The Purpose of Behavioral Programming

Our dedication is to the whole child.  Our interest extends to the child’s family, neighborhood, school, and community.  Each child’s well-being is contingent on the well-being of the extended network surrounding and supporting their growth.

Our interest in the whole child includes their well-rounded and well-balanced development.  We must attend to each area of need and support carefully weighted, balanced, and multi-dimensional growth: music, art, sports, friendship, family, hobbies and interests, academic achievement, ethical and spiritual well-being.  No one area can be allowed to consume our attention at the expense of another area.  We must remain flexible and responsive to the child’s needs. We must nurture each child’s strengths and carefully attend to their weaknesses.

Elements of Character, Development, and a Healthy Lifestyle: 

• Honesty

• Creative Well-being

• Cooperation / Teamwork

• Physical Well-being

• Work

• Emotional Well-being

• Loyalty

• Intellectual Well-being

• Enthusiasm

• Ethical Well-being

• Determination

• Spiritual Well-being

• Curiosity / Inquisitiveness

• Community Well-being 

• Playfulness

• Filial Well-being

• Optimism

• Social Well-being

• Resourcefulness

• Caring & Compassion

Growth is a dynamic process; a process leading toward resilience, a process leading toward a healthy and productive adult participant in society.  

Leadership initiates the process.  

Leadership is the beacon toward which the children grow. Leadership is the example or model we provide.  What does our model look like?  How do we nurture a carefully weighted and balanced lifestyle in our own lives and in the lives of the children we serve? 

How do we nurture resilience?  How do we nurture a sense of community in which growth and resilience will flourish?

The purpose of programming is to create a sense of community that will nurture, protect, and celebrate the children. 

“I was seeing in a sacred manner the shape of all things in the Spirit and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being and I saw the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle wide as daylight and as starlight. And in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father and I saw that it was Holy.” 

~ Black Elk

Kenneth H. Little, MA 

603-726-1006

KenLittle-NH.org

© 2009 Kenneth H. Little. All rights reserved.  

Open & Honest Communication

Raising children requires open and honest communication. The only way children will ever participate in an open and honest dialogue is if they feel safe to speak openly and honestly.

If you as a parent create any sensation of fear, even the slightest amount, if you are angry, harsh, critical, or punitive, you are creating a sizable obstacle to effective communication with your children.  All problem solving and all skill development requires safety and trust.

Children may forgive our transgressions, but they will not necessarily forget.

Now, with that said, I have never met a parent who did not lose their sense of calm at least every now and then.  So, what do we as parents do when we make parenting mistakes?

The first step is always to take a step back, take some time to consider what went wrong and to regain a sense of calm.  It may take a while to figure out what went wrong, but once we do regain our composure we will want to go back to our children and apologize for our loss of self-control, to take ownership and responsibility for the error, and to remove any sense of responsibility from the children. 

Whatever they may or may not have done, it's not their fault or responsibility that we lost control.

The next step is to repair the relationship.

Different people tend to do different things after a fight or argument.  Somethings will bring people back together, healing any hurt feelings. Somethings leave the relationship damage unresolved. Each infraction left unresolved diminishes the relationship more and more over time. As parents, it's best if we can heal hurt feelings and resolve relational problems as they occur. Our children will need us most during adolescence. It's best to have a strong and intact relationship going into this stage of life.

There are many ways for parents to keep their head in the right place. A proactive parenting plan will help you keep stay calm more often and safeguard a strong, trusting relationship with your children.

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Kenneth H. Little, MA 

603-726-1006

KenLittle-NH.org

© 2019 Kenneth H. Little. All rights reserved.  

Trust & Faith

Parenting requires two key elements: trust and faith. It's very important that parents
trust their children and have faith in their innate goodness and capacity, while
continuously working to develop the required skills, ability, and character.
With constructive proactive parenting the likelihood is very high that your children
will turn out to be the good, capable, successful adults they were born to be. 

Believe this. Believe in your child’s natural goodness and innate ability from birth on.

The probability of a good outcome declines as parents implement parenting plans and
methods that are based in fear, anxiety, anger, and mistrust. For example, if you
believe that children are inherently sneaky and dishonest, you are likely to parent
them in a way that increases their sneakiness and dishonesty. Similarly, overly
restrictive parenting designed to increase child obedience and safety often inspires
increased rebellion and risky behaviors.

Trust

I often hear parents say to a child who has made a mistake -- "you broke my trust".
This in my view is a deep parental mistake, more akin to shaming than guiding and
correcting. Under what circumstances does a parent think create illusory conditions
of trust based on the expectation that their child will never make a mistake?

Mistakes are expected, not surprises. Trust your children to make mistakes as they
grow up. 

Children are born with natural goodness and abilities, not as perfect beings. Life is a rigorous and demanding practice-to-mastery activity. Mistakes are an expected part of life. When a child makes a mistake, it will be more reasonable and honest for a parent to say, "ah, that was expected. Let's see if we can figure out what went wrong." Mistakes are an expected part of growing up, not betrayals of trust. It's much more reasonable and accurate to trust that children will make mistakes, understanding that this is a very ordinary part of growing up.

Smile at the mistakes and reassure them.

Faith

Have faith in your children. Believe in them, that they are essentially good and
capable. Children make mistakes. They will need coaching and corrective guidance
on life skills, but this does not make them bad. "Bad" behaviors are much more
accurately seen as expected mistakes.

This is not an exercise in semantics.

