Get The Tools Here--& The Confidence to Use Them!I Was Frustrated Until I Found DrDeb's Complete System for Raising a Good Child Who Could Enjoy Being Good!
This is me, Abigail. You can see that I’m overwhelmed. My child is a sweet little boy but there are times that I’m too stressed to realize it or appreciate it. There are times when I’m just too exhausted—mentally, physically, every way—to think about how cute he is, really, how good he is. All I can see is that he’s going one way when I want to go the other. And I just don’t have the time or patience for that. Listen, I know what you’re thinking: Calm down, girl; it’s not so bad. Well, you’re right. It’s not bad at all. I’m very well paid for what I do. I’m an account exec; I can’t tell you where I work in this public sort of forum. But what I will say is that my job is demanding on my time, my thought process, my energy, my commitment—and I just can’t see giving it up. After all, it’s what’s paying for Andrew’s preschool and one day will pay for his college education, wedding, and whatever else he needs. Isn’t that part of parenting too? My parents did that for me. They took care of all my needs. Who am I to do less for my child? The problem is, I’m going to admit it: Sometimes, I just lose it with Andrew. I feel terrible afterwards. Frankly, I’m often just as mad at him as I am at myself. I know my impatience is unfair; after all, he is only two. But sometimes my impatience gets the best of me. Like last Sunday, I had made up my mind to take time out for me, just to unwind. But I couldn’t leave Andrew alone, and my husband had to go into his office to work, even though it was a weekend. So, originally, I was going to just relax by myself; instead, I took Andrew to the park. True, it was a lovely day and I had the chance to just sit, but somehow that wasn’t enough. Watching a two-year old constantly isn’t exactly free time. When would it be my turn? Now, it was getting late and the week ahead loomed large and dreary. I wanted to just get home. Maybe, if Matthew was home from work—his job is more stressful than mine, if such a thing were possible—I could soak in a hot tub for a while. That seemed nice. Cheered at the prospect, I called to Andrew to come. Busy using his imagination in a pile of sand, he ignored me. I just felt my last few free moments leaking out of my grasp. I wanted to make him come! How would you have gotten him to cooperate—without using a bribe or a threat? Without yelling or hitting? How would you carve out time for yourself without neglecting your child either? Well, I did know what to do. I knew because I’m one of the people in DrDeb’s book. In Chapter 19 - Designing Punishments, I learned how to precisely tailor the punishment to the offense and the "crime." You know what I learned? Get this: The quieter my voice is, the more Andrew will listen. Let me tell you, doing that is not easy. Being calm and quiet when I’m frustrated, tense, and anxious to get going is absolutely not easy. That’s why I could never have accomplished what I did in handling Andrew and giving him no more than a stern voice for a punishment if DrDeb hadn’t insisted that readers go through Part 1 first. See, DrDeb gets you started by looking closely at yourself first so when you start learning the tools for changing your child’s behavior, it becomes easy because by that point you’re relating to your child as a person; you’re connected. Part 1 talks about you, and it was in there that I came to see that my impatience was only half my problem. The other half came from having learned as a child to disconnect from my own feelings. I needed to do that in my household. The problem is, it’s awfully hard to empathize with a small child’s feelings when you’re disconnected from your own. In Part 1, she walks you through overcoming anger. Oddly enough, one of the most important steps that I learned to take is how to be good to myself! You can understand that I hated myself for being so mean to my son, and those bad feelings came back to nip me in the you-know-where because when you’re frustrated and self-hating, you don’t have patience for anybody. So DrDeb calls Part 1 of the System “You” for a good reason. There’s a lot more in Part 1 besides that, but that stood out for me. I’m not the angry, frustrated person you see at the top of this page any more. And there are other people like me. There are 40 families featured in DrDeb's Commplete System .
My name is Jean and my problem is—and it really is a problem, whether you believe it or not—is that I am the exact opposite of Abigail. She had a hot temper and you’d have to really do I-don’t-know what to make me lose mine. DrDeb took a really close look at our family in The Secret Marriage Killer: Eradicating Verbal and Emotional Abuse, (another one of DrDeb's Complete Systems I strongly recommend). You see, my husband, Ricky, and I came a long, long way as a couple with her help. But one of the scars I took away from the abuse was that in no way, shape, or form, did I want to abuse my child. Scars, Jean? Why in the world would you call not wanting to abuse your child a scar? Well, it is a problem when you go way to the other extreme. The problem comes when you develop this fear of disciplining which is so deep, you're even afraid that if you say, "No," you'll hurt your child. So you give in to everything.And the absolute worst of it is that you can't tell the difference between healthy discipline and abuse. For example, there was the time that, thirty thousand feet up in the air, Goldie, the baby, started screaming. She was only a little over year old, after all, and the air pressure was probably hurting her eardrums. “Shh,” I said reassuringly. It didn’t work. “Shh,” I said again, hoping for the best. My husband, Ricky looked around and the whole plane of people seemed to be looking over his way. He eyed little Goldie and he eyed me. “Is Jean going to pull off a miracle with Goldie?” He wondered. With DrDeb's help, Ricky learned a lot about relating to me. The question is: Could he relate to his child? For him, the challenge was quite different than mine. He used to be very good at yelling, but even worse, he was very good at sulking, licking his wounds. But you can't walk off and feel sorry for yourself when you have a baby to attend to! And if he learned one thing from DrDeb—and he learned many things—it was that he can't just drop the baby in my arms and say, "Here!" No, he knows that, and the truth is, he wants to learn how to be a good dad. So what can he do? What would you do? Can you pull that miracle off—without yelling, without losing it? Or do you have to let the baby cry?
