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The Center for Unhindered Living Growing Up Healthy and Unhindered A guide for parents and children
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Parenting Without Punishment  |
Today's society needs to change it's ideas about what is normal, healthy behavior for children and adults. Look at the society around you. The prisons are full, the offices of mental health professionals are full, many children have been removed from their homes and placed in foster care or the children are in therapy because parents don't know how to deal with their behavior, and children are failing in school and their social and interpersonal relationships are unstable. Our nation needs a new paradigm for dealing with human behavior, and the changes need to start when children are infants so that they have a chance to grow up healthy and unhindered. Children have different thought patterns than adults. It takes many, many years of healthy, sensitive, supported care for children to mature to the point of thinking the way adults do. So right from the start, do not try to measure whether your children's behavior is appropriate by adult standards. Not only do children's thought patterns and therefore behavior standards follow a different set of rules than adults, but the typical adult thought patterns that exist in this country are not healthy to begin with. So not only is there a developmental gap between child and adult thoughts and behavior, but the standards most adults apply to their own behavior in many cases needs to be changed. Adults in this country take for granted some basic assumptions about children. They believe babies and young children are unable to determine what their needs are and what is best for them, so we adults are supposed to decide for them. They believe if we do not actively teach children to be good and do right that they will not choose to do it on their own. They believe that without strict discipline, which involves some kind of punishment or reward, that children will not learn to behave appropriately. This is the most fundamental mistake ever made in forming ideas about children and human beings in general. Our world is based on the idea of power and authority. Someone gives an order, and everyone else obeys. Most societies are based on some kind of power struggle between those in control and those who are trying to be controlled. Do you like being controlled? Do you like being ordered around? Do you like being made to feel like you can't think for yourself and that someone else needs to decide what's best for you? Some countries are freer than others, but almost all societies take it upon themselves to try and control their members. Not only is it not fair for one person to think it's all right to control someone else, it does not make for healthy mental, emotional and behavioral development. It sets up a situation in which all behavior is geared toward avoiding control. The key is to guide and influence without exerting control. To allow individuals the ultimate freedom to control their own thoughts, feelings, actions and destiny, without coersion, but to provide healthy natural models for them to observe, and to provide a safe place where any thoughts, feelings, words and actions that occur or met with loving, non-judgmental attitudes. Children are obviously going to make mistakes as they grow, let's not make them feel as if they've committed a crime by simply going through the normal developmental process of learning. So, how do we guide our children without controlling them, and allow their inborn mechanisms to encourage healthy, unhindered development? If you don't want to dishonor and humiliate your children with punishment and manipulation, we can teach you other ways to get their cooperation. That is what this section of our website is devoted to. |
Normal, Healthy Development Here are some links that will help you start from a control-based parenting style to a nurturing, healthy aware parenting style. Aware Parenting Personal Bill of Rights Bogus Parenting Styles Childhood Autonomy Getting Your Child's Cooperation Unhindered Childbirth Children's Health Why Homeschool? Non-Institutional Education Breastfeeding Children's Spirituality Work Smarter, Not Harder The Bible Does NOT Teach Spanking The Family Bed The Nursing Father What's So Bad About Formula? Why Not Let Them "Cry It Out"? Why Not Use Substitutes? Removing Obstacles to a Healthy Body & Mind Guidance for Families & Friends of New Moms Prevent Child Slavery Normal Human Development Links to good Birth and Parenting Info The Center for Unhindered Living
Lawton, OK 73501  The way we respond to our children is so crucial to how they
will
develop and who they will become. It's not good enough for us to
bring our kids up the way we were brought up, or to follow the latest
method thought up by some over-educated doctor. Our children were
born with everything they need to succeed. Their physiological
and psychological systems were created with inborn mechanisms to insure
healthy, normal development. But we adults, we get in the
way. We try to impose upon them some kind of methods that make
sense to us, but as I stated in the beginning, we cannot apply adult
ways of thinking to children and measure their behavior by what we used
to think was right. We were wrong, it's time we admitted it.
I have successfully parented two children to adulthood using the simple principles of unconditional respect and modeling. But what to model? Family Effectiveness Training classes, taught at The Center for Unhindered Living, will teach with you how unbelievibly effective and rewarding this can be, and how it will change both your thoughts, feelings and behavior as well as your child's. I also give you some revolutionary new energy-balancing tools that can help children with all kinds of behavior problems. |
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