TANTRUMS, SCHOOL TESTING, COMMON PARENT MISTAKES TO AVOID, ETC

Excerpts from an interview of Bob Lancer

Bob, you teach parents how to Parent With Love, Without Anger or Stress.  What is one the most important exercise parents should learn to practice?  

Peace Poise Power.  Just practice that more and more religiously and you will find so many of your problems solved.  When you lose your peace and poise, you lose your power.  If a child can make you react, the child is in charge.  The parent's state radiates.  Just by maintaining your true composure, you help the child to settle down and you give yourself access to your own finest judgment.  

You show parents practical solutions from public temper-tantrums to bedtime issues.  What is your technique based on?  

Observation and experience primarily, with background studies in Montessori, Alice Miller, Waldorf, Organic Education, and the study of classical philosophy, psychology, world religions, and practical self-help literature in the American self-help tradition.  I am a parent and a former schoolteacher who has worked with all grade levels, and with children and families from all backgrounds, from the most affluent to homeless shelters.  

With state testing just around the corner, how can parents stress to their children the importance of passing the tests, without adding stress and pressure on them?  

In a non-stressful manner.  You want to preserve the child's self-confidence and calm, because that leads to competence.  The more worried the parent, the more anxious and unfocused the student.  Also, for a child to do well in school, he or she needs to feel that home is a safe, stable, harmonious place.  A harmonious home-life is the springboard to success for every family member.  I address how to make this happen, in depth, in my seminars, consultations, and in my book.  This is a crucial factor commonly overlooked when it comes to child behavior and school performance.  

You have traveled the world giving seminars and training on Parenting Solutions.  What parenting problem do most parents have in common?  

Blaming the child for the parents' anger, frustration.  Making the child responsible for the parent's habitual complaining and feeling of powerlessness.  Using anger to solve child behavior problems.  Relating to the child as basically in need of total molding and control. If you consistently relate with a child as good, kind, capable, intelligent that is what you find.  Focusing too much intensity on correction and not enough on loving connection.  Forgetting that you cannot instill better self-control in a child by losing yours.  What this all boils down to is parenting on automatic, reacting habitually, instead of paying close, calm attention to what is actually happening between you and your child.  

You also talk to our young people (mainly teens) about being a "world leader" -- the power of positive self-image.  Such important issues…talk to us a little about that.  

Children, as do adults, live up to or down to their self-image.  The way you think of yourself is no one's responsibility but your own.  If you let other people talk you into a negative idea of yourself, you end up acting that idea out.  I teach children, and adults, how to shape their self-image, how to let go of negative self-notions that operate as negative self-fulfilling prophesies.  And I teach parents how to speak to and relate with their child to protect and nurture a self-image in the child that they want the child to live up to.  

What other services does Parenting Solutions offer?  

I present parenting seminars and private consultations as well as marriage seminars and consultations, based on the principle that if Mom and Dad are not getting along well, junior cannot be doing as well as he could.  We are also in the process of offering free parenting lunch time teleseminars, so that parents at work (and at home) can basically learn parenting skills during their lunch hour, and come home from work, hopefully, better parents.  It's a way of giving your kids more of your time without losing time at work. On my website you will also see books and scores of CD's that relate to parenting, marriage, and self-development.  Also, we send out a free newsletter, which you can sign up for on our website.  Additionally, I present state accredited trainings on child behavior for childcare professionals.  

If our audience would like more information?    

I have two websites so far.  boblancerpower.com relates primarily to my public speaking.  It is also a great place to order my books and recordings, and the only place to sign up for the newsletter.  I also have boblancer.com, which is more about information, where you will find loads of free advice, free videos, as well as my monthly schedule of seminars presented here in Atlanta.