this question. What motivates unmotivated boys? There are several things which parents and teachers can do. Where school is concerned it is essential to understand how the boy (or girl feels) about his or her intellectual skills and abilities to succeed in school. Quite frequently the evaluation process which goes on in classrooms has been interpreted by the child that he or she will fail and cannot succeed. If this is the case, then why try? His or her ability level may need to be improved or at least communicated about so it can be matched with the tasks given.

After assessing the child’s abilities to perform required tasks we can see if help is needed to improve the skills set. There are many programs, including those on this website, which will help improve memory and other study strategies. Then there are other things which can motivate. First, create a sense of family cohesion, classroom teamwork, and partnership feelings with other adults and students. Boys are motivated by the desire to belong, to contribute, and to not fail others. Peers in middle school and older are a very influential source of motivation or the lack thereof. Second, invite boys and girls to help others. One school in Chicago significantly reduced the number of predicted drop outs by asking high school boys to tutor low achieving third graders in reading. They agreed to learn how to tutor and then began to stay in school themselves in order to help the younger students.

Third, give positive attention and approval for students’ strengths. Sometimes parents and teachers worry and focus so much on the lack of motivation that we forget each child has unique strengths and these talents call out to be expressed. Attention and approval give recognition to that possibility. Fourth is engagement with a mentor (parent or teacher) who is willing to jointly work on a project of some kind. For example, a parent might ask for companionship to see how something works, or an activity in the out-of-doors, or a request to build something together. The project and the companionship are both essential. Fifth, work to achieve a relevant understanding of the child’s emotions, instead of a constant barrage of pressure and criticism, and know how to channel these emotions into some form of action. Understanding someone’s feelings comes through observation and communication. Channeling emotions only requires that a child take his sense of failure and frustration and turn it into a small desire to discover, create, or participate. Once started with a bit of hope, this can lead to trying to do something else which can grow into something more self sustained. Appealing to the example of other people who have gone through similar experiences is a good device. Albert Einstein, for instance, failed algebra and he changed the way we think about the universe.

There are other forms of motivation such as giving rewards for performance, praise, recognition, and etc. We need to become much better at all forms of motivation because we are at risk for losing many of our sons and daughters, at least for several years, instead of seeing them excited about their futures. Besides, an unmotivated child who becomes motivated means that many others will benefit. When that happens, we, as parents and teachers, will have done our jobs.

The National Institute of Mental Health recently reported the results of research about the number of people who experience depression. Having worked with depressed patients I have great compassion for anyone in that situation. So I read this study with interest. I noticed that in their effort to document how widespread depression is among Americans the authors of the study did not appear to explain why so many people experience this serious emotional disorder.

When a child or adult feels depressed the reduction in quality of life can be substantial. We need to understand why there is so much depression so we can eliminate the causes. I propose that generally we have so much depression because people have poor boundaries. These are boundaries between what they could and should do to protect and advance themselves as individuals, in a healthy way, and the environmental pressure they feel from the world around them. This pressure can be brought on by being acted upon by events, people, or situations. But, since all people have pressures and stress, the rates of depression cannot be explained by that alone. I believe that for many people depression is the result when people fail to establish responsible control for themselves This is done by knowing they can control some of what they think and feel, and that their actions are most often a result of their own choices. It takes a lot of work to first build and then maintain one’s sense of self and then reinforce that throughout life. When we do not do that well we become vulnerable. There are exceptions to this, of course, but I think I can support my belief by describing signs, types, and solutions for depression.

We understand that the signs of depression can include feelings of sadness, diminished interest or pleasure, sleep disturbance, lack of energy, feelings of guilt or unworthiness, difficulty making decisions, suicidal thoughts, unexplained anger, resentment about and criticism of others, blaming others, self pity, and self criticism. None of these, obviously, is positive.

We also understand there are several specific types of depression but most could be categorized into two general types. Reactive depression results from mental exhaustion where great pressure, distress, and environmental influence is high. The sense of stress can be due to feelings that one’s emotions are controlled by some external situation which may include a loss, too many demands, and trying to do too much.

Endogenous depression originates from an inherited and/or chemical condition which results in episodes of depression or mood swings. In this case, successful treatment usually involves a combination of psychotherapy and psychotropic medication.

