4 Questions to Ask Yourself About Parenting [parenting]

Your child tells you he is going to play at a neighbor’s house. The neighbors are close friends and you don’t give it a second thought. An hour later your friend calls to tell you she thinks the boys went off to the woods behind your house - a place you know they shouldn’t be.

Your daughter has stopped letting you check her knapsack when she comes home from school. One day as you are cleaning her room you discover a pile of small things (a pencil case, a key ring, a notepad) that clearly don’t belong to her.

Your kids have household chores to do each week and they are not getting done.

Four Questions for Parents
As a parent you ask, “What do I do now that things are going wrong? What kind of corrective action do I have to take? What discipline does my child need?” While there are clearly going to be times when some direct intervention is called for to keep your child safe or to prevent a serious incident, more often than not, the solution lies in prevention.

The Arbinger Institute, in a powerful article entitled The Parenting Pyramid™, tells us there are four questions parents should be asking themselves:


1: Am I correcting my children without teaching them?
Have we spent time helping them to understand what we value? Do we seek out teaching opportunities when there is not a problem?

2: What is the quality of my relationship with my children?
Will our children be open to our teaching if we are mostly unavailable or preoccupied?

3: What is the quality of my relationship with my spouse?
Are you looking for love from your children that you really want from your wife? Are your frustrations with your husband making you short-tempered with your kids?

4: How pure is my “way of being?”How are you relating to the people in your life? Are you focused on what you need from them or do you see their needs and wants to be as real as your own?

So…If you are struggling with correcting your children’s behavior, check out how consistent you have been in teaching them. If they are not open to your teaching, check out the quality of your overall relationship with them. If you are struggling to connect to your kids, you might want to invest in reinvigorating your marriage. And if you are struggling in your marriage, you might want to do some introspection into who you are being right now.