An Apple a Day - How to teach children to think

Do you know how to enhance your child's mind? Give your child a mental apple a day? (Some of this info is found in Vol. 6 of my It's Not Rocket Surgery!)

Read on to learn more about:

• The best practice for learning is adult-led, direct instruction with an inquiry-based approach. 
• Parents should start their children’s learning at home, long before school age. 
• For their child’s continued development, they need to advocate for these best practices, especially for math and reading, at public, private, or home school. 
• I’d also like to add that if they use a preschool, parents should choose one that believes in adult-led education, not self-discovery. 
• The less time in preschool, and the more time with mom or dad, the better – for learning, for development, for bonding, for emotional and mental health.

To maximize your child’s window of learning, she or he needs adult-led direct instruction. Unfortunately, as is commonly the case, teachers (and parents) leave good students to fend for themselves on the mistaken assumption that they don’t need help. Mom and Dad can and should do things at home to enhance their child’s learning and intelligence. Start with early reading the right way.

What is the difference between student-led and adult-led education? In its truest form, student-led learning is where students only learn what they want to learn, wherever their curiosity takes them, if anywhere. Groups of students theoretically lead each other into the discovery of all knowledge at their own pace. Teacher-led learning is where the teacher uses a structured lesson plan to present knowledge in a specific sequence. You, as parents, are your child’s first teacher and best advocate.

There are problems with both sides, but clearly the unguided student-led learning leads to failure. Whole Language learning is a prime example of this. (Student-led math instruction is also a fiasco. Such faulty ideas are rampant in Common Core philosophy.)

One teacher, Pavel Ryzlovsky, of Canada, wrote to me: “With the whole population's silent participation, we have already accumulated several obstacles to good-quality language teaching. The other one that needs to be tackled is our adherence to student-oriented learning.

“I remember reading of a study, unprecedented in its scope, which was conveyed to determine what sort of language-teaching system has been the most effective one. It found that teacher-oriented education has been consistently bringing the best results, in few aspects several times better than the student-oriented type.

“The outcome of the study was disseminated among the teaching districts throughout USA; however, only one tenth of their total number embraced the teacher-oriented system; in other districts both parents and teachers refused it as "too demanding" (for children and teachers).

“The sooner we recognize what's wrong at the roots of our approaches the better. We have a long way to go to get out of the trouble we put ourselves into.” ~ Pavel Ryzlovsky, Canada

It is true that when we ask questions we remember better than when we are just spoon fed facts. But waiting for children to be curious about every aspect of knowledge is not enough in the classroom. Children were not born knowing everything. They don’t know what they don’t know. If one wanted to learn to be a doctor, wouldn’t she want to go to the experts? Having to re-invent the wheel, or self-discover all medical knowledge, is not the best way to learn.

Leaving a child to his own discovery will not bring progress quickly. If children were able to learn all knowledge by self-discovery, there would be no reason to have colleges or degree programs. Someone has to cache all the centuries of learned knowledge for others to use, which falls to our universities, libraries and schools. If teacher-oriented learning wasn’t necessary, all the farmers in the last century would have become geniuses just by thinking while on their tractors or in their fields.

“To promote scientific literacy, one focus of science education is scientific discovery learning. However, its effectiveness is dubious, because students face some difficulties in dealing with the discovery processes, especially coordinating hypotheses with evidence. Students do not attempt to associate their hypotheses with the evidence. And even if they do, they are so strongly biased that they retain their current hypotheses and ignore or distort the evidence.” (Hiroko Kobayashi, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. The effects of "collaborative discovery learning with an association scheme" on the acquisition of scientific literacy.)

The above statement shows one reason why teacher-oriented learning is best – the immaturity of students. But teachers have to make learning interesting. As one social studies teacher put it:

“The content has to be first. So in a sense it has to be very teacher oriented, teacher centered. I am giving them information and I am expecting [them] to process it and do something with it. I give homework assignments.”