I believe that most depression is of the reactive type and can be successfully resolved by a person understanding the conditions which may trigger it and then by making life style changes with or without therapy or medication.

Some of the conditions which create vulnerability to reactive depression include childhood trauma, physical abuse, excessive competitiveness, comparing oneself unfavorably with others, assuming too much responsibility for other people and situations, excessive emotional sensitivity and self absorption, lack of decision making skills and dependence on other people, little achievement, and excessive anxiety. If you see yourself in any of the foregoing you might consider that you are more vulnerable to depression and may solve some portion of it or prevent it by doing the following.

Some life style changes a person can make is to develop adequate and diverse social contacts, develop a routine of pleasurable activities, sleep, eat, and exercise regularly, set emotional boundaries and learn to assume responsibility for what is felt rather than blame others, if possible, avoid situations where you will feel a loss of control, focus on the present and the future rather than the past, actively create positive conditions through self motivated acts, control pessimism and create optimism, do several want to’s in addition to what you should do.

Except in those cases where there are inherited and/or chemical conditions which create a vulnerability to depression, it is possible for us to do many things on our own to create lives filled with happiness rather than suffer depression and its negative qualities. Promoting ourselves does not mean to elevate us over others. Nor does it mean to withdraw from others. It means to decide, to think positively, to act on and achieve important achievements. It means to feel in control of some things in our lives. When we are spending more of our time creating the positive, we increase our opportunities for happiness.

Currently there is an increasing number of people who are single and never married. This number, when combined with people who are divorced, constitutes a very fast growing portion of our population. It is not as large as the age wave of baby boomers but it is much larger than most think. Census figures and some demographers suggest that thirty to forty percent of our nation’s adult population are single. As the number of single adults who are not married and have never married increases, the percentage of individuals living together in conjugal relationships also increases. While there is no body of extensive and solid research evidence comparing the stability of these relationships with legal marriages, current thought suggests these relationships are entered into because they are temporary and allow easy exits.

Apparently the reduction in marriage rates is the result of many factors, including the rapid rise in jobs which require people to travel extensively. Some attribute this situation to economic conditions which seem to make it more difficult to provide for a family. Educational differences between men and women may also be involved. More women are seeking higher education and may intimidate prospective husbands who do not. We also see researchers and writers describe fear of marrying as a result of childhood experience where parents have had painful marriages and divorced. Lastly, social scientists suggest reduced marriage rates per thousand in our country can, in part, be caused by relaxed sexual standards which make sex available to men and women who would otherwise marry to have a sexual relationship.

While these and other reasons are those most commonly studied by sociologists and family scientists, I believe there are other reasons why many fear committing to marriage. Many young adults report their reasons for being afraid to marry as: (1) not wanting to make a bad choice, (2) fear of assuming responsibility, (3) not wanting to feel their personal lives are managed by the need to make and keep commitments, (4) apprehension about the legal entanglements marriage appears to create.

The forgoing leads to the following conclusion. Young adults and scientists have told us why people do not marry but they do not seem to have answered this question: Why is fear that deters people from marrying greater than the security, attraction, fulfillment, and excitement marriage offers?

I have watched many different individuals face choices about marriage and based on my experience I offer the following as reasons for the fear. First, marriage now days is not based on traditional and preset roles for a husband a wife. In previous generations there was “men’s work,” and/or “women’s work” which were well defined. Plus these were mutually understood. A prospective husband knew in advance what he should do and a new wife had similar levels of knowledge about what wives are to do. They only had to ask themselves if they could do what the social roles prescribed. Now, with increased freedom of opportunity, these roles are less well defined. For many there is considerable ambiguity about them. Therefore, couples today are confronted by more uncertainty and have to negotiate about very significant matters without adequate knowledge or preparation. It requires high level skills to work throug who will do what and many may not be equipped, at least at first, to decide and agree on such issues as who will work and provide for the family, who will cook, who will do household chores, who will parent and how that will take place, and how to take care of each person’s values, and etc. If these have to be negotiated rather than being set by social and cultural custom, many who face marriage today often worry whether they can meet the social standard of a legal marriage. Further, even if prospective spouses know what he or she wants to do they still question and may not have evidence to be certain of the other person’s willingness to participate successfully. Many divorces early in marriage are about the failure of one or both to participate in negotiating a successful and agreed upon partnership.

