The Color of Change
[Portions reprinted from The Gentle Parent: Positive, Practical, Effective Discipline by L.R.Knost. Whispers Through Time: Communication Through the Ages and Stages of Childhood and Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages also available on Amazon and through other major retailers.]
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So few parents today were raised peacefully and respectfully by their own parents that it’s no surprise that a big issue in the gentle parenting community is how to overcome the stumbling blocks of change. Moving from a control-based parenting style, whether you’re used to spanking or time-outs or reward charts or some combination of the three, to a connection-based parenting style is a heart and mindset change as much as it is a lifestyle change. The undeniable fact is that change is hard work. Whether you’re trying to overcome your own childhood or your own already-established parenting habits, you can expect it to get harder before it gets easier. Just like with any lifestyle change, you will hit walls along the way, and they might even knock you back a step or two. Here are five tips to help you keep calm and carry on to achieve your parenting goals:
1) Commit to no hitting or other physical expressions of anger or frustration, and let that be your starting point, the line in the sand that you absolutely won’t cross. Just like in marriage, if you don’t make a commitment, there’s nothing to keep you from straying back into old patterns.
2) Rethink your parenting role and move from trying to force or manipulate or plead or coerce or use any other tactic to try to control your child’s behavior and instead build a desire in your child to cooperate because they trust you to make good decisions and to want them to be happy and safe. Do that by taking all of that energy that’s been going into trying to control their behavior (external controls) and focusing it on trying to build your connection and modeling the behavior you want to encourage (building internal controls).
3) Examine what you’re modeling. If right now you are insisting on your own way and reacting emotionally with anger and power-plays to your child’s lack of cooperation, what are you modeling? Stubbornness and lack of emotional regulation (i.e. adult-style tantrums). If, instead, you connect with your child, engage them in creative problem-solving, and work together with them toward a resolution to whatever issue you’re having, what are you modeling? Compromise, resourcefulness, and cooperation. Definitely worthwhile life lessons!
4) Keep working on you. Remind yourself that it’s your emotions and experiences and expectations that are causing your outbursts, not your little one’s behavior. Ask yourself why you’re so upset. Let yourself explore your inner triggers. Work through that internally instead of reacting to it externally.
5) Choose a touchstone in a color that will help to keep you grounded, something to look at or hold on to when you feel yourself slipping back into old thinking and behavior patterns. It could be a necklace or bracelet or key chain in a color that captures the essence of the parent you want to be to help you stay focused as you work your way toward becoming that parent. Colors have psychological implications, so some good choices might be blue which is the color of peace and trust; turquoise which is the color of communication; pink which is the color of unconditional love; or magenta which is the color of harmony. You can also place the color around your house as a reminder of the peaceful home you’re trying to create and as a symbol of change and renewal to help you remember to stop and breathe and think before responding to your child.
Remember, it’s a huge change to go from demanding obedience to inviting cooperation, and if you are already in an adversarial pattern with your child, that process will take extra time and patience. And keep in mind that no parenting ‘works’ to change a child into an adult or into a perfect little puppet. Children are imperfect humans being raised by imperfect humans in an imperfect world, after all! But shifting your thinking from expecting, or demanding, obedience to working with your child, understanding them, connecting with them, and inviting them to cooperate (i.e. Instead of “If you don’t put your dinner dishes in the sink, you won’t get ice cream for dessert” try “Let me know when your dishes are in the sink so I can get your ice cream for you.”) is the first and most important step toward a gentler style of parenting and a more peaceful home.
*Having gentle parenting tools ready and available in your ‘toolbox’ will go a long way toward helping you to stick to your commitment to be a more gentle parent. Here are some links to practical alternatives to punishment:
Practical, Gentle, Effective Discipline
Testing the Boundaries~What’s a Parent to Do?
*Also published in The Natural Parent Magazine
Related posts:
When Children Act Out ~ Reflecting Our Emotions
Backtalk is Communication…LISTEN
Bridge Over Troubled Waters~Parenting a ‘Problem’ Child
The Taming of the Tantrum: A Toddler’s Perspective
The Thoughtful Parent’s Guide to Positive Parenting Guides
Award-winnning author, L.R.Knost, is the founder and director of the children's rights advocacy and family consulting group, Little Hearts/Gentle Parenting Resources, and Editor-in-Chief of Holistic Parenting Magazine. Books by L.R.Knost include Whispers Through Time: Communication Through the Ages and Stages of Childhood ; Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages ; The Gentle Parent: Positive, Practical, Effective Discipline ; and Jesus, the Gentle Parent: Gentle Christian Parenting the first four books in the Little Hearts Handbook gentle parenting series, and children’s picture books Petey’s Listening Ears and the soon-to-be-released Grumpykins series.