The best teacher-oriented education uses an inquiry-based approach, much like Socrates used. In this way, the questions are guided by an adult but help the children think and learn. Often, a question is answered with another question. This opens a child’s curiosity and leads the student to the knowledge. This may require longer class discussions, but is worth it. Cultures that use this kind of guided-question, teacher-oriented discovery produce more Nobel Prize nominees and winners than those that don’t.

There is one place where student-oriented learning does well, and that is when discovery is enhanced with computers. The computer asks the leading questions, so the student isn’t completely on his own, but feels like he is in control. Student discovery by computer works well with some [older] children, but they still need the human touch on occasion. Too much computer time has proven to be detrimental to emotional and social maturity. (McGlinn, M. (2007). Using the "Documenting the American South" Digital Library in the social studies: A case study of the experiences of teachers in the field. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education [Online serial], 7(1). http://www.citejournal.org/vol7/iss1/socialstudies/article1.cfm)

There you have it. 
The best practice for learning is adult-led, direct instruction with an inquiry-based approach. 
Parents should start their children’s learning at home, long before school age. 
For their child’s continued development, they need to advocate for these best practices, especially for math and reading, at public, private, or home school. 
I’d also like to add that if they use a preschool, parents should choose one that believes in adult-led education, not self-discovery. 
The less time in preschool, and the more time with mom or dad, the better – for learning, for development, for bonding, for emotional and mental health.

http://thegodfreymethod.com

7 questions parents need to know about reading

These 7 questions answer why phonics first for your child:

        1. How does early reading by phonics increase my child’s IQ?

        Several studies show that a person’s intelligence quotient (IQ) is only about 50% genetic. The other 50% that affects IQ is environment. Any child’s IQ can be raised by what mom and dad do at home. And the more they learn at younger ages, the more they are able to learn for the rest of their lives. Of course, part of the nature-nurture mix is the child's own inner motivation. Give your child the chance to be his or her best self. My dad taught me to read when I was only 3 years old.

        How to be an exceptional parent without spending a lot of money = early reading the right way. Intelligence is not completely genetic. Almost any child can become much more intelligent with the proper phonics method early in life. The sooner we recognize what's wrong at the roots of our reading-instruction approaches the better.

        2. Why is phonics reading better than sight reading?

        Scientific research shows that phonics wires a child’s brain properly for efficient, excellent reading. Learning sight-words first wires a child’s brain in the wrong place for reading. Dyslexic children read with a different part of the brain than do normal readers. Reading is hearing with your eyes. The Godfrey Method wires the child’s brain properly for a sure foundation. It makes a mental connection between letters and sounds like no other. Prevention is much better than remediation. If a child learns sight-reading first, he may have trouble reading later as an adult.

         3. How will learning to read early affect my child’s school years?

         Children who start kindergarten ahead of the class usually stay there for the rest of their school careers. They have more confidence and self-esteem, too. They get to skip the embarrassment of going to remedial resource classes, too.

        4. What about children needing to be taught using the most efficient method according to their personal learning style?

        What may be efficient or seem easier in the early years, such as sight-word flash cards, will often bring trouble later in life, when there are no more flash words, no more teacher to tell you when your guess is right, and no way to decode a new word. Teens and adults aren’t prone to ask for help with reading when they are stuck on a word. It is embarrassing.

        Personal learning styles - whether visual (seeing), audio (hearing), kinesthetic (body movement), and/or musical - that actually involve phonics-instruction work best for a child. Sight-reading should NOT be considered a child's learning style. If your baby can read by sight-words, s/he may struggle with reading later. Always put phonics first.

        5. How is the Godfrey Method different from other reading methods?

        It uses an innovative picture-letter phonics system that even young children can grasp, woven into an enchanting stories, A Funny Boy Was Prince River, for one. The Godfrey Method is able to start children younger, which increases your child’s capacity to learn for life. It is affordable, time-saving, prevents dyslexia, provides quality parent-child time, helps children learn faster and easier than other phonics methods, improves speech, and helps boys catch up to girls in school sooner.

        The Godfrey Method is simple yet effective, and the child never forgets. Our motto is, Keep it Simple for Success (KISS). All children do not learn the same. The Godfrey Method involves several senses and learning styles.

