The Four Essential Ingredients for Effective Parenting

By Ronald J. Raymond Jr. Ph.D.

This book is the ultimate in providing guidelines for effective parenting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543975994

Book preview

DISCLAIMER

Although the examples used in this book to illustrate certain points are all actual incidents and experiences of the author, all of the names, characters, and any businesses or locations that might have been mentioned are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 by Ronald J. Raymond, Jr.

ISBN 978-1-54397-598-7 (print)

ISBN 978-1-54397-599-4 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

The Four Essential Ingredients

Chapter 3

The First Essential Ingredient: Unconditional Positive Regard

Chapter 4

Unconditional Positive Regard Continued

Chapter 5

The Second Essential Ingredient: Appropriate Empathy

Chapter 6

Effective Listening & Communication

Chapter 7

The Third Essential Ingredient: Congruence

Chapter 8

The Fourth Essential Ingredient: Consistency

Chapter 9

Shame Versus Guilt

Chapter 10

Application of the Essential Ingredients to Specific Issues

Chapter 11

Guidance and Discipline

Chapter 12

Limit Setting is an Important Part of Good Parenting

Chapter 13

Motivation

Chapter 14

Procrastination

Chapter 15

Excessive Worry and Anxiety

Chapter 16

Coping with Stress

Chapter 17

Homework

Chapter 18

Sibling Rivalry

Chapter 19

Bedtime

Chapter 20

Lying

Chapter 21

Temper Tantrums and Meltdowns

Chapter 22

Autism

Chapter 23

Bullying

Chapter 24

Have Confidence In Your Decisions

Chapter 25

Look After Yourself As Well As Your Child

References

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank the many families who participated in my gathering data for this book and who gave so generously of their time and thoughts. My research involved many consultations with parents and children who shared many personal feelings, answered my thousands of questions, and taught me a great deal.

I also want to thank the professionals without whose contributions and thoughts this work would not have been possible. Many thanks to Randall P. Raymond, Ph.D., Kelly A. Raymond, Ph.D., Doris J. Raymond, M.S., Stephen V. Eliot, Ph.D., and Sid Rowell, M.A., Commodore Chip White, MED, U.S. Navy (Ret.), for their assistance in providing suggestions and in reading early versions of this book. Many thanks to Dorrie Duda for her dedication and assistance in preparing this book for publication.

Finally, I thank all of my family, without whose love and support, throughout my career, I would never have been able to develop my life-long work of conceptualizing The Four Essential Ingredients.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The present approach to parenting, as presented in this book, was developed through the collaboration of a group of child psychologists, clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists, school psychologists, credentialed learning specialists, and family therapists. The team creating this theory of the essential ingredients to parenting has developed an approach that has proven effective for thousands of families over a span of fifty years of experience. Each of the participants who contributed to the writing of this book is also a parent, with a representation of children ranging from early childhood to adulthood. I have chosen to write this book in an effort to help parents appreciate the enormity of being a parent and to have the basic tools to enable them to be effective in their parenting efforts. I hold Diplomate status in Clinical Psychology, as well as in Biofeedback and Neurofeedback, and I am a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. I have been working as a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at various universities, for over forty years and have been a consultant to four independent schools throughout my career. During my career, I have served as the head of the Psychology Department at Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut, as the Director of the Family and Child Guidance Center of Midwest City, Oklahoma, the Director of Psychology at the Boley State Prison in Oklahoma, the Director of Psychology at the Paul’s Valley State Institution in Oklahoma, and as a Psychological Services Director in the Peace Corps. My career includes establishing Transition, Inc., a psychological consulting firm that specialized in counseling corporations and their families in the process of geographical relocations. In this role, I consulted and ran group programs for several hundred families for over fifty Fortune Five-hundred Corporations. These positions provided me with the opportunity to help thousands of families and children, as well as to conduct more than two hundred seminars on parenting.

The one thing about which there is no doubt is that parenting is the hardest job anyone can face. At the same time, it’s usually the job that most defines us. Parenting has a million complex and tedious aspects to it that never end, no matter what age the child reaches. From the moment you take the little one home, most parents are hit by the sense of responsibility, and the worry that goes with it that never really stops. For many reasons, the sudden awareness of being a parent awakens fears you never realized you had.

