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Reviews and Endorsements:

"Uses biblical principles and sound research to help parents solve everyday kid problems. . . . I highly recommend it."
Dr. John Townsend
Coauthor of Boundaries

"Packed with proven principles that empower moms and dads to raise calm and confident kids."
Dr. Tim Kimmel
Author of Raising Kids Who Turn Out Right

"A wonderful blending of clinical competence and user-friendliness. . . . A very practical approach that will help parents get on the right track."
Dr. Archibald Hart, professor of psychology
Fuller Theological Seminary

"Provides a whole host of practical tips based on extensive research and experience to help parents take a more proactive approach to raising kids. Great for new parents and seasoned parents alike."
Christian Parenting Today (1999)

"Easy to read and filled with easy-to-implement advice. I recommend it to parents, teachers, day care providers, and others who work with children. It's a resource you'll refer to again and again."
Provident Book Finder (1999)

"Filled with practical advice, solid principles, and biblical references. For parents struggling to stay afloat in our anything-goes world, this book could provide a lifeline to the shore of family harmony."
Christian Home & School (1999)

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Content and Excerpts:

Contents:

• Preface
• Chapter One: You Need a Plan: How to get started in the right direction -- view excerpt
• Chapter Two: Build It to Last: Keys to building strong relationships
• Chapter Three: They Noticed That? Understanding the influence of your own behavior
• Chapter Four: Let's Do This Instead: How to teach your children what you want them to do
• Chapter Five: Make Them Glad They Did It: How to strengthen positive behavior -- view excerpt
• Chapter Six: This Has Gotta Stop! Bringing negative behavior to a stop
• Chapter Seven: It's All in Your Head: Keeping your thoughts on track
• Chapter Eight: Let's Play Ball: Putting your plan to work
• Appendix A: Your Parenting Plan
• Appendix B: Tools for the Journey
• Appendix C: Your Child's Development

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Excerpt from Chapter One: How to Get Started in the Right Direction

Five Key Ingredients

So, how do you become the best parent that you can be? Picture a baseball diamond. There are four bases centered around a pitcher's mound. This is a perfect picture to help you remember the five key ingredients that will help you become the best parent you can be. Just as a baseball game begins with the first pitch, so we must begin with the ingredient symbolized by the pitcher's mound: building healthy relationships. You can't have a baseball game without a pitcher, and you won't have effective biblical parenting without first building a healthy relationship with your child. This involves striving for a quality relationship as well as spending a reasonable quantity of time with your child. That's right, both quality and quantity are important. It is hard to build a relationships with somebody that you never see, or with somebody that you see but seldom relate to. While some life circumstances (e.g., divorce) can legitimately make it difficult to spend a great deal of time with your child, it is important that you do the very best that yo can to make that relationship a priority. Kids have a funny way of sensing whether or not they are important to you.

Once you have hit the first pitch of relationship building, your next stop is first base. Here you must take a look at the behavior you model for your children. Like what? Your relationship with God. Your relationship with your spouse. Your style of communicating with family members. The priority you place on spiritual disciplines (e.g, prayer, Bible study, etc.). The way that you express yourself when you are angry. Your method for solving problems. Your bad habits. Your "colorful" language. Your choice of television shows. Your priorities. The list goes on and on. When we take a close look at our own behavior, the mystery may not be why our children are acting as badly as they do, it may be whey their behavior is not worse! A parent's behavior affects a child's behavior. If we are to be godly leaders in our family, we must lead by example. There is no other way.

As we round second base, we now consider whether we are teaching our children how to behave appropriately. This may sound simple, but it is a very helpful idea. It is far easier for my four-year-old son to learn to play a game that he has never seen before if I show him the game pieces, explain the rules, demonstrate the movement around the board, and even go through a few practice rolls of the die than if I just throw him the box and expect him to know how to play. If this is true for a game, then it is even more true for more complicated life situations such as controlling a temper, curtailing impulses to throw a toy, or curbing the temptation to tell a lie. Children have many things to learn and life never ceases to provide challenging learning situations. If I take the time to teach my son how to play a game of Monopoly, then perhaps I should consider spending some concentrated time teaching him how to exhibit behaviors that are far more important and far more difficult. If I have not done this, then I should not be surprised that I do not see these desired behaviors happening more often.