        6. Why doesn’t the Godfrey Method use a lot of electronic devices?

        Studies show that too much TV, radio, video games, and computer time may trigger autism or dyslexia in young children. The Godfrey Method focuses on books for 2 reasons, to keep flashing lights and noises away from young, developing minds, and to provide nurturing interaction between parent and child. Holding your child on your lap or next to you, reading A Pretty Girl Was Alpha Bette and doing the phonics cards, is much more beneficial than plopping a child in front of the TV with a DVD and walking away. What may be more convenient for the parents may be devastating to the child’s mind. Why take the chance?

        7. Did you know that sight-reading can cause reading problems? Proponents of this method try to solve the problem (that they created) with some strange remedial methods.

        Which brings me to miscue analysis. Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld said it best, so I will quote parts of his article, Miscue Analysis (ibid.), here:

        Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman knowingly mislead the public. “Frank Smith explains the concept of the miscue in Understanding Reading (p. 151): The prior use of meaning ensures that when individual words must be identified, for example, in order to read aloud, a minimum of visual information need be used. And as a consequence, mistakes will often occur. If a reader already has a good idea of what a word might be, there is not much point in delaying to make extra certain what the word actually is. As a result it is not unusual for even highly experienced readers to make misreadings that are radically different visually — like reading “said” when the word is actually announced or reported but which make no significant difference to the meaning. Beginning readers often show exactly the same tendency... The mistakes that are made are sometimes called miscues rather than errors to avoid the connotation that they are something bad (Goodman, 1969). Such misreadings show that these beginning readers are attempting to read in the way fluent readers do, with sense taking priority over individual word identification.

        “One could write a book about the utterly perverse reasoning in that paragraph. In the first place only a sight reader could make the kinds of errors Smith illustrates. A phonetic reader will make entirely different kinds of errors, perhaps something on the order of scanning hastily and reading deported for departed, but then correcting himself because the sentence doesn’t make sense. On the other hand substituting “said” for “announced” is the kind of error that Schmitt found that defective children made even though they had been taught to read by a phonetic method.

        “I can confirm this tendency on the part of retarded individuals to read as Schmitt observed from my own experience as a tutor. For ten years I tutored a retarded young man and taught him to read by intensive phonics. Yet, he often made the kinds of errors Schmitt observed. Whenever he came to a word he could not read, he substituted a word which made no sense phonetically. In other words, sounding out the word was not his first means of word attack, even though the word might have been one he had previously read correctly. Whenever he did this, I had him spell out the word, and suddenly his phonetic knowledge came to the fore, and he read the word correctly.

        “When Frank Smith tells us that normal beginning readers make the same kinds of mistakes that defective children make, what he should tell us is that normal beginning readers taught to read by the whole-word method make the same kinds of errors that adult sight readers make! It is one of the dishonest tricks that whole-language advocates play, by not telling the reader when speaking of miscues what kind of beginning reading instruction was used with the individuals being examined. The very fact that the word “miscue” is used instead of “error” is a good indication of the intellectual dishonesty at work, the fancy sleight of hand being used to confuse the public.

        “Apparently, the idea of “miscue analysis” was dreamed up by Prof. Kenneth Goodman and his wife, Yetta, two of the leading founders of the whole-language movement. In my opinion, miscue analysis is probably the worst form of educational malpractice ever invented. What they do is take a poor sight reader — a victim of the whole-word method — and try to improve his guessing “strategies.” After all, it was Ken Goodman who defined reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game.” In other words, no attempt is made to train the poor sight reader to become an accurate phonetic reader. As long as the sight reader's word insertions, omissions and substitutions relate more closely to the meaning of the text, they are acceptable.

        “In short, the purpose of miscue analysis is to make sure that the pupil remains permanently crippled as a sight reader and never becomes an accurate phonetic reader. Ken Goodman writes in The Whole Language Catalog (p. 100): “Miscue analysis helps people to realize that many of the miscues kids are making are sensible, even remarkable sometimes, in what they reveal about the language processes that the reader would have to go through to have produced them.”

