The Parenting Toolkit: Simple Steps to Happy & Confident Children

By Caroline Penney, Steve Biddulph and Kate Hajducka

This book is a unique and valuable resource for parents and guardians who wish to give their children the best start in life. The author has drawn on her years of experience facilitating parenting groups and working as a family therapist to present these techniques clearly, illustrated by a wealth of real-life examples. She explains how to help your child become confident, capable, caring, and able to reach their full potential. She gives parents and guardians simple skills for developing healthier relationships with their children of all ages. These include: acknowledging feelings, clear communication, descriptive praise, assertiveness, child-led play, describing behavior instead of labeling the child, problem solving, and discipline strategies. She also has advice on balancing parents'/guardians' stress with self-care.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hawthorn Press
• Release date: May 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912480357

Book preview

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Foreword

The very best parent I know had a terrible childhood. Her family was violent, desperately poor, and chaotic. Too many children, too little time and space. Kids fixed their own meals half the time, and they often woke to find strangers asleep in their living room or wandering down the hallway. It wasn’t that her parents didn’t care; they were just totally out of their depth. It was like being children raised by children.

Somehow, I don’t know how, she managed to figure out all the things wrong with her childhood, and made sure that her own children had the opposite – stability, affection, fun, and discipline that was friendly and never scary.

You don’t have to have a good childhood to be able to parent well. But you do need the chance to reflect, think and get in touch with what it felt like to be a child, and what might make things better.

There are an awful lot of books on raising kids, and a million self-proclaimed experts on the internet, with cheery lists of tips and points to make your child resilient, successful, confident, and so on. I am sure this is worthy stuff, but it makes me want to get my kayak out and sail right away. A snowstorm of advice is not what parents need.

Caroline’s book is deeper water than this. It uses the secrets that family therapists know to get underneath problems and unlock what is causing them. Are you neglecting self-care? Are there emotional areas that press your buttons and make it hard to stay calm? Was your childhood a nightmare that seems to come back and haunt you and mess up your life even now?

In clear, simple and friendly language, she helps you understand and overcome these hurdles. She tells you the kind of stories I love to hear – the ones about families in much worse trouble than you, or at least as bad, and how they untangled things and went on to have happier lives.

There are ways to think about what you do and say to kids which are better than what was done and said to us when we were growing up. It’s not mysterious or hard. If you can change the wheel on a car, or find your way around Netflix, or make pancakes on a Saturday morning, you can learn to communicate with kids.

I would recommend taking this book in small bits. Try some of it out, and see if it makes a difference. You’ve got all the time in the world, as your kids will keep giving you new chances to improve!

Most people are good at some parts of being a mum or dad, but have holes in their abilities. Some aspects of parenthood just seem to go wrong, or blow up in our faces. You will naturally notice chapter titles that grab your attention, because you know, at some level, what you need to be more able to relax and be more connected with yourself and your kids. The whole human race is on this journey of healing and learning.

It took generations to get this messed up, and if we can shine even a bit of light into ourselves and grow a bit warmer and clearer, we can be very proud. Enjoy this book. Enjoy parenthood. That’s why we do it, and why it can feel so good when we get it right.

Steve Biddulph

Tasmania, 2018

Introduction

Many parents tell me that they wish that they’d been given an instruction manual when they had a baby. Many of us felt completely unprepared at first for parenthood, feeling that we had to ‘make it up as we went along’. The Parenting Toolkit is that manual we all wish we’d had.

Raising a child is one the most important and complicated activities anyone will ever do. This book gives you 12 basic parenting principles to help get it right. These principles help to improve the relationship between you and your child, provide strategies for dealing with challenging times and behaviour, and help your parenting to become more satisfying, fun and rewarding. They will help all your family to get along better, and increase the confidence and self-esteem of your children.

The Parenting Toolkit is based on how I have helped hundreds of families in my professional and clinical practice as a family therapist, on the latest research in the area, and – very importantly – on my own experience as the mother of three children. It is about becoming a reflective parent instead of just reacting to situations as they happen. It is about making the often small changes in how you relate to your child that can result in dramatic transformations in your family life.

How to use this book

I would recommend that you first read the book straight through, which will give you a full understanding of the whole Parenting Toolkit. Then you could spend more time going over each chapter and doing the associated exercises. Each chapter builds on the understanding from the previous one.

However, if you are short of time, you may wish just to look at one aspect of parenting that interests you, such as child-led play or the meaning of children’s behaviour – in which case you can jump to those chapters. As your children grow and develop, the chapter on ages and stages will be fascinating, and the chapter on discipline strategies would be useful if you feel you need to update your knowledge on effective discipline methods.

If you work with parents you may like to investigate the appendix on the theories that underpin parenting education.

The book can also be used as a reference book, to dip into and out of when you are uncertain how to handle a specific issue, and the examples illustrating problems can show how making small adjustments to your parenting can achieve transformational results.

With a pencil in hand it could also be used as a work book in which you can learn about your child, and perhaps about yourself.

The book covers the following topics:

1. Looking after yourself. This chapter looks at the importance of getting your own needs met as a parent and not to feel guilty about this. It also looks at how patterns from previous generations can influence how we parent, arguing that these need to be understood so that we do not pass on unhelpful patterns of parenting.

2. Feelings. This chapter describes the importance of acknowledging feelings so children feel that their feelings are being taken seriously. It also helps parents understand how to express feelings in a way that can be heard and does not spoil relationships.

