Active Parenting Pays Off

I recently taught a six week class called Active Parenting. It is a really solid class based on the theories and principals of Alfred Adler and Rudolf Dreikurs. There is a lot to the class around encouraging your children and creating family fun, but the meat of the course digs into discipline from the perspective of choices and logical consequences. When applied consistently (and consistency is key) these principals allow you to enjoy your parenting beyond anything you imagined – truly. I have many stories I can share about how this has allowed our family to thrive, but most recently my 11 year-old daughter said something that brought the point home.
I was at the office and she was home from school. She asked what I was doing and I said I was on-line looking for a new sitter as ours just went back to college. She chimed right in and said, “Make sure she is young, and fun and smart.” Then she added on, “Oh, and someone who is “firm.” You know, not a pushover, but someone who will hold boundaries well.” I was really heartened by her saying that because she was telling me how important and I will say, safe, she feels having clear limits and boundaries.

(I am running Active Parenting again starting next week, Jan 28th. If you would like to join us email me at Gertrude@wrightlearning.com)

Thanksgiving thoughts – the light and dark side!

What I like about thanksgiving is that everyone in the US celebrates it. It is a national family holiday. It allows the diversity of our country to be celebrated as there is no religious affiliation associated with it. I like the focus on gratitude and families gathered in the spirit of abundance and thankfulness. I do have some issues with the holiday though. I think we should drop the whole pilgrim thing. To me it is a farce and completely out of integrity to celebrate a friendly, peace-making gathering with the Native Americans. Cause even if we did we certainly didn’t act like a loving family toward them in the long run we ripped their land out from under them and killed off most of the native population. So, we celebrate a “happy” family moment and lie and hide the “dirty laundry.” In this way the holiday supports what happens all to often in families. What if we used the holiday to tell the full truth about what happened as we began our country and thereby support families to look at the dark side of their family history so they can learn from their mistakes and choose more consciously going forward? That would be my vision for Thanksgiving.

Huddle Up!

In my last blog I talked about the Family Adventure Weekend we attended at the Wright Leadership Institute. I shared about one of the assignments we gave ourselves that we did that first night back. We also came up with one we would do every day for a month. It is called the Family Daily Huddle. We picked a time, 7:45pm, where we would gather if we are together or get on the phone if we are apart to share briefly about our day. We have been doing it for over 3 week now. A few night we all completely forgot, but we are trying to be forgiving of ourselves given it is a new habit. On the days we have done it, it has been really cool. Some have been quick like a minute each while others we took longer asking questions as people shared. Our girls are 10 and 13 and we all lead busy lives so, in the past, it was not uncommon for us to barely talk in a day. So far this has helped us feel more cohesive and connected on a daily basis. Another thing that is neat is that on days we have actually all been together, like on a weekend day, we still did it and found out more about how the day was for each other even though we had been together – very cool!

The Wright Family Vacation

I love family vacations! As a family, we have done some really fun things and gone to lots of really cool places like Ireland and Paris and a ranch in Wyoming to name a few. Our latest was the Family Adventure Weekend put on by the Parenting Program at the Wright Leadership Institute on September 25-27, 2009 and it was by far one of my favorites. Granted we didn’t go a far distance geographically (80 miles to Elkhorn, WI), but we travelled many, many miles in our connection and cohesion as a family. We did typical family things like camp out, carve pumpkins, and canoe races (see photo of us about to win the race!), but what was so different was the context in which we did these activities.

Dr. Bob Wright, founder of the Wright Leadership Institute, facilitated discussions amongst the families attending that put our family in the perspective of the system that it operates in. I was pretty impressed that Bob kept a room of parents with children ages 4 months to seventeen years old engaged in the inquiry of the different roles they play in their family. Everyone left with ways they were going to apply what they learned on the weekend in their every day lives.

We had worked really well as a team in the canoe race – cheering each other on and putting our full selves into it. So, one of the things we said we would do was that night was approach a chunk of work we had to do in the basement with the same attitude. It was great! A job of sorting and moving things and preparing for workmen the next day would have taken us a whole day in the past with a fair amount of complaining. We accomplished our goal in 2.5 hours with no complaints. And while it had gotten too late to have our reward of watching a movie we felt really good about our teamwork and watched the movie the next night. In my next blog I will talk about oneof our other two assignments…