Parents frequently come to our office to get help managing their children’s misbehavior. Their complaints consist of non-compliance, temper tantrums, and sibling rivalry, to name just a few; in short, “taking us to the limit.” They come in discouraged, questioning their own ability to be ‘good’ parents and blaming themselves. There is no definative answer as to when exactly they started playing the blame-game.
Over the years we’ve managed to help a lot of parents gain back their sanity and enjoy their children once again. The success started when I put aside what all the parenting books were saying and used my clinical judgement and my personal experience as a father of three entirely different children, who had been living under the same roof with the same parents, yet had diverse reactions to the same parenting style. It became clear that the familiar parenting advice worked remarkably well with children who were relatively easy going, but not quite as well with others. Parents continue to share with me how easy it has been to raise and discipline their cooperative child. They’ve followed the text book suggestions and have gotten excellent results, but put them a few weeks with a not so compliant child and they’ll start loosing their sanity as quickly as anyone else. In short, the parents that complain about their child’s behavior are not less qualified, or less competent, they simply are following the wrong set of rules.
They’ve been trying to follow the rules that work for easy going children, expecting these rules to be a catch-all solution; but they are not. If your response when talking about your child’s misbehavior to others is that you’ve tried everything but nothing works, chances are your child is what I call the ‘Strong-Willed Child’ and they require a whole new set of rules. The good news is, we’ve got the rule book.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.