Saturday, February 04 2012

Have better relationships with your children; enjoy them, guide them, and learn from them. The regular practice of Compassionate Parenting will increase cooperation, self-esteem, and self-discipline, while simultaneously reducing anger, resentment, and hostility in children and parents. The manual for this 10-week course is filled with  parenting advice, tips, information about family issues, effective  parenting skills, and parent resources, as well as information that can help with your  marriage.

Compassionate Parenting raises emotional intelligence through heavy emphasis on before-the-fact emotional motivation of behavior, rather than after-the-fact consequences. The result is much more effective discipline that does nothing to detract from the crucial relationship between parents and children.

Compassionate Parenting Package

(PowerPoint introduction and three .pdf files)

Compassionate Parenting
An 8-session course for resentful, angry, anxious, and overwhelmed parents. Create deeper parent-child connections through increased interest and enjoyment. Parents and children increase emotional intelligence. Empowering-discipline helps children achieve optimal growth, development, cooperation skills, and moral courage. Research shows that children learn to regulate their emotions, eliminate temper tantrums, and reduce bad behavior when they can put their feelings into words. When the brain has no way to label or otherwise discriminate among the various meanings it gives to events and behaviors, it tends to funnel all emotional response into the form of arousal that gives the most temporary power: anger. Model dialogue shows how to teach key vocabulary words to children.

 

My Good Heart: Drawing the Greatness Inside You
This drawing book, for ages 5 to 10, presents a fun, non-preachy format for learning compassion, anger-regulation, and core value.  Notes for Parents: The My Good Heart drawing book reinforces the core value of children. Core value forms the foundation of self-esteem, competence, creativity, achievement, self-care, and compassion.

The good heart concept helps children build internal regulation of emotions and impulses to prevent the ordinary experience of disappointment, anxiety, sadness, and anger from devaluing the sense of self. It helps them learn compassion for themselves and for others. Care givers can reinforce the power of the Good Heart by saying something like:

"Rub your Good Heart to make it better."

Children get in touch with their own core value when encouraged to look for value in other people, even difficult people.

"Way to go! You recognized the Good Heart of another person!"

Children will want to know about other kids acting out and adults doing cruel things. Emphasize that misbehaving children and cruel adults are not devoid of Good Hearts. Rather, they are merely out of touch with them. This same thought, incorporated into normal safety precautions for children, can be expressed as:

"Because some people are out of touch with their Good Hearts, you need to be careful not to talk to strangers."

A Deeper Understanding of Your Children  

Try this experiment. Draw what you think your child will draw. Then compare your drawing with the child's

A Note for Professionals  

The My Good Heart drawings provide a wealth of diagnostic and treatment material. Choices of color, figures, shadows, etc., have the usual art therapy significance. The book as a whole has been used as a pre and post test to measure the effectiveness of treatment. Children enjoy drawing in the book and usually want to return to favorite sections of it repeatedly in the course of treatment.

 

Basic Humanity: How Your Emotions Guide Your Core Value

This 46-page booklet asks a series of questions that help adolescents develop a sense of their innate core value, which is the ultimate guide for their behavior and the foundation of their morality. For ages 12-18.

 

Compassionate Parenting Package: $14.95