All parents have the desire to feel that they are successful as parents. Everyone wants to be the best parent they can be, but it’s the type of job that brings frustration and often causes you to say and do what you swore you would never do. Although it’s the most challenging job, it can also be the most rewarding. The majority of parents are concerned with how others view their parenting skills. Married couples often express caring about how their spouse views their parenting. There is also the issue of parents needing their own parents to consider them as doing a good job raising their children. As time passes, our bundle of joy turns us into a bundle of nerves as we constantly strive to raise the bar on our own parenting skills. The Washington Post journalist, Brigid Schulte states, "We’re an achievement-oriented culture, always wanting to be our best and pushing our kids to be their best" (Schulte, 2014). Unfortunately, many of the parents who consult me seem to be caught up in the thought that success is defined by perfectionism and successful competition. It’s important for parents to realize that this value system is communicated to children through the parents’ emotional state and through what the parents reveal impresses them by giving praise for those values, or discouragement for other behaviors.

Pushing teens to be the best is well-intentioned. Parent’s worry that their children will be left behind in a competitive world. But the notion that being the best and having the most brings happiness, is an illusion (Crocker & Carnevale, 2013). Many areas of research show that future success is not determined by good grades, Ivy League acceptances, or inflated self-esteem (Tough, 2012). In the past decade, through my work with hundreds of families, I’ve seen a certain type of parenting style gradually take over parental attitudes. It involves what might be seen as a growing sense among parents of seeing their children as narcissistic extensions of themselves. The attitude is one of hyper-attentiveness and pushing for excellence by providing academic programming through admission to independent schools, obtaining tutors to ensure A grades, employing private coaches in sports, and enrolling the children in Saturday language classes, for example in Chinese. There has even been stress put on children in terms of eating habits, to avoid the dreaded fear of the child being a bit overweight. Peggy Noonan, in her article, Kids Don’t Become Success Robots, in the Wall Street Journal, points out that although reaching for high achievements are laudable goals of parents, the goals produce extreme competition. She writes, If their child succeeds, they were successful parents. If they were successful parents, their status is enhanced in a serious way: Everyone respects successful parents. The irony of all of this is that success robots, once wound up and pushed forward, often struggle (Noonan, 2019). I have been in a position to consult to many college admission faculty and find that they are deeply concerned by the recent increase in the number of students admitted to their institutions who require psychological help during their stay at the college or university.

Far too many modern parents have bought into the misguided belief that elite brands, certain elitist activities, (such as equestrian activities), or the highest ranking colleges, lead to or guarantees success. Many of the parents who consult me started this belief system with preschool; making sure they purchase the correct name sneakers for the child and proceed to launch the child’s path from that point to begin preparation for admission to an Ivy League level college. A significant amount of money is often spent to get the most prestigious names attached to the child as possible (Noonan, 2019). Despite this, the research strongly supports that spending time with the child and regarding the specific needs and unique talents of the child is far more important. It often takes significant convincing to get some parents to accept that a healthy identification for a child is not defined by what he/she wears, drives, or the name of the school attended, but rather by the level of self-confidence and self-esteem established in the child.

It’s not surprising, when we consider the misguided pressures modern parents experience, to find that the Justice Department has actually investigated and found that numerous wealthy parents have paid bribes to ensure that their children were accepted to universities and colleges they regarded to be in the elite educational institutions category. In my experience with families, it’s important to stress that the false premise that elite brands are always better, and association with prestigious names guarantees success is not limited to the wealthy but pervades middle class families as well. The core of this epidemic probably lies in the tendency for modern parents to invest too much time and energy in engineering their children’s lives.

There are countless books and professional and popular magazine articles written about parenting. A review of many recent articles reveals that the primary debates about good parenting often focus on parenting philosophies that center around the question of a free-range, versus helicopter parenting. The debate goes on in hundreds of magazines that can be found at supermarket check-out stands and various store shelves. Most raise the issue of which is more beneficial to healthy child development, the tiger mom, or what has recently become the popular term, the nurturing environment".

Unfortunately, many of these journal articles are contradictory in the best approach to good parenting and often just confuse the readers. The authors of the thousands of parent training books and articles are all sincere people, wanting to help parents become better parents. However, the confusion arises because most of them have very different views about how parents should raise children. Brigid Schulte, when asked in her interview on the NPR program, about the volumes of articles published about parenting, stated: The problem is that we don’t know what to do with that information on parenting because we really don’t know what is best. It doesn’t do parents any good if there is someone yelling at them because they’re doing this or that while they are struggling to find the right direction. That just fosters an element of competition among parents which is not very helpful to anyone and, probably, the least helpful to the child. We can conclude from volumes of written material on parenting that professionals, within various fields of social science, are convinced that parents want training in parenting, and that people have recognized that parental style and regime have a major influence on the development of children of all ages. There are hundreds of studies to support that ineffective parenting creates many, if not most, of the problems children develop and struggle with, not only during childhood, but problems that follow them into adulthood (Dishion & McMahon, 1998). The focus of this book is to help improve parenting skills, which we know will prevent many, if not most, of the problems parents face. While many published parenting styles are assuring effective parenting, as you learn about the Four Essential Ingredients, you will see the efficacy of approaching parenting within that frame of reference, it’s practicality, how much sense it makes, and how it is one of the easier approaches to use.

