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Parenting is Regulating
Every parent should regulate their children’s behavior until they are ready to regulate their own. It will likely be a 20-year process, which starts with full regulatory control of the infant and ends with total release of all control at adulthood. What does it mean “to regulate?” In grammatical terms, it is a transitive verb,…
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Motivate. Don’t Manipulate Your Kids.
Once again, his room isn’t clean, not by any standard. Her backpack, jacket, and shoes are scattered about the floor of the hall, again. His grades are sub-par in math, again. She is making the family late to school, again. He seems to be nonchalant about his music audition this weekend. She isn’t running enough…
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Embracing Parenting
Here is a sample from my latest project. It’s a chapter from my not-even-close-to-being-finished book. Feel free to give me some feedback. Be the Parent I believe that there is neither “The Way” nor “God’s Way” to raise children. There is no formula for success. But that does not mean that there are not good…
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Doodling
My wife, my 13 year old son, and I went to see The Taming of the Shrew outdoors last night in Forest Park. Since it’s a free and first-class show, we had to get there very early to get a spot with any sort of good view. Before the show started, just as we settled…
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Training Up Independent Kids
Embracing Mistakes; Developing Problem-Solvers Thomas Edison believed that failure was not a bad thing; it merely directed him closer to success. He embraced his mistakes as opportunities to learn, and he ultimately succeeded as the greatest inventor of all time. The truth is that you want your children (or students) to learn from their mistakes,…
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Growing Up and Away?
A friend of mine recently expressed frustration with the way that everyone seems to write off their kids around the age of 12. He said that he hears people say very matter-of-factly things like, “Well enjoy your little boys now because it won’t be long before they are teenagers and they stop loving you.” Or…