        Yetta Goodman writes in the same article:

        “Insertions and omissions can give you tremendous insight into whether a reader is proficient or not. Proficient readers tend to make insertions more than less proficient readers; certain kinds of omissions tend to be things that are acceptable to the syntax and semantic structure of the text, and good readers make them all the time. Other kinds of omissions indicate kids who want to leave out words that they are afraid to try and identify.”

        “Can you believe it? A reader is more proficient if he or she reads something that isn’t there — that is, inserts a word in the text — than a reader who doesn’t! Of course, the Goodmans have no intention of teaching these sight readers to become phonetic readers.”

        Ken Goodman writes:

        “The concept I put in the place of ‘remedial’ is ‘revaluing’; that is where the intent of the teacher is to help the child to revalue himself or herself as a reader and to revalue the process; to help the child move away from the process of sounding out and attacking words, and toward making sense out of print and legitimizing the kinds of productive strategies that the kids have been using and had thought were cheating. These kids are often their own worst enemies in that their beliefs about themselves and their ability to learn get in their way constantly; they're very easily discouraged. So a lot of patient time taken to help them revalue themselves is the most essential thing.”

        “In other words, the main therapeutic purpose of miscue analysis to convince the defective reader that it’s okay to be a defective reader, as long as the miscues make sense. But, of course, in the workplace such nonsense does not hold water. An error is an error no matter what else you may call it, and to try to convince a child that an error is not an error will not serve him well when he is an adult confronting the demands of a technologically advanced economy that requires accuracy and precision in thinking and performing and reading.”

        “The quest for truth requires a respect and appreciation for accuracy and precision of thought. If, to begin with, you denigrate accuracy in reading, you denigrate the pursuit of truth… Miscue analysis is the crudest hoax ever perpetrated on unsuspecting children. To convince a normal child that it is perfectly all right to read as if he had a defective brain is so heinous a form of miseducation as to be nothing short of a crime.” This article was taken from The Blumenfeld Education Letter, Vol. 7, No.12 (Letter 76), December 1992. Editor: Samuel L. Blumenfeld, reprinted on www.donpotter.net

        The newsletter masthead reads: “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge.” [Hosea 4:6] The purpose of this newsletter is to provide knowledge for parents and educators who want to save the children of America from the destructive forces that endanger them.

        “Our children in the public schools are at grave risk in 4 ways: academically, spiritually, morally, and physically – and only a well-informed public will be able to reduce these risks. “Without vision, the people perish” [Proverbs 29:18]. Notes by Donald L. Potter, May 20, 2005, Odessa, TX.

        Yes, we CAN make reading easier by pulling the process apart and teaching phonics reading skills. To a phonetic reader, reading is NOT a “psycholinguistic guessing game.” It is accurate and precise. No wonder the U.S. is falling behind as the technological giant. Many of our young adults now were taught by these faulty teaching models.

        By the way, remedial classes mushroomed since Project Follow Through because the methods were, and still are, creating more learning disabilities than ever before. Private (commercial) tutoring has mushroomed too, because parents are desperate to fix what the schools have done. But many parents cannot afford to pay for good (not the school’s) remediation. TGM is something anyone can afford to do at home, the earlier the better.

http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/BeingaWiseOwl7questionsparentsneedtoknowaboutreading 

23 ways phonics is the best practice of millenia

Let's discuss the next building blocks for your child, using the best practice of millennia - phonics

                Ask yourself - Why do those who are taught to read phonetically never become dyslexic? But those who read ideographically (by sight-words) do? A phonetic reader cannot become dyslexic.

That’s proof enough that dyslexia is not truly genetic, and that it's preventable and curable.

All change is not progress. If it isn't broken, don't fix it. Stay with phonics!

Five simple ways parents can avoid paying for remediation later, and how you can, too:

• Read to your infant/toddler/preschooler daily, often while holding or sitting next to him/her. Avoid electronic reading methods, which dampen bonding.
• Introduce The Godfrey Method picture-letter phonics-cards, as found in A Funny Boy Was Prince River, as early as possible, easily giving your child the first 26 sounds. Preschool is not the answer.
• Help your child learn to write the letters, and later words, as taught in this book, especially in the Volume 1 & 2 Home Early Learning Play School (HELPS) of It's Not Rocket Surgery!
• Help your child to read before kindergarten age, using the words and spelling rules in this INRS appendix. Avoid the top ten myths of reading, outlined in Volume 2.
• Let your child “catch” you reading. Show your enjoyment. Go to the library regularly.