Imagination is the Language of Childhood
If “play is the work of childhood,” as Fred Rogers so aptly put it, then imagination is truly the language of childhood.
Little Hearts/Gentle Parenting Resources is focused on helping parents to see things from their children’s perspective in order to connect and communicate, guide and inspire, and support and encourage their children throughout childhood and beyond.
Children’s books are a wonderful avenue for parents to connect with their children through that lovely language of childhood…imagination. Little Hearts Books LLC is excited to announce the July 2013 release of L.R.Knost’s newest children’s book, A Walk in the Clouds. Written in a playful, rhythmic cadence…
Little toes high in the air
Waving round without a care
Walking cross the sunlit sky
Spotting cloudy shapes go by
A duck floats in a crystal sea
Look! A bird’s nest in a tree
A dancing hippo takes a bow
And there’s a tiny little cow
Laughing penguins all lined up…
and illustrated with whimsical cloud shapes of dancing hippos, laughing penguins, and more, A Walk in the Clouds captures that magical childhood experience of laying in the cool grass while spotting shapes in the clouds drifting overhead and celebrates the pure and simple joy of ‘doing nothing’ that makes childhood such a beautiful season of life. For some ideas about connecting with your children through play, check out this Bucket List for a Happy Childhood!
Other children’s books by L.R.Knost include Petey’s Listening Ears the first in the Wisdom for Little Hearts picture book series focused on equipping parents with gentle parenting tools while entertaining and gently guiding children, and Grumpykins, a soon-to-be-released series by L.R.Knost, that develops children’s emotional health and intelligence as little Grumpykins’ bad attitude and grumpiness brings giggles as well as understanding about emotions, perceptions, and self-regulation.
L.R.Knost is the author of the Little Hearts Handbook series of parenting
guides. Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages and Whispers Through Time: Communication Through the Ages and Stages of Childhood are the first two books in the series. The next book in the series, due to be released in November of 2013, is The Gentle Parent: Positive, Practical, Effective Discipline.
Other books in the Little Hearts Handbook series due to be released in 2014 are
- Gentle Christian Parenting: Reflecting the Heart of Jesus
- Raising Bookworms: Sharing a Love of Reading with Children.
- Gentle Beginnings: The First Year
To find out more about the Little Hearts Handbooks, click here for reviews, sample chapters, author interviews, contact and media information, and giveaways!
Award-winnning author, L.R.Knost, is the founder and director of the children's rights advocacy and family consulting group, Little Hearts/Gentle Parenting Resources, and Editor-in-Chief of Holistic Parenting Magazine. Books by L.R.Knost include Whispers Through Time: Communication Through the Ages and Stages of Childhood ; Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages ; The Gentle Parent: Positive, Practical, Effective Discipline ; and Jesus, the Gentle Parent: Gentle Christian Parenting the first four books in the Little Hearts Handbook gentle parenting series, and children’s picture books Petey’s Listening Ears and the soon-to-be-released Grumpykins series.
Authors and Social Media: Book Promotion 101
[By L.R.Knost, author of Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages and Whispers Through Time: Communication Through the Ages and Stages of Childhood now available on Amazon.]
There was a time when authors could focus solely on honing their craft…obsessing over each word choice, laboring to perfect the cadence of every sentence, endeavoring to transform thoughts, dreams, ideas into written words worthy of publication. While those things must still take precedence over all else, the reality of the publishing world we now live in demands that we also don the hats of the expert marketer and the seasoned publicist. Times are hard for publishers struggling to keep up with the ever-changing electronic age, and marketing budgets are reserved for those who don’t need them…the already famous, the noteworthy, the known.
So, what is a struggling new writer, traditionally published or self-published, to do? The secret is the same one we follow when writing our masterpieces, only instead of, “Write what you know,” it’s “Harness what you know.” And what do most younger-generation writers know? Social media, of course!
We already know how to operate on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Tumblr, and more, and as new media outlets crop up, we’re the first to jump in and see what they are all about. So let’s use them for the one thing we need most—EXPOSURE! We want to be discovered. We want to be heard. We want to be read. And, to be perfectly honest, we want to sell books!
Here are some ways to leverage three of the top social media outlets you already use (or should be using!) to market your books so you can get back to what matters most…writing! (I’m just going to assume you already have a blog and are regularly writing posts relevant to your genre. If you don’t have a blog yet, start there!)
Pinterest:
- Make sure your profile bio is interesting and relevant.
- Create an author board like this one and pin anything you write, whether it’s a magazine article, a blog post, or a book, with a brief description.