Secondly, when dating couples are faced with assessing the other person’s partnership abilities they focus on eight areas: sex, money management, communication, in-law relationships, child care, religion, social relationships and household work. Any person may not be certain of his or her abilities in each of these areas but the level of each person’s apprehensions is almost matched by anxiety about how the other person will perform. This creates fear that they cannot control or exert enough power to influence the outcome of a marriage relationship.

Fear of marriage, if it results in limiting the number of people who marry, will gradually reduce our society’s ability to nurture and successfully prepare each coming generation. Where there may have been equal or a greater number of prepared children to face and master the tasks of life in an earlier generation, there will be an increased number of parents who are unprepared to care for the next generation’s children. More children will be cared for by people other than committed and caring parents. We can, even now, see an increasing number of this generation’s children being reared by grandparents and social-government agencies who, as some suspect, may be less effective than two committed people joined by a legal and love commitment. Depending on individual situations these types of child care may be very effective for any given child. Absent confident people who are tied together in marriage, grandparents and government institutions taken as a whole have yet to demonstrate they can be as successful as competent and caring parents.

We probably do not want to go back to the era when gender roles were prescribed. What then can we do? We can recognize a serious problem is brewing. We can take steps to increase and improve premarital education programs in schools and churches. Many high schools, for instance, do not include parent and marriage education. We can support current parents in their efforts to rear children by adjusting school and church schedules and laws which negate their efforts. Most importantly, we could help parents move beyond the usual child discipline to take a more prominent role in preparing their children with confidence they can marry successfully.

Growing children make mistakes, disobey, and in other ways display their immaturity. For many years people have debated what to do in these cases and the debate has taken more than one form. Some favor spanking, others disagree. Many parents think that permissively letting children have a great deal of freedom is the best way because children will grow out of their errors. Still others believe that tight controls are essential and employ scolding, restricting a privilege, grounding, or sitting on a chair for a period of time. The debate about child discipline has even moved to disagreements over whether “time outs” are helpful or harmful to a child. In the last ten years we have even seen one book where the central thesis is that parents didn’t do much of anything to influence their children. Home was, in this case, a temporary hotel.

It is a little surprising that in the midst of all this we have not sat ourselves down and used a little common sense by asking the question, “What do we really want?” In general terms what we want is something other than willful disobedience, major mistakes, and other problems. What is the best way to achieve that? Further, children are growing and changing. Development is the name of the game and so we as parents are faced with two very powerful conditions: nature and nurture. Each child has inherited tendencies which we should know about and respect plus they live in an environment where we hope they will successfully adapt in ways that promote their well-being. What is the best way to get what we want and take into account their nature while we try to teach them?

Some punishments may be useful as a means of identifying unacceptable behavior, but by itself it does not teach much that we want to have happen. So, the principle of success which emerges is the idea of preparing or teaching children more than you impose punishments. In fact, as a consequence of mistakes or disobedience, having children practice what you want them to do is a very effective tool. If two children argue, have them practice cooperation. If a child can’t come home at the appointed time, buy a cheap watch and have him practice. A child who steals something from someone can result in having to care for a plant or a pet to practice “caring” for something.

This method keeps parents focused on the positive behavior they want to teach and it helps them be involved with children while they (the children) learn. Both the teaching and the involvement are ingredients to parental success.

This is not about sex education where children learn healthy and positive ideas about themselves and others. This is exposing children to sex, sex acts, and sexual information which makes it seem like many parts of one’s life is related to sex and great emphasis on sex is a very natural part of life. When sexual information is made widely available, with repeated previews, children often come to believe that it is a social script which everyone is participating in. When a youth thinks everyone else is doing something this belief is often accompanied by the bandwagon notion that they too must do it. Many experiment for social reasons when they do not understand the personal consequences for themselves.

We have also learned that the first exposure of many children to pornography is at the ninth or tenth year of their lives. Typically children that age are not cognitively nor emotionally mature enough to understand much about it except basics and raw feelings. When sexual images, conversations about sex, and other sexual ideas are repeated in magazines, TV, movies, and computers the collective impact can indeed be very influential to a developing children. Sex and sexual activity can occupy a position of prominence that is harmful because the focus on it becomes part of personality development, occupying too much of one’s life experience, and precluding experience with other things in childhood.