I vividly recall the first day I held my first-born child. I was as proud and filled with joy as anyone could be. The next day, when visiting the hospital, I brought him a little infant’s baseball glove, thinking that all I had to do was love him, play baseball with him, and it would all be easy. I had no idea, at that time, what lay ahead and the normal complications I would meet in raising him and his siblings. I had no idea of the exhausting power struggles and endless confrontations the normal child creates for the well-intentioned parent. No one had trained me to be a parent, or even made me aware of how difficult a job it is to be a good parent. No one told me that it would be far more anxiety producing and energy consuming than my professional work. Bronson and Merryman have come up with the term, NutureShock, to describe the panic common to new parents (Baumrind, 1993). Bronson and Merryman, state that, the mythical fountain of knowledge as to how to be an effective parent does not magically kick in right after birth. They coined the term, NutureShock, which refers in their words to the gut pummeling doubt that hits the moment you bring your first child home from the hospital. They suggest that the feeling of wow, they let us keep this thing! snowballs from there to feelings of inadequacy and doubt (Bronson & Merryman, 2009). I knew from my training as a psychologist that from early childhood on, I needed to be sure that my children had a voice, but no one warned me that when they used it, my buttons would so often get pushed. I was led, as were the other parents on our professional team, to search for alternative styles of parenting because we desperately tried to do what we thought was right, based on our own parent-child experiences, but those methods kept backfiring (Farkas et al., 2002).

There is no question, as we journey through life, that change is inevitable. If you think about your life prior to having children, you will realize that you had different priorities and that, in fact, you were different. Yes, having a child changes your world view and understanding of yourself. The important thing is that we embrace the change and use it to our benefit. It’s a certainty that having a child produces change in you and in your relationship with others, including your spouse. Life suddenly takes on a level of complexity far beyond your experience prior to being a parent. However, it’s out of this change that we tend to grow. Becoming a parent opens us up to new ways of viewing the world, a new hierarchy of the important things in our life, new ideas, and usually a new sense of responsibility. Being flexible in your thinking is a helpful ability for dealing with the changes in so many aspects of your life and with the issues your child will inevitable confront you. Flexibility helps you to adjust to the issues and circumstances your child may present; issues that will be new to you and suddenly present you with behaviors with which you never dreamed you would be confronted.

Becoming a parent places increased demand on us to be flexible. Flexibility permits you to see the big picture of adding the role of parenting to your life and to avoid the many extraneous details in which you may have previously been caught up. Flexibility means that you are willing to consider alternative ways of viewing the world and your purpose and role within it. Your mission may be to become the best possible parent to your child. It’s critical that your spouse supports your efforts to be flexible in the way the mission is carried out. It’s important to emphasize that being flexible is not being weak, arbitrary, or whimsical, in your responses to your child. Mental flexibility, as applied to parenting, refers to the ability to change from one thought to another, developing multiple concepts, or ways of looking at the issue the child is presenting. If you think about dealing with some issue your child presents, you will realize that you always have some goal in mind that you would like to accomplish. When we are conscious of trying to be flexible in our thinking and approach to the problem presented, we can review the appropriateness of the initial goal and open ourselves to considering that maybe a different goal is more applicable to the situation and to an appraisal of what is realistically possible.

A number of years ago, a father in a parenting seminar I was conducting told the following story, in our seminar, as an example of the flexibility of thinking he had to go through. He had saved for two years to be able to afford a week’s stay for the family at a Caribbean Island resort. He took his two sons, ages 6 and 11, and his wife, to dinner at an upscale restaurant as a special way of telling them that he had purchased the travel package. He was really proud of himself and felt like this was a wonderful experiential gift for the boys. After telling them, his older son said, I’m not going, I’ll stay with grandma. The father was shattered, along with the disappointment he felt that he must have failed as a parent in some way. He immediately convinced himself that his son must have a significant emotional problem that he had overlooked up to this point. He took the approach of telling the boy how he was interfering with the family’s vacation, the plans he was so proud of, and having already told their friends about it. The mental set was that there was something wrong with the boy and that his intention was to destroy a family fun opportunity. Fortunately, the mom chose to take the approach of scheduling a family meeting the next night, to discuss the issue. The boy