Being at Your Best When Your Kids Are at Their Worst
Practical Compassion in Parenting
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
A practical, meditative approach that can be used in the moment to help you stay calm and balanced when your child's behavior is pushing you to your limit--by the popular author of Simplicity Parenting.
When children are at their most difficult and challenging situations arise, how can we react in a way that reflects our family values and expectations? Often, when children “push our buttons,” we find ourselves reacting in ways that are far from our principles, often further inflaming a situation.
When our children are at their worst, they need us to be at our best—or as close to it as we can be. Educator and family counselor Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting, offers techniques that simply and directly shift these damaging patterns in communication and parental behavior. These grounded and practical strategies will help you:
• Slow down the interaction
• Be more in control of your reactions
• Open up a much wider range of helpful responses
• Sense what your child’s deeper needs are even though they are misbehaving
• Respond in a way that gives your child a feeling of being heard and still puts a boundary in place
Payne’s meditative approach can be done anywhere, anytime; it lifts you out of old, unwanted patterns of action-reaction and prepares you so that the voice you speak with is closer to the parent you want to be. His concrete and simple techniques can help you, and your children, be at your best, even in the most challenging of times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Children who act out can tap adults' emotional hot buttons, and the subsequent combustion is rarely productive for either party. Educational consultant Payne (Simplicity Parenting) builds on the practice of visualization he learned from sports psychologists as a young athlete in this accessible book for parents and teachers. Part one contains advice and tools for breaking from the "action-reaction" response when provoked, and understanding that children "ping," or elicit reactions from, the adults they rely on when they're upset. Part two explains a four-step "compassionate response" for adults that is based on the work of influential authors such as Stephen Covey and Rudolf Steiner, and which overlaps with mindfulness practices. The idea is to start with the only thing one can control: one's response, an insight Payne likens to the flight attendant's warning to parents to secure their own oxygen mask first. Part three explains that once tapped into this practice, one can extend it to any child one encounters in crisis. In other words, the key to helping an out-of-control child is a self-regulated adult. This book proves to be a practical guide to carrying out this centered approach, as well as an easy and encouraging reading experience.