How you feel about children in general will leak out all over your children. Many
parents (and teachers) that I've worked with over the years have expressed the belief
that children are essentially "bad", that they are liars and are always "up to no good",
trying to get away with some bad behavior. This is a belief, a basic assumption about
children and human beings. It's not a fact. 

While it may apply to a very few, most children are not inherently "bad". If you believe that children are basically bad, this belief will be infused into every parent-child interaction: it will be in your eyes, in your tone of voice, in the conclusions you jump to, and in the way you talk with your child after events. Your child will gradually internalize your beliefs over time and have increasingly bad behavior as a result.

This parenting approach is a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

The parent believes it and interacts with their children accordingly who then internalize the belief and ... act it out in the real world.

My strongest possible recommendation is for you to question your beliefs about
children and work continuously to develop a belief in their inherent ability and
goodness. They do not misbehave intentionally as an expression of "being bad"
humans. Children are inherently "good'. Think of misbehavior events as “just a mistake”, not a catastrophic indicator that they will grow up to be felons or failures.

Note: there are a very few children who do certain things that are indicators of a much
larger problem. This is rare. I have worked with these children. They do need extra
help. It's unlikely that your child is this child. I'll do a post on red flags another time,
but just as an example, cruelty toward animals is an example of a child in significant
distress. If you are concerned, consult with your child's medical doctor first. If you
are still concerned speak with a clinical specialist.

Even if your child is in a high-risk category, your belief in their essential goodness
and ability to overcome can have a significant constructive impact on future outcomes
while in the opposite direction, your belief that they are inherently bad is more likely
to cement their destructive future fate.

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Kenneth H. Little, MA / 135 Lee Brook Road / Thornton, NH 03285 / 603-726-1006 / Achieve-ES.com

© 2019 Kenneth H. Little. All rights reserved. 

The Great Adventure!

When my wife and I brought our first son home from the hospital, all packed into the warm winter snugly fleece in his little car seat, I carried him into our apartment and placed him, still in the car seat, in the center of the kitchen floor ... very much like a bag of groceries. 

We stood there looking down at him.  I looked at my wife.  "Now what?"

Groceries, I know what to do with.  You unpack them and put them away.  An infant was a whole new and anxiety producing adventure for me.  My wife -- a pediatrician in training -- seemed a wee bit more confident, but not as much as I would have liked.

Although I had been working with children as a mental health professional for over 5 years, I had no direct parenting experience at all, had never changed a diaper in my entire life. I began rummaging through his bag of things.  Where is the owner's manual?  How do you turn this thing on, off; change its settings?

I had no idea ... none.

I'm sure there must be parents who are completely skilled and confident about parenting from the very start; people who transition seamlessly into parenting. However, I'm not one and I've never met one. For my self and the parents I know and have worked with, parenting is a struggle.     

© 2019 Kenneth H. Little. All rights reserved. 

Deciphering the Difficulties

Figuring out how and why you get stuck in a parenting ordeal can be a very difficult task. The answers are not always as obvious as one might think. 

I have been meeting with a single Mother who has temporarily lost custody of her son.  We had developed a pretty tight plan of action, things that Mom really needs to work on to begin the process of getting her life in order so she might be able to regain custody of her son.

Mom has accomplished none of these action items over the past few months.

I queried Mom about this, what she thought might be preventing her from following through on the action steps we had designed.

There could be many reasons, but I've had an inkling for some time that she's just exhausted, ashamed; that on some level she believes herself to be a bad parent. I have wondered if perhaps, she might not be relieved in some ways that she no longer has custody, that she is no longer responsible for parenting her son.  Could it be that she secretly believes that her son is better off without her?

So I asked. 

Figuring out what's going on, working and what's not working and why, is a very difficult path.  It really does require that parents dig into themselves to try to understand what's going on, what's driving the process in the way that it is. It's extremely hard work. 

More to come soon.  

 © 2019 Kenneth H. Little. All rights reserved. 

  

The Spirited Child

I see spirited children often. I love their natural energy.  Their parent(s) always look a bit tattered, ruffled, and strained. 

Most parents would say, I think, that they want their children to have some "get-up-and-go", a bit of "fire in their belly", some internal tenacity.  These are admirable traits and characteristics that will serve children well as they learn how to refine, harness, and direct their energies as they move toward adulthood.

They will very likely clash with the world during this process.

It is better to guide these children gently forward rather than to try to break them of their natural tendencies. 

 Kenneth H. Little, MA / 135 Lee Brook Road / Thornton, NH 03285 / 603-726-1006 / Achieve-ES.com

© 2019 Kenneth H. Little. All rights reserved.  

From Parent to Child

When children first come whooshing out into the world they are fully reliant on their parent(s) for all of their needs and well-being.  As soon as the umbilical chord is cut, however, the very long and gradual process of separation and individuation begins.  

Parenting from here on out, every minute of it, is fully about preparing -- incrementally --  the child to occupy a successful, healthy role in the adult world to the best of their abilities.  With each passing moment children grow, change, move inexorably toward adulthood.  Ready or not, adulthood will arrive.

Children are not well prepared by overly involved, overly controlling parents.  Children are not well prepared by under involved, neglectful parents. Children are best prepared by collaborative parents who gently and gradually ween them off parental control and into self-management.   

To be continued.   

Kenneth H. Little, MA / 135 Lee Brook Road / Thornton, NH 03285 / 603-726-1006 / Achieve-ES.com

© 2019 Kenneth H. Little. All rights reserved.