My colleague, Donna, told me that her son’s elementary school in Michigan taught reading with a child-led “discovery” system that did not teach the spelling rules of phonics. The teachers didn’t want to ‘hurt’ the kids’ self-esteems with corrections, and let them write however they wanted. But that’s exactly what they did – hurt self-esteem. Being unable to read or write well shakes a child’s confidence to the core. And it gets worse each year.

Several years later, Donna had to go to the junior high for a conference for her son. While there, she heard several mothers talking about having to take their young teens to Sylvan Learning Center® for tutoring because they were so far behind.

One mother was especially angry, not only because she had to pay for Sylvan’s tutoring, but while there, she heard the registrar say, “We see this all the time. We have a lot of junior high students coming to us because of how they were taught in elementary.”

That mom was furious! She had to pay to remedy how the school messed up her son! Sadly, the elementary is still teaching the faulty theory even after years of proven failure. (What I want to know is, why aren’t schools beating down the doors of Sylvan Learning Center® to find out how to teach correctly? Obviously the knowledge is out there.) Let's look at the history of sight-reading versus phonics -

The best practice of millennia - phonics:

1. ~2001 B.C. - Writing is done with complex hieroglyphics, keeping literacy available only to a small class of scholars, scribes, and priests. It was cumbersome and required memorizing thousands of pictographs.
2. ~2000 B.C. - The first alphabet was invented in Phoenicia (south Lebanon & north Israel area). This remarkable discovery gave man an accurate, precise means of translating spoken words into writing. It was the most revolutionary invention in all history. It required learning only 42 sounds. It accelerated the speed and availability of intellectual development to the whole population.
3. 1783 - Noah Webster produced near-universal literacy with his phonetic American Spelling Book and other spellers like it. From 1783 to 1826, Webster's brilliant sound-method speller was unfailingly successful in curing the "disease" of illiteracy.
4. 1826 - A movement to promote reading by "meaning" instead of "sound" began on both sides of the Atlantic. The first two sight-word primers emerged, Franklin Primer and Worcester's. Spelling books (phonetic) were omitted for the first time ever. Astonishingly spread and infiltrated by only 1830.
5. 1830 - Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet invented the sight method for deaf children, using pictures with words - and using words as pictures (hieroglyphics). Published it in the American Annals of Education.
6. 1836 - Gallaudet published The Mother's Primer based on his look-say method. Predictably, reading and spelling disabilities exploded in the wake of the "improvements" of the know-nothings who were oblivious to history.
7. 1837 - Horace Mann of the Boston Primary School Committee adopts the above primer for Massachusetts. Educational "reformers" of that time were against anything they considered old orthodox, including phonics.
8. 1844 - The defects of Gallaudet's look-say primer are very apparent to Boston schoolmasters, who issued a blistering attack against it. These defects were recognized by educators who were not seduced by the siren songs of the reformers.
9. 1912 - Myrtle Sholty published her study in Elementary School Teacher, which showed that sight-reading produced impaired, subjective readers who guessed at words, omitted words, inserted words, substituted words, and mutilated words.
10. 1914 - Psychologist Walter F. Dearborn reviewed Sholty's study and admitted that sight-readers are more likely to misread because of the large apperceptive element they supply to their reading. Despite this, top psychologists proceeded to devise and publish look-say textbooks based on this very defective methodology.
11. 1929 - Dr. Samuel T. Orton, a neuropathologist in Iowa, concluded from his research that children's reading problems were caused not by their neurology, but by a new sight-reading method. Results of his research were published in the Journal of Educational Psychology.
12. 1956 - Rudolf Flesch's article, Why Johnny Can't Read, was published in a newspaper.
13. 1967 - Project Follow Through begins, giving us 21 faulty teaching models that still persist. Government funded this for 28 years, into the billions.
14. 1973 - The New Illiterates was published, showing that the chief, and perhaps only, cause of dyslexia is sight-reading.
15. 1981 - The 1920s Dewey revolt against phonics eventually led Dr. Seuss' publisher to insist that he write sight-word books from the first grade word list. Hence, The Cat in the Hat. Dr. Seuss later said, "I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country."
16. 1984 - Samuel Blumenfeld's book, NEA, quotes Russian psychologists, Luna and Pavlov, who devised an artificial way of including behavioral disorganization by introducing two conflicting stimuli to the organism. Sight-reading does this to children.
17. 1985 - In Reading Without Nonsense, Frank Smith is responsible for the misconception of the century, promoting sight-reading. His book, Understanding Reading, became the bible of whole-language educators.
18. 1987 - The federal government has spent- and is still spending- millions of dollars looking for the genetic causes of dyslexia. There is something insidious in this. A total waste - there aren't any. The children are phonetically impaired by their pre-school learning of a sight vocabulary.
19. 1989 - Edward Miller devised a scientific test which clearly indicated whether a child was a sight-reader or a phonetic-reader, and at what point the child's reading mode became permanent. (Phonetic readers were usually taught by their parents.)
20. 1990s - Edward Miller went to great lengths to bring his findings to the government education and research establishment, to no avail. They are not interested. They have their own agenda, and it has nothing to do with educational excellence.
21. 1992 - Samuel Blumenfeld states, "Our only hope is to reach enough parents so that as many children as possible can be saved from the fate of functional illiteracy the public schools have in store for them... This will immunize children against dyslexia."
22. 2004 - Geraldine E. Rodgers writes an article, "Why Noah Webster's Way Was the Right Way." She proves, "Teaching the reading of alphabetic print by its "sound" is the correct way. Teaching the reading of alphabetic print by its "meaning" is the incorrect way." And "If [the two methods] are mixed, then the mixture is incorrect in direct proportion to the emphasis given to the "meaning" method."
23. 2008 - Shannah B Godfrey publishes, A Funny Boy Was Prince River, to empower parents and children to reverse the educational trend for themselves. Phonics before kindergarten age is our best hope for the future. (Actually A Pretty Girl Was Alpha Bette was first, but I prefer my Funny River version.)

