When wanting more, strong-willed children can eventually accept what is possible and what is not, because their parents have already learned to accept. The child benefits from the parents’ experience that you may not always get what you want right away, but, if you don’t give up, you will eventually get what you need. When children experience the pain of loss, delay, or disappointment, but feel understood, they connect with the maturity or expanded consciousness of the parent who is listening.
When children feel understood, they automatically connect with the maturity of the parent who is listening.
Strong-willed children will throw tantrums, but they will also gradually become more cooperative. Resistant children come back to their inner willingness to cooperate with their parents, because resistance itself creates the friction necessary to increase their feeling of connection. Children need to resist their parents from time to time in order to feel their connection. When they feel their connection once again, they are suddenly open and receptive to their parents’ leadership and guidance. This new insight changes the way we view children’s negative behaviors or attitudes.
When children are unruly or uncooperative, they are not bad—they are just out of control. They do not need punishment or to feel in order to self-correct or become more disciplined. Instead, they just need to come back into control. Whose control? Their parents’ control. When parents apply the five skills of positive parenting, their children are once again back in control and happy to accommodate and cooperate.
Children are never bad, they are just out of control.
With positive parenting, children are not just being con trolled, they are being given the ability to feel that control. This is why positive parenting was not discovered before. Children in previous generations were not yet born sensitive enough to feel their parents’ control. Without the ability to feel, children would not respond to positive parenting. Today, because a shift has taken place in the collective consciousness, these skills work for all children and teens, even if they were not raised with them. Children and teens of all ages will begin to respond right away.
Positive parenting skills work because children today have a greater ability to feel.
Other more common, permissive parenting approaches have failed because they were not complete. It is not enough simply to let your children be and do whatever they want. To give children greater freedom, parents must provide strong leadership. By learning to balance increasing freedom with greater control, the skills of positive parenting are successful.