Total Transformation Review

Breaking Through

Parenting Roles That Lead to Accountability

Parents can play specific roles which affect the level of social skill building, problem solving, and responsibility taking that occurs within the family.  These roles are characterized by parental leadersip,clarity, willingness, and respect for a child's potential.  When dealing with children, there's a difference between knowing what's wrong, knowing something's wrong, and knowing right from wrong.  Knowing what's wrong precedes training and coaching; knowing something's wrong precedes problem solving, and knowing what's right from wrong precedes accountability.  When parents work to learn these roles and implement them with children, they are moving toward a culture of accountability in their home. 

1. Training & Coaching Role
2. Problem-Solving Role
3. Limit-Setting Role

OBJECTIVES--LESSON 3

The objective of Lesson 3 is to identify more effective parenting roles and to reveal how you can use these roles to help your child change his behavior.  Specifically you will be able to:

• Identify the elements of the training and coaching role
• Identify the elements of the problem-solving role
• Identify the elements of the limit-setting role

Use these roles to help your child change behavior. 

Let's take a look at each of these roles individually, I will list a few examples for each role.

Training & Coaching Role:

Focuses on skill building, rehearsal and repetition.  The parent is the "trainer" for the skills the child needs to learn to become a responsible, accountable adult.  Learning any skill takes time, practice, repetition, and refinement.  The parent's job is to support and encourage the child's learning process. 

Keeps the child's eyes on the prize.  Because of the work involved in learning new skills, the child can easily lose interest or staying power.  It is the job of the parent to keep the child motivated to continue practicing skills.  Developmentally, children aren't always able to see the big picture or plan for the future.  that is the role of the parent - to look towards the future and keep promoting those skills which will produce a responsible adult.

Teaches by example.  Utilizes social skills in everyday life.  Most of us learn best when our lessons are relevant and we are able to see things in action and context.  The parent can provide this for the child by modeling the skills and pointing out how these skills are useful in our everyday lives.  In contrast, if the parent models behavior that is in conflict with appropriate skills (e.g. being disrespectful to another family member), the child will, unfortunately, learn what they see rather than what the parent is trying to teach.

Problem-Solving Role:

Understands importance of problem solving as a process.  If problems were easy to solve, we wouldn't have any.  Because of this inherent difficulty, it is most effective to break down problem solving into steps or a process.  Children have little appreciation of this.  In fact, they would like to have all problems solved immediately.  Many kids with obnoxious and abusive behaviors are even more impatient with problems, and have little tolerance for the problem-solving process.  It is consequently most important for parents to understand the significance of their role in supporting the learning process.

Participates in mutual decision-making.  When children are young, they often require parents to decide for them.  For example:  "No, you can't ride your bike at night" "Yes, you can stay overnight at your friends." "Don't wear shorts to school when it's snowing out." But, when the child becomes a teen, the parent has to begin to allow the teen to decide some things for themselves, while not abdicating complete responsibility.  Ideally, many decisions are made together with input from both the teen and the parent.  Sometimes this will lead to compromise.  Sometimes the parent will need to make the final decision.  And sometimes the parent will defer to the teen.  The process requires the development of a parent/child mutual decision-making process.

Encourages exploration and experimentation.  Part of being a teen is trying new things.  this is how we all learn who we are, what we care about, and what we are capable of.  Rather than trying to fight against this natural adolescent role, parents can support and direct the child's exploration nd experimentation into productive problem solving.

Recognizes setbacks and failure as opportunities for life's learning experiences.  Because experimentation and exploration are risks, outcomes will be both successful and unsuccessful.  We all learn from our failures, as well as our mistakes.  The parent's role is to view these "failures" as the useful learning opportunity they present.  It is also important to take the long view, knowing that a "failure" by your child is not going to determine the rest of your life.  It is only a setback that can be overcome.

Sets firm outer bounderies with fluid, flexible center.  Parents should be firm about issues of safety and compliance with their children, but can be flexible about choices that are less important.  Issues such as abuse or violence in the home and safety issues such as curfews need to be supported by rules as the choices are not suggestive or violent.  Some parents are firm and inflexible on every issue, no matter how trivial.  Others are not firm enough on any issue because they are constantly losing the power struggle with their child.  It is important to find balance.  The best way to do that is to determine what's important and demand 100 percent compliance on those issues.

Limit-Setting Role

Establishes and maintains parental authority.  It is often difficult to maintain parental authority when there are teens in the home.  Part of the developmental process for adolescence is to become more independent and less dependent upon parental authority.  Despite that, kids need their parents to maintain appropriate authority.  A method to maintain this, while also allowing independence and growth, is to establish and maintain appropriate limits.  Limits can then be tightened and loosened to match the teen's behavior and display of responsible behavior. 

Is task-oriented.  In order to comply with limits, we need to understand them.  For teens, this means that limits should be task oriented, rather than theoretical in nature.  For example rather than expecting that your teen "treat their sister with respect", a task oriented limit would be:  "You cannot call your sister names".  The goal is to have limits that are clear, understood, doable, and ultimately adhered to by your teen.

Communicates belief in the child through expectations.  By setting limits, the parent communicates that they believe their child can meet those limits or expectations.  To make this meaningful, the parent needs to set limits that are realistic, tangible and doable.  These limits let the child know that the parent believes  the child can make this improvement or meet this expectation.  It is a method of letting the child know you have faith in them and in their abilities to comply with your rules.

***Each one of the above "roles " are gone over in detail on the audio CD and in the workbook

**Also included in your workbook are:

Action Steps Part 1 and Part 2: At the end of each lesson, there will be a section called action steps. This is where James will help you to implement what you have just learned. He will also tell you what to expect when implementing this lesson.

So this is a sneak peek at Lesson 3, I hope you found it to be helpful in getting an idea of what the program is about. 

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