                Most of this information comes from the writings of Samuel Blumenfeld and others, posted on Don Potter's wonderful blog:http://www.donpotter.net/ed.htm

 

http://thegodfreymethod.com/blog/open-world-23-ways-phonics-best-practice-millenia

34 favorite parenting tips

You are a caring, concerned, proactive parent, and you want to spend time with your children. You know that it is important for parents to be more involved in early childhood learning, not less.

 

More pre-school is not usually the best answer. Showing your children how to read early the right way, in a nurturing home environment, is much better. “If you delay, you may pay,” as the saying goes.

 

But kids don't come with a manual and good parenting skills are learned, so never fear, help is on the way. 

 

Here is a list of 34 of my favorite parenting tips. They work every time I remember to follow them.

 

No one can master a list of 34 parenting habits all at once. Just pick one or two to work on now, and when they’re comfortably established in your routine, try a couple more.

 

Continuous improvement is a life-long pursuit, and change can be slow. Be patient with yourself. Keep trying; never give up.

 

Like Dori says on Finding Nemo, “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming…”

 

Good Parenting Skills:

 

1. ENCOURAGE YOUR CHILD

                A misbehaving child is a discouraged one.

2. AVOID PUNISHMENT & REWARD (love and logic instead)

                It reinforces mistaken goals.

3. USE NATURAL & LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES

                And don’t ‘bail the child out’.

4. BE FIRM WITHOUT DOMINATING

                Keep your choice without showing anger.

5. RESPECT THE CHILD

                Don’t humiliate or over-demand.

6. INDUCE RESPECT FOR ORDER

                Do not shield children from the results of disorder.

7. INDUCE RESPECT FOR THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS

                Cheerfully remove the offending child, or ‘play the game’ (do it his way for a minute).

8. ELIMINATE CRITICISM & MINIMIZE MISTAKES

                We cannot build on weakness – only on strength.