3. Child-led play. This chapter explains the reasons why play is important and how to implement child-led play so the child experiences high-quality special time with their parent(s).

4. Parenting styles. This chapter describes the main types of parenting style – Aggressive, Passive, Manipulative and Assertive – and their impact on children.

5. Descriptive praise. This chapter describes how to give specific praise which helps the child feel valued.

6. Labels. This chapter looks at the importance of not ascribing labels to children, but describing the behaviour instead. It also looks at roles in the family and the importance of letting children not be defined by a role – e.g. the ‘sporty’ one or the ‘shy’ one.

7. Helping your child solve problems. This chapter describes how a parent can help their child solve problems in a creative way.

8. Understanding your child’s behaviour. This chapter explains that no behaviour occurs in a vacuum. There is always a need underlying the behaviour, and this behaviour is always communicating a meaning.

9. Discipline strategies. This chapter discusses and explains how to implement a wide range of discipline strategies.

10. Ages and stages. This chapter describes how the meaning of children’s behaviour is dependent upon the developmental phase in which the child is located, and how, during each phase, a child needs to master particular tasks.

11. Communication skills. This chapter looks at how to listen and the common pitfalls that parents can fall into.

12. Stress management. This chapter looks at how to manage stress for both parents and children, providing case studies.

The first eight chapters and Chapter 11 will help build the positive relationship between parents and their children, improving their child’s self-esteem and ability to be socially competent, and with the chapters building upon each other. Chapter 9 gives parents a range of different discipline strategies for helping their children accept boundaries and behave appropriately. Chapter 10 gives parents fascinating information about how child development impacts on expectations of children’s behaviour, and the role of the parent in helping children successfully master the skills necessary to develop through each stage.

Chapter 12 is a guide to understanding stress and the how to cope with difficult feelings so that relationships are not damaged by destructive behaviour.

I have used the real life experiences of families I have worked with to tell stories about the impact of implementing different parenting strategies. The case studies are an amalgam of different family experiences, and all details have been anonymized.

Chapter 1

Looking after Yourself

Looking after yourself is important because we need to feel positive about ourselves in order to look after our children. It is not selfish to get some of your own needs met; in fact it is essential. In this chapter we explore the reasons why this is vital, and also why our family patterns over previous generations could prevent us from being the parent we want to be.

Accepting that you can’t be – and don’t need to be – a perfect parent is a liberating feeling. To be ‘good enough’ is a major achievement! You can forgive yourself for being impatient sometimes, or for having the occasional takeaway meal instead of cooking. It can sometimes be enough that you have managed to get through the day without ‘losing it’ altogether.

As a parent you need to look after yourself. Imagine you are a jug full of all your emotional and physical resources. During the day you are using these up all the time with your children. Soon there will come a time when you have very few resources left. Therefore it is very important to have your own needs met too, in order to fill up your jug and have some emotional and physical energy left to give to your children. Look after yourself by meeting up with friends, getting enough sleep, watching football or your favourite TV programme, or doing whatever gives you joy. Asking for help from friends and relatives can also keep your jug full enough to cope with your children.

EXERCISE

Write down all the things you like doing and when you last did them. Then think of ways that you might be able to fit them into your life so that you get more of your needs met.

Our expectations of ourselves as parents are sometimes unrealistic and only end up leaving us feeling inadequate. Parents are supposed to be educators, cooks, cleaners, health and safety inspectors, counsellors, security guards, breadwinners, taxi drivers, fun to be with, clever, sympathetic and loving. To have all these attributes all the time is simply not realistic for one person.

These expectations put pressure on you as a parent, which only helps to leave you feeling more stressed with your children. Without these pressures, it can sometimes be much easier to be the parent that you want to be. We tend to see our children’s behaviour as reflecting our competence as parents. This can lead to trying to control our children so much that they are not able to take responsibility for themselves. However, not letting children take responsibility for themselves can be risky. We can end up feeling exhausted but also the child does not have the opportunity to learn from experience and to develop self-confidence.

Our role changes from being 100 percent responsible when they are a baby to when they are aged 18, when hopefully, they can become independent, ready to start the process of leaving the family and taking much more responsibility for themselves. This is a massive change in a short space of time, and so parenting in many ways is about slowly letting go and giving our children all the skills they need for forming positive relationships and feeling they can make a difference in the world.

Looking at yourself as a parent and what you bring to the parent role can be useful in helping you understand what makes you tick and where your vulnerabilities are, what ‘pushes your buttons’ to leave you feeling furious or out of control. This self-understanding is important because it is a way of helping you look after yourself and not unwittingly sabotage yourself.

Parents who are able to understand and think about how they were parented, and why their parents behaved in that way (even if their experience of childhood was very difficult), will be much less likely to repeat a pattern of poor parenting. Your own childhood, and also the family patterns (scripts) from generations past, can give you interesting clues as to what might be being played out in your own life without you even realising it. These family patterns can be enormously powerful. Unless we address these unconscious patterns, it is easy to just follow them blindly.

Look at patterns in your family such as:

•relationships between mothers and fathers

•relationships between brothers and sisters

•relationships between parents and children

•the role of women and men

•how conflict is managed

•messages about sexuality

•effects of displacement from country of origin

•role of dominance and competition

•the intimacy or distance of relationships in the family.

By looking at your own family tree you can examine your possible blind spots and issues, so as not to repeat patterns unknowingly. If you have a partner it can be useful to explore how your family script could be very different to their family script. When you both have an understanding of each other’s family patterns, then when problems flare up over child-rearing issues, you will be much better