Third base is just as important. As we will soon see, behaviors that are reinforced, or strengthened, tend to happen more frequently than behaviors that are not. Just as plants are designed to bloom when they are watered, appropriate behaviors will happen more often when they are consistently noticed and reinforced. This step is often overlooked in attempts to address childhood misbehavior. Many parents rely on discipline designed to stomp out inappropriate behavior when a far more effective approach would aim to increase desired behavior. If your plant is withering, check your water jug.

Finally, once we reach home plate, we need to take a look at how we can most effectively use negative consequences to weaken inappropriate behaviors. Punishment may be given in a way that actually reinforces rather than deters negative behavior, and sometimes negative consequences are simply ineffective or loaded with negative side effects. Other times, inappropriate behavior may be accidently rewarded. So, just as it is important to be actively reinforcing desired behaviors, it is equally important to be responding to negative behavior in a thoughtful and effective manner.

These are the five key ingredients that must be a part of your plan if you want to achieve your goal of being the best parent you can be. Difficulties in any of these areas contribute not only to childhood misbehavior, but to a variety of other problems as well. You must start by making sure that you are relating to your children in a healthy way and modeling a genuine Christian lifestyle. Then, you do your best to teach your children the behaviors they need to learn, consistently rewarding them for doing those behaviors, and providing effective negative consequences for inappropriate behaviors. Remember the baseball diamond and you've got your plan.

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Excerpt from Chapter Five: Make Them Glad They Did It

The Pour-It-On-Technique

The Pour-It-On-Technique gives you a strategic way to start using your social rewards. I highly recommend this technique, not just for the effect it will have on your children's behavior, but also because it will get you into the habit of using your newly learned social rewards. You want these social rewards to become as natural to you as walking. And given time, they will. As the name implies, you are going to pour on the social rewards when you see your child exhibit specific desired behavior. Your child's appropriate behavior is the cereal and the social rewards are the milk. So pour it on!

The Pour-It-On-Technique

1. Identify the target behavior that you want to strengthen
2. Watch very carefully for that behavior to occur
3. Whenever you see your child act this way, immediately give him or her a specific verbal reward, such as, "Tommy, I sure love it when you play quietly with your toys!"

When identifying a target behavior, "acting good" is not specific enough. Here are some examples of specific target behaviors:

• playing
• quietly sharing toys
• expressing anger appropriately
• talking respectfully
• following instructions the first time
• showing appropriate table manners
• playing properly with toys
• cleaning up his or her bedroom
• showing sportsmanship
• putting away toys

Once you have determined the target behavior and have begun to teach your child how to do it, then you watch. Think of an eagle soaring high above the mountains, scouring the landscape, looking for any little movement on the ground that could signal its next meal. With the same type of watchful anticipation, you are waiting to see even a flicker of the target behavior. And when you finally see it, you immediately pounce upon it with an exuberant social reward. You pour it on! Why? Because Johnny has just show you that he is starting to make progress toward the target behavior! And he can't take a second step until he has taken his first step. So, make him glad that he has started to move at all!

This will not only begin to have a positive effect on his behavior but will affect the way he thinks about himself. Johnny will be consistently hearing realistically positive things about himself and his behavior. Even though inappropriate behaviors will still occur and negative consequences will still be given, your child will now be receiving regular feedback bout the behaviors that he does right. You'll be teaching your child that although he occasionally makes mistakes and poor choices (who doesn't!), there are many things about him and his behavior that are positive. On top of that, using the Pour-It-On-Technique will help you become more aware of positive behaviors (which were probably going unnoticed!) and more effective at rewarding them.

Set a goal of giving ten or more social rewards in a day and see how you do. Once the positive behavior has become well established, you can begin to provide the social rewards less frequently. This helps to maintain the behavior that your child has learned to do. But when you're trying to build a behavior that doesn't happen very often, remember to pour it on!

If your child rarely performs the desired behavior, make sure that you have clearly identified the behavior and that you have taught this behavior to your child. If needed, review or make changes in the steps you've used to teach the behavior. Then pour on the rewards whenever your child comes close to doing the target behavior. For example, if putting toys away is the target behavior, don't wait until they are all put away to give a verbal reward to your child. Give one immediately after your child puts a single toy away, or even after he or she simply picks up a toy to put it away. Find something that you can reward!

Excerpt taken from The Parent Lifesaver, by Todd Cartmell. Used by permission of Baker Book House Company, copyright 1998. All rights to this material are reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Book House Company.

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Link to:
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