9. MAINTAIN ROUTINE

                Routine provides order and freedom, not license.

10. TAKE TIME FOR TRAINING

                Correcting the untrained child fails to ‘teach’, only criticizes, discourages, and provokes.

11. WIN COOPERATION

                Recognize a behavior’s purpose; feel NO rancor; discuss.

12. AVOID GIVING UNDUE ATTENTION

                What are the demands of the situation? A child seeking constant attention is unhappy.

13. SIDE-STEP THE POWER STRUGGLE

                Find a different and effective approach. Be firm, but ‘have no stake’ in the child’s reaction.

 

14. WITHDRAW FROM THE CONFLICT (don't react)

                Take the sail out of his wind!

15. ACTION! NOT WORDS

                Cheerfully, I decide what I will do, NOW. If possible, say nothing.

16. DON’T SHOO FLIES

                Children become ‘parent-deaf’ to nagging.

17. HAVE THE COURAGE TO SAY ‘NO’

                Children must learn to cope with frustration. We are not slaves to satisfy, nor indulge, their every whim.

18. AVOID THAT FIRST IMPULSE – DO THE UNEXPECTED

                Join the child; Give a hug instead of anger.

19. REFRAIN FROM OVER-PROTECTION

                This is discouraging the child’s abilities.

20. STIMULATE INDEPENDENCE

                Never do for a child what s/he can do her/himself. Within reason.

21. STAY OUT OF FIGHTS (or respond without anger)

                What is the behavior’s purpose? To get parents’ immediate attention. Separate the children or remove the object. Do not allow bullying in either direction.

 

(Children should NOT just work things out by themselves. The larger or meaner child always wins, which isn’t right. Some situations need calm parental intervention.)

22. BE UNIMPRESSED BY FEARS

                Don’t encourage fears by making a big fuss. Children are natural hams.

23. MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS

                Stay out of someone else’s relationship, unless there’s abuse. Have confidence in your influence at other times when you're not there.

24. AVOID THE PITFALLS OF PITY

                Pity is damaging, even when justifiable and understandable. This different than empathy or sympathy or compassion.

25. MAKE REQUESTS REASONABLE & SPARSE

                Don’t attempt to show authority. Use opportunity instead of oppositional reaction. Win-win, not win-lose.

26. FOLLOW THROUGH – BE CONSISTENT

                Otherwise, we train them in disobedience.

27. PUT THEM ALL IN THE SAME BOAT

                Dealing with children individually intensifies their competition. Treat all as a unit.

28. LISTEN!

                Children have valuable solutions and ideas. Also, what is the child’s meaning behind negative words?

29. WATCH YOUR TONE OF VOICE

                Don’t dictate, discourage, nor condescend, in tone.

30. TAKE IT EASY

                Don’t be over-concerned or worried. Relax.

31. DOWNGRADE ‘BAD’ HABITS

                Make no fuss. Quietly, privately give a choice, or ignore it totally. Otherwise, it’s more fun to continue.

32. HAVE FUN TOGETHER

                Hostility is reduced; harmony increases.

33. TALK WITH CHILDREN, NOT TO THEM

                Use sentences like -

 

        “I wonder why _?”

        “What if _?”

        “What else could _?”

        “Do you have any ideas _?”

        “How do _?”

        “What can _?”

        “You may be right.”

        “We’ll think about it and see what happens.”

        “I don’t agree with you.”

        “But you have the right to think so, if you wish.”

        “I would appreciate it if you would _.”

34. ESTABLISH A FAMILY COUNCIL

                The decision holds for a week, with no further discussion. Democracy is everyone working for the good of the situation, not for personal tyranny and license.

 

As you can see, most of these take self-control on the part of us parents. It has taken me a lifetime to get some of these.

 

One of my favorite mantras is:

 

"It doesn't matter how the child makes you feel; it only matters how you make the child feel - you're the adult."

 

Easier said than done, but I have faith in you. The goal is to raise independent, responsible, capable children with healthy self-esteems and motivation. You can do it!              

http://thegodfreymethod.com/blog/head-start-34-favorite-parenting-tips