It does not matter if TV is following society or if society follows TV or whether movies reflect social change or lead it. It does not matter if the whole idea of sex, sexuality, and sexual behavior is modern and people believe it should be understood more widely and earlier. No argument in favor of sexualizing our children provides a positive condition which has been found to make people happier and more successful. If as some suppose, it is useful for kids to become acquainted with this much sexual content at an earlier age, then we should see more happier children, better sexual relationships in marriage, more respect for others, and less sexually transmitted disease. None of these is true.

Instead sex becomes linked to a variety of social and emotional conditions through the process of association. When these emotions are felt then sexual motivations follow. When this happens experimentation shows up and is first thought about, then talked about, then acted out. The evidence for this can be found in the research showing that when children have a friend who is sexually experienced and talks about it, that child is more likely to experiment. Further, we only need to look at text messages sent from one twelve year-old to another. With this technology comes freedom to communicate without adult guidance and a large proportion of these messages are laden with explicit sexual content. When this happens between boys and girls, both often become more aggressive in experimenting upon the words.

Can sex be harmful if it takes place when children are not mature enough to understand the experience? Can it lead to behavior that is beyond one’s ability to manage? In other words, can it addict? Can it lead to other sexual problems? Of course. This does not mean that children who have early sex will become more violent or anti social. It does mean that for many who repeat the experience other problems may arise. We can tell this is the case by the rise in the number of sexually addicted people in treatment groups for that purpose and by the increase in sexually oriented problems. But, the most compelling evidence is less obvious. It is found in the despair felt by youth who do too much and feel exploited by it. The foot print of this experience can last too long.

Let’s instead educate our children to believe that sex is positive, that understanding it is useful, that talking about it with parents is a wise thing, and that participating in it can be a form of love and tenderness. Then let’s help them live a happy childhood where sex is a part but not the star of life.

The boy sat in my professional office telling of how he started using marijuana which was the beginning of a much more complex drug related problem. As I listened, I thought I should involve his family. Therefore I asked to see both parents and other family members. After they entered the room and seated themselves I began to get acquainted with them. As part of the conversation I asked what medicines they used. One parent said, “I am not certain what we use. Probably we use aspirin or something like that.” Suspecting that this answer did not accurately reflect actual practice I asked if they would bring all their prescription drugs so I could check them out. The next appointment they brought a large brown paper bag, used for groceries, over half filled with partially used medications. There were seven or eight dozen different little green, blue, or clear plastic containers.

There were five or six larger amber colored containers about as large as a third of a pint jar. After my initial surprise I asked if they would tell me when and for what these medications were used. Many situations and many maladies were described. This boy was part of a family culture where frequent drug use was an open and acceptable form of family behavior.

During the years since then I have noticed what seems to be a dramatic increase in the use of prescription medication. Medication for depression has increased over five hundred percent in the last decade reaping huge profits for their manufacturers. To compete, pharmaceutical companies rush to develop specific drugs for many specific and numerous uses. Many have beneficial benefits but all have potentially negative side effects. The companies openly advertise drugs by name so they are virtually branded into people’s thought process. Such knowledge allows patients to ask for specific drugs when they visit their doctors. Over the same period of time there has been a significant increase in the number of kids who use controlled substances until very large numbers have had some contact with them by the time they are sixteen or seventeen. Are these two growth trends related? I believe prescription medicine in families can be linked to children’s psychological and physical dependency.

After watching, reading about, and treating people with drug related problems, I now believe that we and our children are involved in several things which may lead to these particular issues. One important factor, perhaps the most important of these, is the fact that many medical doctors prescribe medication without understanding the family culture of the person who obtains the prescription. One of my patients who was addicted to pain medication while treating an ankle injury said, “I can get medication anytime I want.” She proved that by going from one doctor after another until she got what she wanted so that no one doctor would suspect. Because she was addicted she asked for and obtained refills. I admit to being a bit dumbfounded when I saw how easy it was for her to support her habit. In many cases where a physical examination is required due to an injury some doctors will give free samples to their patients as a good will gesture believing the medications will be responsibly administered.