- Use hashtags (i.e. #parenting, #education, #poetry, #nonfiction, #romance, #fantasy, etc.) to help people find your pins.
- Create a board like this one for every book you write, preferably just before it’s released. Add relevant pins such as your book cover, giveaways, book reviews, character sketches you’ve shared on your blog, etc.
- Make sure your boards aren’t one-dimensional. In other words, create boards that show your interests other than writing such as cooking or reading or crafting or hiking or traveling so other pinners will get to know you as more than just an author and also to provide a way to interact.
- Engage with other pinners by regularly repinning the best of other people’s pins onto relevant boards, as well as commenting on and liking pins and following boards and people that interest you.
- Choose one or two chapters of your book and share them as blog posts like this with links to your Amazon sales page (or wherever you want to direct people to purchase your book), then pin to your relevant boards, but not all at once. Remember, no one likes a spammer!
- Create group boards like this and invite contacts you’ve made who share similar interests to join. Sharing pins and interests is a great way to network!
Facebook:
- Create an author page separate from your personal page.
- Do some research and find other pages that share similar interests to your work and ‘like’ them. For example, my Facebook page reflects my focus on parenting, and the pages I’ve ‘liked’ share similar parenting philosophies to the ones I write about.
- Interact with the pages you’ve ‘liked’ by commenting on and sharing their posts and images. It’s important to build relationships with like-minded pages not only because their followers often follow you, as well, when they see you interacting on the page, but also because those page administrators may end up being enthusiastic book tour hosts when your book is released!
- Share your blog posts two or three times after publishing them, preferably at different times of the day to reach a broader audience.
- Interact with your followers by replying to their comments and by posting the occasional question in your status updates. An example would be asking something like, “If you could visit anywhere in the world (or if you write sci-fi you could say “anywhere in the universe,” lol) it would be ___________.”
- Create memes (images with text) with quotes from your books and share them along with the link to a relevant blog post or to your Amazon sales page (or wherever you want to direct people to purchase your book).
- Host giveaways, being careful to follow Facebook’s rules, and offer your followers freebies such as signed copies of your book or signed book-plates for your books they’ve already purchased.
Twitter:
- Twitter is all about networking, so be sure to not only check people’s bios before following them to see if their interests are relevant to yours, but also read through their last few tweets to get a good feel for their purpose for being on Twitter. If you don’t like giveaways or inspirational quotes or political rants, then you’ll want to know before following if that’s what someone’s tweets are all about!
- Just as with Facebook, tweet your blog posts two or three times after publishing, preferably at different times of the day to reach a broader audience.
- Use relevant hashtags, as with Pinterest, so your tweets will show up in searches about your subject.
- Use a link shortener such as bit.ly or goo.gl for your blog post links to leave lots of space for an intriguing teaser to make people want to click and follow.
- Make sure to use less than the maximum 140 characters in your tweet to leave room for retweets.
- Reply to and retweet other people’s tweets regularly to engage, interact, and, hopefully, attract the attention of people with whom you’d like to network.
- Tweet images and videos relevant to your subject to engage your followers in new and interesting ways.
The main thing to keep in mind is that success breeds success…as in helping other people achieve success will have a direct impact on your own success. A ‘me first’ mentality won’t get you far on social media, hence the word ‘social’ in the term. So be social, be nice, be helpful, do for others all the things you’d like others to do for you. Believe me, working together we’ll all achieve our goals faster and enjoy the journey a lot more!
Anything to add? Share it in the comments!
Related posts:
7 Parenting Tips for Working from Home with Young Children
20 Parent Savvy Pinterest People to Follow
Practical, Gentle, Effective Discipline
200 Ways to Bless Your Children with a Happy Childhood
10 Ways to Play with your Children when Play is the Last Thing on your Mind
Award-winnning author, L.R.Knost, is the founder and director of the children's rights advocacy and family consulting group, Little Hearts/Gentle Parenting Resources, and Editor-in-Chief of Holistic Parenting Magazine. Books by L.R.Knost include Whispers Through Time: Communication Through the Ages and Stages of Childhood ; Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages ; The Gentle Parent: Positive, Practical, Effective Discipline ; and Jesus, the Gentle Parent: Gentle Christian Parenting the first four books in the Little Hearts Handbook gentle parenting series, and children’s picture books Petey’s Listening Ears and the soon-to-be-released Grumpykins series.
Five Gentle Tools for Handling Lying
[Reprinted from Whispers Through Time: Communication Through the Ages and Stages of Childhood by L.R.Knost. Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages and The Gentle Parent: Positive, Practical, Effective Discipline also available through Amazon and other major retailers.]
