Ep 42: Positive Parenting Solutions

Jane Nelsen, the author of the Positive Discipline books and founder of the positive discipline movement reveals some positive parenting strategies for rebellious and defiant teenagers. Get your teen under control without punishing and lecturing them with these great tips.

Full show notes

Being a parent is busy work.

The amount of household and childcare responsibilities placed on top of a 40 hour work week can seem monstrously overwhelming. You’re doing so much! It’s no wonder that when your kids neglect to do their homework, you might feel like exploding. They had one job!

Obviously, these emotional explosions aren’t healthy for you or your kids. Even if you feel like you can keep your emotions in check, how often do you find yourself lecturing away at your children? I mean, how else are they going to get the message that their homework is important, and they can’t be playing video games all day?

Thankfully, there are ways to take this business and channel it towards some positive parenting techniques that will benefit you and your children. Not just one or two proven techniques, but a whole world of them! With a simple shift in mindset, you can use the collective creativity of your entire family to come up with an endless stream of ideas for getting chores done.

To help provide some tried and tested wisdom on positive parenting techniques, I spoke with the mother of 7, grandmother of 22, and great-grandma of 13, Jane Nelsen!

Jane is an educational psychologist famous for her Positive Discipline books and seminars. She teaches positive parenting techniques for managing children without resorting to punishments, threats, or other negative tactics (such as the old fashioned “timeout”). Her knowledge is very well received across the country, and she’s even appeared on Oprah! I was so excited to get time with her and ask her about these positive parenting techniques.

Being Busy is a Blessing

Being busy as a parent can be a positive thing. Jane tells parents that having work is a blessing because you can get your children involved in helping out around the house.

She jokes that when she was raised, her parents didn’t even drive her to school. She walked to school even when she was five! (We won’t say how long ago that was.) The point she makes is that when she was growing up, she and her friends found freedom outside of their homes because at home they were expected to do the chores. The kids were expected to help out on the farm.

Today, it seems flipped to where the parents are expected to do the chores and the kids are just expected to do homework. But these are not positive parenting techniques! Jane says she sees children today having very little freedom outside the home, and inside the home they are being micromanaged. Instead of telling kids how to help out around the house, Jane more often sees parents lecturing their children over every aspect of their homework.

What’s the point of this lecturing and micromanagement? This leads us to one of Jane’s key things regarding positive parenting techniques.

Belonging and Significance

One of the key parts of practicing positive parenting techniques is understanding why we do what we do. So why would we give our children more responsibilities? If they won’t even do their homework, who’s to say they’ll do other chores we assign them?

Jane says that the reason behind all positive parenting techniques is that children need to feel belonging, and they need to feel significant. She says that belonging is easy, and comes down to kids feeling unconditional love from parents. Significance, on the other hand, is different.

Significance does not mean giving your kids more love, but more responsibility.

It’s easy to think that you can make your child feel significant by pampering them and lessening their responsibility. But Jane says that children need to feel capable, especially when it comes to serving their home, their school, and their greater community. By giving kids more responsibility, you are helping them develop long range life skills to be happy, successful people.

So, busy parents, don’t feel guilty that you’re working a lot outside the home. See it as an opportunity to increase your children’s significance in the home! It’s not child labor to have them take the trash out and clean the dishes. Children need those responsibilities to learn that they as humans are necessary members of a functioning family.

Giving your children more responsibility might sound like a tense conversation to have. This is where Jane’s positive parenting techniques become next level! Here’s one step you can take to make these conversations super creative and fun for your kids.

Family Meetings

Family meetings are great for establishing positive parenting techniques. It’s important to get your kids involved in them, especially when it comes to family problem solving.

Jane strongly suggests having weekly family meetings to get your children engaged in the process of maintaining the house. She says to get them involved asking:

“What are the things we all need to do to keep the house running smoothly?”

Once you’ve created a list, chat about which chores the parents can do and which ones the kids can do. Then you can help your kids come up with a creative way to keep track of their responsibilities throughout the week. They can build a chore chart with dice, a spin wheel, cans of colored popsicle sticks, or anything else they can come up with!

If your child has a complaint about the system during the week, you can tell them to bring it up at the next family meeting. Help them problem solve and come up with ideas on their own. If they are coming up with their own solutions to their own system for doing chores, they will be so much more likely to execute! For example:

Jane said that her kids used a whiteboard with all the responsibilities listed out for the week, and when a chore got done they would cross it off. They each had to do two chores per day. This system worked until one of them asked, “Why does my sister get all the easy ones?”

At the next family meeting, Jane asked her kids what they thought they should do to solve this problem. After some deliberation, they ended up adding more chores to the whiteboard and assigning them on a first-come first-serve basis. They would race each other home to see who could do chores first!

Jane says this worked with her kids because it was their idea. And it doesn’t take much adjusting for a child to think something was their idea. In Jane’s example, the whiteboard system didn’t change, just the approach to it did.

Years of Wisdom

Jane knows so much about raising kids, both from research and from experience. She has so many simple adjustments for learning positive parenting techniques. I felt like our conversation just scratched the surface of her years of wisdom, and yet we talked about so much!

• The Idea of Being Kind and Firm
• Connection Before Correction
• The Mistaken Goal Chart
• The 4 Ways Children Try to Gain Belonging and Significance
• The 4 Ways Parents Try to Gain Belonging and Significance
• The Iceberg: Behaviors, Beliefs, and Needs
• Positive Discipline Tools for Teenage Years
• Understanding Teenage Priorities
• Curiosity Questions
• The Positive Timeout

Talking with Jane made me so excited to keep learning positive parenti...