Bright Minds, Poor Grades by Michael D. Whitley

Author:Michael D. Whitley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Supplemental Discipline II: establishing the Totally Positive Parent approach

Whenever I am teaching parents how to bring motivation to their children, either as a psychotherapist or as a workshop leader, I try to instill in them what it means emotionally to become a positive parent. Being a positive parent goes beyond techniques or behavior strategies a parent might use to help their kids. Rather, being positive lies in the heart of the parents, in the emotions, attitudes and sense of faith and respect a parent brings to the trials and tribulations of rearing children who have their own hidden ways of seeing and feeling the world around them. Being a positive parent is much more than being a little Mr. or Mrs. Sunshine under all times and circumstances. It is certainly not being wimpy, flimsy, helpless, hapless, and spineless. Rather, a positive parent knows that children are works of art that take time and a lot of patience to create. They are works of art that have to be nurtured into creation, not driven or made by power oriented and angry demands. Positive parents know deep down within themselves that their children are works of art that ultimately must be self-creating, self-disciplining, and must learn to be self-motivating.

Most parents in the workshops or treatment sessions can acknowledge the attributes of a positive parent I have partially enumerated above, but they still need a way to revitalize the loving part of their parenting when they face troubles with their underachieving or misbehaving children. They need positive parenting attributes and attitudes most when they have to become firm and disciplined with their children.

Early in my training as a psychologist, I learned that if a person wants to change something about himself, one powerful way to do this is to create a vivid mental image of how one would behave. The powerful and vivid mental image, when evoked in the mind of the person under stress, changes the way that person behaves and feels, and this alters in positive ways the experience of stress.

All of us create mental images, anyway. Sometimes those mental images hurt us, sometimes they help us. I once treated a young woman with a severe phobia about speaking in public. Because she wanted to become a lawyer, her phobia was quite debilitating to her. Whenever she tried to speak before a class or an audience, she would become so panicked that she could not move or force herself to speak.

After several treatment sessions, she revealed a vivid mental image that accompanied her severe anxiety. She imagined that if she started speaking, she would become so nauseated that she would throw up on herself and then everyone would ridicule her. Her embarrassment and humiliation would prevent her from ever attending classes or being seen by members of the audience again. By taking control and changing that catastrophic mental imagery and replacing it with different imagery, she was able to eventually overcome her phobia of public speaking.

When parents confront their children’s misbehavior

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.