The line between fantasy and reality is very blurry for small children. They still believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. They are convinced that they can talk to animals and can fly if they wear a cape and are faster runners if they wear their ‘fast shoes.’ They think the moon follows them home and that if they stretch as tall as they can, they can touch the stars. It’s one of the most beautiful and celebrated facets of the innocence of childhood, but also one of the most misunderstood.
When a little boy puts a bowl on his head and makes up a fantastic story about rocketing to the moon in a cardboard spaceship, adults smile nostalgically and applaud his imagination. When that same little boy finds himself stuck in the uncomfortable position of being caught sneaking cookies from the pantry and makes up a story about the cookies accidentally falling off of the shelf into his mouth, those same adults often shame the child.
When a little girl perches on the arm of the sofa and tells a tall tale about pirates and stormy seas and walking the plank, her parents will laugh and join in the fun, but then she will often be punished if she spins a tale to cover her tracks after she stuffs a towel down the toilet to see if it will flush and finds out that stuffed up toilets overflow instead.
Communication is a complex skill, full of hidden nuances and subtle connotations and social mores that are far, far beyond the capacity of young children to understand. And yet they are often held to an impossible standard of perfection by the adults in their life. Interestingly, those adults holding them to such a high standard rarely hold themselves to the same standard, though. What adult, when faced with a traffic fine for speeding, hasn’t protested that they didn’t know they were going over the speed limit? How often do adults say “I love your new haircut” or “You haven’t aged a day” when the opposite is true? How many adults call out of work sick when they aren’t actually sick or return something to the store after using it and say it’s unused or tell their spouse to say they aren’t home when a phone call comes in they don’t want to answer?
How, then, when adults are the ones modeling how communication should be used, can they expect children to somehow know instinctively when it is and isn’t acceptable to lie? How can parents expect children to have the fortitude and maturity to simply accept the discomfort of telling the truth when they, themselves, so easily and often lie to avoid their own discomfort?
And yet parents are often horrified and embarrassed when their child lies. So much so, in fact, that they react to their own emotions instead of responding appropriately to the child and the situation, and they end up shaming and/or punishing their child.
Think about it realistically for a moment, though. If children lie because they’ve seen the adults in their life lie, is shaming or punishing them fair? If they lie because they are uncomfortable and fearful, will making them more uncomfortable and fearful solve the problem? If they lie because it’s normal for their developmental stage, does it seem reasonable to hold them accountable for it?
Having a few tools ready and available in your parenting ‘toolbox’ helps to avoid these ineffective and rather hypocritical adult reactions to children lying:
First, be aware that the safer your children feel with you, the less likely they will be to lie. Removing the motivation of fear and discomfort will go a long way toward making your children trust you with the truth, no matter what it is.
Second, even when children feel safe they may lie simply because small children often say how they wish things were and really believe they can make it happen just by saying it! Bearing this in mind can help you to see that innocent imagination at work that you enjoy so much in other settings and help you to exercise more patience and understanding.
Third, when confronted with a lie, the best response is to calmly state the truth yourself, assure the child that they can always tell you the truth, and then move on without punishing the lie or giving the lie any more power or attention.
Fourth, all behavior, including lying, is communication. Focusing on the need behind the behavior instead of the behavior itself (or the lie it prompted) will actually solve the problem rather than simply address the symptom of the problem.
Fifth, keeping in mind that, over time, your children will mature enough to verbalize their needs instead of acting them out if their needs are met consistently and with understanding and respect while they are younger will help you to stay calm and focused. The end result will be healthy communication and trust with no need to lie.
Imagination truly is the language of childhood. It only makes sense to try to understand their language instead of insisting they perfect ours. We are, after all, the only adults in the relationship!
Related posts:
Practical, Gentle, Effective Discipline
200 Ways to Bless Your Children with a Happy Childhood
10 Ways to Play with your Children when Play is the Last Thing on your Mind
12 Tips for Gently Parenting Your Adult Children (Hint: It starts when they’re newborns!)
Tots to Teens~Communication Through the Ages and Stages
Award-winnning author, L.R.Knost, is the founder and director of the children's rights advocacy and family consulting group, Little Hearts/Gentle Parenting Resources, and Editor-in-Chief of Holistic Parenting Magazine. Books by L.R.Knost include Whispers Through Time: Communication Through the Ages and Stages of Childhood ; Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages ; The Gentle Parent: Positive, Practical, Effective Discipline ; and Jesus, the Gentle Parent: Gentle Christian Parenting the first four books in the Little Hearts Handbook gentle parenting series, and children’s picture books Petey’s Listening Ears and the soon-to-be-released Grumpykins series.
