37 Keys to Parenting Success, Without Stress

1. Your child is not responsible for how you react. Your stressful, angry reactions represent ways that you behave, and those ways do not work. you can parent far more effectively and enjoyably by demonstrating calm and loving self-control.

2. Improving your response to your child's behavior begins with taking total responsibility for your responses.

3. Focus on your own behavior to see the ways that you contribute to the outcomes that you do not want.

4. Begin addressing any unbalance in your life. To parent with more peace, poise and loving effectiveness, you need to eat well, exercise enough, practice some form of meditative centering or conscious relaxation, do enough of what you love to keep your morale high, and practice doing what must be done in a calm, confident, pleasant manner.

5. To remove the anger and stress from your reactions to your child's behavior, practice handling every aspect of your day without rush. The more you rush the faster you drive yourself crazy.

6. Children have two speeds when it comes to doing what you want: slow and stop. If you push them to go faster they go in reverse.

7. A calm child behaves better than a stressed out child. Your state radiates. The more calmly you interact with your child, the calmer your child will be.

8. You cannot instill better self-control in a child while you are losing yours.

9. Taking charge in your relationship with child begins with taking charge of yourself.

10. When a child can make you react, the child is in charge. Gaining control in any situation starts with controlling your reaction to the situation.

11. Watch what you tell your child. Saying things like, "You make me angry. You move too slowly. You force me to yell." Gives your child and your own subconscious that the child is in charge and responsible for how you behave.

12. God sends a challenging child into your life when it is time for you to grow.

13. When you lose your peace and poise in response to your child's behavior, you lose your power.

14. Practice handling EVERYTHING with peace and poise. From peace you can connect with your deeper wisdom and love to guide you in your parenting.

15. By degrees equals ease. Be satisfied with making small steps of improvement in any situation. When you lose your patience, you lose more time.

16. Your stressful reactions to your child express an unhealthy way that you handle what happens and indicates a lack of self-respect.

17. Children need a peaceful, harmonious, stable environment to demonstrate their best behavior and positive, loving, respectful attitude. Therefore, when you react with anger and stress toward your child's behavior, you undermine your child's ability to do better.

18. Anger, stress, pleading, arguing, yelling ... these represent the most ineffective modes of parenting. Regard them as a choice, not as a necessity and then choose another way.

19. Children need boundaries but they do not learn healthy boundaries when you try to enforce boundaries in an unhealthy way.

20. As a general rule, if your reaction hurts you it probably hurts the one you react to. As you commit to taking excellent care of yourself you will operate within healthy, constructive boundaries in your parenting.

21. When you get stressed out in reaction to your child's behavior, you make yourself sick, unhappy and exhausted. You make yourself that way; the child does not make you that way, and your influence sickens those around you.

22. Observe how you think of your child. If your thoughts bring you anger or stress, your thinking, and not your child, is the problem.

23. You bring about what you think about. Think of your child as you want him/her to be and think of your parenting as you want that to be.

24. To be wise is t o make problems smaller, not larger. When your child behaves in a problematic way, you add to the problem by becoming a stressed out, unhappy, angry person in response.

25. Changing your response to your child begins with resisting the urge to blame your child for how poorly you react.

26. Your anger and stress reactions to your child's behavior indicate that you push yourself too hard and then take it out on the child. As you take better care of yourself your child's behavior will seem less taxing.

27. When you do not know how to handle your child's behavior, simply observe, relax and assume an attitude of confidence. Pay attention with an open mind and something constructive will occur.

28. Before you can gain control, you need to learn how to be out of control. Trust the way things are when they spin out of your control.

29. Make no big deal about behavior that disturbs you. Make a very big deal about the behavior that pleases you. A high intensity reaction rewards the behavior to which you react.

30. Do not struggle against behavior you do not want, but rather, take constructive action to achieve the behavior you do want.

31. The most essential "ingredient" a child needs to behave well is a deeply loving, secure and mutually respectful relationship with his/her parents. You undermine this with reactions of anger and stress.

32. To change a child's behavior, demonstrate better behavior yourself.

33. 95% of your redirection of child behavior should involve positive, loving, even playful ways to guiding your child out of behavior you want stopped and into behavior you want started.

34. If you are in the habit of thinking of yourself as a martyr and portraying yourself as a martyr you sacrifice your sense of power and self-respect in parenting. Stop seeing yourself as a victim to start experiencing more victory.

35. When you need to be firm, be unemotionally firm. Institute a consequence involving a restriction of a privilege, but maintain your composure and remain kind in the process. Be consistent and your child will get the message of the boundary you want followed.

36. When you blow up as a parent, you blow it as a parent. Anger and stress are to a child's poor behavior what gasoline is to fire.

37. The final solution: you have to trust that it can be done, that you can guide your child with love and without anger and stress. Where there is a willingness, a way opens up.