FAQ’s

Absolutely! Here are all 9 Pillars of our parenting training course for your review:

Pillar 1: Children Think Differently from Adults
Pillar 2: Emotional Age Affects Our Feelings and Behavior
Pillar 3: Disruptive/Challenging Behavior is a Way of Coping
Pillar 4: How We See Things Influences Our Relationships
Pillar 5: Adult Responses Can Alter the Child’s Behavior
Pillar 6: How We Communicate Changes Our Message
Pillar 7: Win-Win Outcomes Are Possible
Pillar 8: Success = Avoiding Arguments
Pillar 9: Honoring the Child Has Amazing Results

The titles look fairly simple, don’t they? However, there is a wealth of information to discover and it will all make total sense to you once you go through the entire parent training course.

There’s a reason Pillars for Success isn’t just another one of many parent training courses for out of control children. The range of possibilities in human behavior is endless! The strength of this parenting training course is that it strains out and makes sense of the endless possibilities. It clearly defines the foundation from which to work. Children come in different shapes and sizes, different ages and they have different behaviors. However, they all share the same basic needs and thrive when they learn how to successfully get their needs met.

In a lifetime of work with children and families in just about every setting, I have strained out the innumerable (and confusing) possibilities that explain the “why” of challenging and defiant behavior and have been able to group them into 3 main categories:

• Basic survival needs (food, clothing, safety, a place to sleep etc.)
• Attention (by the way, it does not matter if the attention is positive or negative)
• Power and control

This is where Pillars for Success differs from other parent training courses for out-of-control children. Simplifying and identifying these reasons is extremely helpful because when a child demonstrates challenging behavior, we only have to figure out which of the three needs is driving that behavior. Not only is the child’s unmet need important, but our response is equally as important (and, believe it or not, the program will also teach you why the importance of the very effective technique of “non-response” and when to use it).

Our parenting training course will define a child’s negative behavior as a “coping mechanism”. More importantly, we will teach you to focus your attention on identifying the early signs of the child becoming unbalanced. Remember, one way or the other the child will get his/her needs met and behavior will increase until that happens. We will teach you how to more effectively interact with them, we’ll practice responding as early as possible before the behavior escalates. Will the child still have “outcomes” for unacceptable behavior? Yes. (you’ll learn why to avoid negatively charged terms like “consequences”.) Remember, that our main goal is to react to the child positively rather than wait for the behavior to deteriorate and then react negatively.

Let me share with you the definition of a “happy family” that has proven to be ageless: “A happy family is a family you don’t know very well.” So, in the snapshot of time that you see other families (whether at your house of worship, in the neighborhood, at the park or at the grocery store) and everyone is smiling and the kids are peaceful and cooperating remember that it is just a snapshot in time. During my time developing the Pillars for Success parenting training course, I have worked with some “model” families and learned they were pretty much the same as other families.

True, some kids are just easier to parent. Those kids are innately more cooperative and calm. Similarly, some kids are more feisty and challenging. I can guarantee you, however, that every family has its challenges, its successes and its failures.

I grew up with a brother who had many behavior challenges. How much of this was due to my parents and how much of this was due to their parenting techniques (or lack thereof?) At this point it doesn’t matter and haunting ourselves with questions like this only adds more to our burden.

The sooner you stop beating yourself up over the issues in your past the sooner you will be able to relax. The sooner you relax, the sooner you will be able to successfully use the rules and tools of this positive parenting program. I am not ignoring the effects that our childhood experiences have on our choices and feelings as adults. What I am saying is that the power of “self-awareness” has a great deal to do with going forward successfully in your own lives. In fact, that awareness can have everything to do with our ability to make changes in our own lives. Guilt and regrets are only useful in sapping the energy we can put toward positive change. We can’t rewind and replay the old tapes of our lives hoping to edit them for a happier outcome. If we aren’t happy about how our kids behave and how we respond NOW, then we can make the choice to learn new and more effective ways that will help us to change our parenting styles and our kids’ responses–and work toward a win-win outcome for everyone.