What is the family culture we ought to understand? It may consist of high level pressure or stress people feel without understanding what they can do to strengthen their own emotional resilience. Parents may have removed the aspect of challenge and achievement from many children’s lives, leaving them without a sense of responsibility. Another is when parents over or under control their children. Drug use appears to be more common in children reared where parents exert excessive and harsh control or where parents are excessively permissive and emotionally indifferent to their children. Neither condition promotes emotional health. Lastly, there seems to be an increase in certain parental styles where children are reared emotionally dependent either because they have an absence of involvement with their parents or are rescued and emotionally tied to one or both parents in a way that prevents them from becoming self reliant. Parental dependence becomes a child’s habit.

We could do more to educate kids about drugs and the potential harm they present. We could find ways to strengthen children to be more self reliant. We adults could regulate our own use of drugs. We can marshal social forces to increase our tolerance for kids in trouble but demand that we collectively remove their inappropriate use from our families, schools, and neighborhoods. None of these is more important than one additional step. All who administer drugs can be helped to better appreciate their positive possibilities and their potential for harm. This requires when prescribing medication it is essential to understand more than the dosage. It is necessary to understand the family culture of the user.

Anxiety is inherited. It has the role of warning us and providing the instinct for survival and self protection. Some people inherit more than others and, because of negative experiences and hurt, some people learn more of it. Regardless of the reason why we are anxious, when too much attention is paid to anxiety, it grows by feeding on itself and extending itself into more areas of human life.

There are many categories of anxiety including regular apprehensions which come from time to time, performance anxiety which shows up during those moments when we are evaluated, anxiety related to an object or person, free floating anxiety which seems to have a life of its own, and the extreme form of anxiety known as panic attacks which cripple. Anxieties and the fear which accompanies them are extremely costly. They reduce the quality of life, they can destroy good relationships, prevent marriages, are often the cause and result of conflict, they reduce the likelihood of achievement, and they accompany depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was correct when after Pearl Harbor he talked about the only fear we should fear is fear itself.

Anxiety and the challenges people face in regard to it, invites us to consider an interesting behavioral principle. It is hard to not pay attention to an intense and negative feeling like anxiety or the emotion of fear. But, if we focus on what we fear, unless there is an actual threat, even without obsessing about it, we can become afraid of those feelings, even if we have no physiological reason for it. Anxieties and fear will grow. This principle has a more powerful application for children. Children, like adults, don’t learn as much FROM their experiences, they learn more from WHAT they experience.

If children actually feel anxiety on a repeat basis they may learn it as a way of life. Unless childhood anxiety is checked by some intervening experience or solved by increased maturation, a child can grow into an anxious person who may be plagued with it for life. If this principle is true, and I have seen it applied by many people, it is equally true for confidence. If as children or adults, we focus more on what confidence is, where it comes from, and how to create it, we can learn what we experience and be more confident instead of more anxious.

In my experience I have learned that in contrast to anxiety, confidence is a very different emotional state. It is also a different emotional behavior that is displayed or shown in sharp contrast to anxiety. Confidence listens to understand someone. It tries new things. It is patient. It will work hard through difficulty to a successful conclusion. It enjoys people and wants to be with and love them. It is at peace and can be quiet. It has some self doubt but uses it to grow stronger instead of withdrawing from opportunity.

Confidence comes from four original sources. The first is hard work and achievement where a person learns mastery of effort or ability and uses ability and effort to produce something. The second is high quality relationships where individuals learn to give and receive, empathy and compassion, to talk and listen, respect and feel respected.

The third is the experience of positive emotions where individuals feel—actually and frequently feel—within themselves positive emotions such as optimism, love, gratitude, and etc. The fourth source of confidence is obedience or freely choosing to match one’s behavior with an appropriate rule or standard. Obedience helps produce self control. Regulating yourself to achieve a positive level of obedience successfully competes with fear.

These four conditions can be applied in any situation. I have seen sports teams where coaches applied the four sources of confidence instead of yelling at, berating, or punishing players for a lack of performance. I have seen parents learn it to help themselves improve parenting skills. I have been able to see employees and managers learn to work with greater confidence. Many young adults facing career choices learn confidence and achieve their goals. Children failing in school become more successful, and individuals who suffer from clinical anxiety and some forms of depression can see many of their symptoms disappear. People fearful of marriage can learn to feel and be more confident in making and keeping commitments.

