Ep 42: Positive Parenting Solutions

Jane Nelsen, the author of the Positive Discipline books and
founder of the positive discipline movement reveals some positive
parenting strategies for rebellious and defiant teenagers. Get
your teen under control without punishing and lecturing them with
these great tips.


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Full show notes


Being a parent is busy work.


The amount of household and childcare responsibilities placed on
top of a 40 hour work week can seem monstrously overwhelming.
You’re doing so much! It’s no wonder that when your kids neglect
to do their homework, you might feel like exploding. They had one
job!
Obviously, these emotional explosions aren’t healthy for you or
your kids. Even if you feel like you can keep your emotions in
check, how often do you find yourself lecturing away at your
children? I mean, how else are they going to get the message that
their homework is important, and they can’t be playing video
games all day?


Thankfully, there are ways to take this business and channel it
towards some positive parenting techniques that will benefit you
and your children. Not just one or two proven techniques, but a
whole world of them! With a simple shift in mindset, you can use
the collective creativity of your entire family to come up with
an endless stream of ideas for getting chores done.


To help provide some tried and tested wisdom on positive
parenting techniques, I spoke with the mother of 7, grandmother
of 22, and great-grandma of 13, Jane Nelsen!


Jane is an educational psychologist famous for her
Positive Discipline books and seminars. She
teaches positive parenting techniques for managing children
without resorting to punishments, threats, or other negative
tactics (such as the old fashioned “timeout”). Her knowledge is
very well received across the country, and she’s even appeared on
Oprah! I was so excited to get time with her and ask her about
these positive parenting techniques.


Being Busy is a Blessing


Being busy as a parent can be a positive thing. Jane tells
parents that having work is a blessing because you can get your
children involved in helping out around the house.


She jokes that when she was raised, her parents didn’t even drive
her to school. She walked to school even when she was five! (We
won’t say how long ago that was.) The point she makes is that
when she was growing up, she and her friends found freedom
outside of their homes because at home they were expected to do
the chores. The kids were expected to help out on the farm.


Today, it seems flipped to where the parents are expected to do
the chores and the kids are just expected to do homework. But
these are not positive parenting techniques! Jane says she sees
children today having very little freedom outside the home, and
inside the home they are being micromanaged. Instead of telling
kids how to help out around the house, Jane more often sees
parents lecturing their children over every aspect of their
homework.


What’s the point of this lecturing and micromanagement? This
leads us to one of Jane’s key things regarding positive parenting
techniques.

Belonging and Significance


One of the key parts of practicing positive parenting techniques
is understanding why we do what we do. So why would we give our
children more responsibilities? If they won’t even do their
homework, who’s to say they’ll do other chores we assign them?


Jane says that the reason behind all positive parenting
techniques is that children need to feel belonging, and they need
to feel significant. She says that belonging is easy, and comes
down to kids feeling unconditional love from parents.
Significance, on the other hand, is different.


Significance does not mean giving your kids more love, but more
responsibility.


It’s easy to think that you can make your child feel significant
by pampering them and lessening their responsibility. But Jane
says that children need to feel capable, especially when it comes
to serving their home, their school, and their greater community.
By giving kids more responsibility, you are helping them develop
long range life skills to be happy, successful people.


So, busy parents, don’t feel guilty that you’re working a lot
outside the home. See it as an opportunity to increase your
children’s significance in the home! It’s not child labor to have
them take the trash out and clean the dishes. Children need those
responsibilities to learn that they as humans are necessary
members of a functioning family.


Giving your children more responsibility might sound like a tense
conversation to have. This is where Jane’s positive parenting
techniques become next level! Here’s one step you can take to
make these conversations super creative and fun for your kids.


Family Meetings


Family meetings are great for establishing positive parenting
techniques. It’s important to get your kids involved in them,
especially when it comes to family problem solving.


Jane strongly suggests having weekly family meetings to get your
children engaged in the process of maintaining the house. She
says to get them involved asking:


“What are the things we all need to do to keep the house running
smoothly?”
Once you’ve created a list, chat about which chores the parents
can do and which ones the kids can do. Then you can help your
kids come up with a creative way to keep track of their
responsibilities throughout the week. They can build a chore
chart with dice, a spin wheel, cans of colored popsicle sticks,
or anything else they can come up with!


If your child has a complaint about the system during the week,
you can tell them to bring it up at the next family meeting. Help
them problem solve and come up with ideas on their own. If they
are coming up with their own solutions to their own system for
doing chores, they will be so much more likely to execute! For
example:


Jane said that her kids used a whiteboard with all the
responsibilities listed out for the week, and when a chore got
done they would cross it off. They each had to do two chores per
day. This system worked until one of them asked, “Why does my
sister get all the easy ones?”


At the next family meeting, Jane asked her kids what they thought
they should do to solve this problem. After some deliberation,
they ended up adding more chores to the whiteboard and assigning
them on a first-come first-serve basis. They would race each
other home to see who could do chores first!


Jane says this worked with her kids because it was their idea.
And it doesn’t take much adjusting for a child to think something
was their idea. In Jane’s example, the whiteboard system didn’t
change, just the approach to it did.


Years of Wisdom


Jane knows so much about raising kids, both from research and
from experience. She has so many simple adjustments for learning
positive parenting techniques. I felt like our conversation just
scratched the surface of her years of wisdom, and yet we talked
about so much!


The Idea of Being Kind and Firm

Connection Before Correction

The Mistaken Goal Chart

The 4 Ways Children Try to Gain Belonging and Significance

The 4 Ways Parents Try to Gain Belonging and Significance

The Iceberg: Behaviors, Beliefs, and Needs