Paying attention to confidence, making it serve us and learning to create it, is much better than waiting for anxiety to happen to us. Parents can focus on confidence in teaching their children. School teachers can do the same to help their students Any individual can grow it. We need more confident people.

A common marital problem could be solved if more of us understood a different way of thinking about ourselves and our partner. For instance, most people think of others in terms of their personality traits such as ambitious, kind, and etc. We also often think of personality traits as fairly permanent and so when we get to know someone we often think of them in terms of having fixed qualities they will always show or display. When there is frustration, conflict, or other problems it is easy for us to think of the other person as having some negative personality quality and once that conclusion is reached, repeated experiences with it typically leads to a fixed idea of the other person. If unchecked it is easy to go one step further. The conclusion that the other person has a negative personality quality is often followed by contempt or condemnation which author and researcher John Gottman suggests are the most common precursors to divorce.

Let’s take another point of view. Consider the idea that a person’s behavior is usually the result of a given situation and may not be a permanent trait. This means that what a spouse or partner might say or do is likely heavily influenced by the actual situation as they perceive or view their relationship. This does not mean that past experiences have no influence. It means instead that a person selects a form of behavior which is a combination of past experience and current perception. It is something both people are helping to create. The most obvious answer to the question, “why do you do that?” is a combination of background experience and something in the current relationship which both share in the responsibility for.

“I am somehow causing part of this,” is openly acknowledging a share of the responsibility for what exists and is an accurate recognition that each person is involved even though they may not know exactly how. There are exceptions to this. When a partner is abusive, unfaithful, or incapable of participating in some way his or her experience is likely the greater influence than the situation. Having said that, the marital partner still has some responsibility for handling the consequences of what the other person does. In most cases, excepting extreme behavior, accepting some part of the responsibility for what happens in a relationship removes criticism and reduces blaming. Yet, many cannot or will not do that and something else happens.

When a person is unsatisfied, believing the problem is being caused by the partner who has some flawed personality trait, he or she often resorts to criticism in an attempt to make improvements. Criticism of this type typically does not produce anything good and often perpetuates the problem. Here is why. Throughout history and in most cultures, marriage is a context or situation where many different forms of love could and should exist. In our own culture, people’s decision to marry or live together is often because of the “love,” they feel or share. There are other compatibility issues of course, but for most people love feelings and displays are usually connected to their intimate relationships or marriage.

Those with a background of loving and being loved tend to adjust better to these relationships. But, the idea that marriage is a context for love sets the stage for the idea that when one expects to be loved, liked, and cared for, the absence of love would be considered more significant than other situations and the presence of criticism would acquire even greater, though harsher, import. Expecting to love and be loved but instead being regularly criticized, or condemned, usually creates a mental and emotional condition labeled “defensiveness.”

When a person has been criticized and hurt and then displays defensiveness he or she may withdraw from conversation and association plus do and say other less successful things. Many common displays of defensiveness include being unable or unwilling to reflect and introspect, the inability to understand their own feelings and make accurate judgments about the feelings of others, to feel scared or threatened around the person or similar persons who hurt them, accusing others, combative verbal behavior, belittling, insensitivity to others, blaming, explosive anger, excessive control, and rigidity.

When these conditions exist the defensiveness often motivates people to think they are being victimized at the same time they are inflicting pain on someone else. Abusive parents often blame children for causing their anger. A defensive husband blames his wive for blaming him, failing to provide enough comfort, sex, warmth, tenderness, and etc. A defensive woman may withdraw and reject her husband, consider his treatment of her to be unkind, wilt and submit to his criticisms in order to placate him, and/or display passivity when he wants action.

When love could and should exist between people, its absence is typically not neutral and therefore produces nothing. Its absence is often filled with criticism and anger which hurts and motivates people to protect themselves. Once self protection is a greater motivation than the giving and receiving love, more problems typically take place. Seeking professional help may be necessary but the solution will always include learning or relearning how to communicate love and how to receive it when we are in the situation where love is expected.

Drop some of your thoughts in the comments.