DrDeb here: No! Don't let the baby cry! Sorry, Jean, for butting in, but I sure didn't want anyone reading this to think that because I'm in favor of good discipline that I would let the baby cry on the plane. As I explain in Chapter 25 - Distracting, when you learn the key to effectively distract a young child, you have a powerful tool to get her quieted down. That and a refreshing bottle should do a great job on a one-year old! That's right, DrDeb. We learned that from you, and that plane ride went well. Ricky took Goldie from me, and walked up and down the isle showing her whatever he could think of that would be of interest while she drank her bottle. When she finished the bottle, she threw it down, but Ricky had a pacifier in his pocket! He kept pointing out things, and you know, those same passengers that had a wicked look in their eye when she was crying turned out to be so nice. They saw what he was doing and went along with it, gooing to her and saying things as she went by. Between his efforts and theirs, they kept her entertained for a while. Eventually, she was willing to sit in my lap and let me read her stories until she dozed off.
Okay, okay, DrDeb. You haven’t spoken about teenagers at all. You know, they’re the toughest of the tough. I mean, if you slipped up somehow when they were kids, the problems just multiply, exponentially.I’m Jeff Larson. My wife, Laura, and I have one of those teenagers that people might call “rebellious”—and that would be an understatement. Or at least, it would have been an understatement before DrDeb’s tools came into play in her Complete System. Our daughter, Chandra, couldn’t seem to get herself out of bed in the morning to go to school and that was just the beginning of a horrible day that followed. That was how every day went. Look, I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t believe in catering to such nonsense. Laura wanted to just ignore her behavior because she didn’t hope for better. There were few words spoken in our house other than angry ones. I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but we went through a complete transformation from blaming and hostility to love, guidance, advice, and, ultimately, friendship. We actually learned how to overcome a bitter past, learn to be positive (page 106), open up the lines of communication and not backslide when our teen is very challenging (page 146). You don’t believe it? Okay, here’s our story:
"Chandra Larson sat down sullenly on the couch in my office. She did not look comfortable. She gazed at the floor; it took too much energy to look up at me. She had several reprimands from her school principal, her grades were poor—that was nothing new—and her parents had all they could do to control their tempers with her. They thought she was ungrateful, a troublemaker, and fresh, to boot. At 15, she was already a “rotten teenager.” And they were about to throw her out of the house in a burst of “tough love.” Chandra started talking about her problems on the fifth visit. (I had warned her parents that it might take some time for her to develop a sense of trust in me.) The day would always begin badly, she said. She hated to get up in the morning; she felt she had absolutely nothing positive to look forward to. Chandra liked to ignore her alarm clock; doing that bought her a few minutes more of peace. Of course, it invited all sorts of problems with her mother, but sometimes postponing the inevitable was worth the pain that the postponement would eventually bring. This “inevitable” took the form of her mother coming into her room already angry at her for not getting up to her alarm clock. DrDeb: So what do you do with your time after you shut it off? Chandra (smiling): I just pull the covers up over my head. By the way, folks, excess sleeping—escaping from pain—is a warning sign of depression. DrDeb: You know your mother is going to get angry with you if you don’t get up. Isn’t it worth it to get up so as to avoid that? Chandra: Nope. She’ll be angry no matter what I do or don’t do so it doesn’t matter. DrDeb: Was there ever a day that you happened to get up to the alarm? Chandra: Oh, sure. There actually are lots of days like that. Sometimes I’m not in the mood to stay in bed and I think, “Oh, screw it. I’ll get up anyway.” Do you notice something? Here, there appears to be a golden opportunity for her parents to reinforce an appropriate behavior. Don’t tell me that she is never good. Here, clearly, she is good—but her parents are in a bad mood about her so they don’t seize the opportunity. DrDeb: So what happens next? Give me one example. Chandra: Okay. Just last week, I don’t know what day it was, I got up on time, got dressed, came down to breakfast, and my mother didn’t say anything. DrDeb: Really? She didn’t say, “Hello”? Chandra: I guess she said, “Breakfast is on the table.” Is that saying anything? Is that anything worth saying? Why bother? I could see it was there. So what? Why would Chandra’s mother not take advantage of the opportunity—especially when it is so rare—to cheerfully greet her daughter to get the day off right? The answer Mrs. Larson would give is clear: There have been 15 years of sullen moods and uncooperative behavior and they won’t get wiped out by one day that happens to start off without them. As an emotional human being, Mrs. Larson’s feelings are perfectly reasonable, perfectly justified: Her daughter has been “difficult” and Mrs. Larson has built up resentment. Here’s the kind of answer I would give to Mrs. Larson: This will take effort, but please get past your own frustrations with your child and start doing what it takes to get her on track. Put your own feelings aside because your child cannot get out of this rut by herself; it takes a grownup. In such cases, I normally meet with the parents. My work is a combination of educating them as to the tools in this book and doing the healing methods described in Chapter 2 and in my book about recovery from verbal abuse, The Secret Marriage Killer, available online through my website, www.abuse-recovery-and-marriage-counseling.com. Many battle-scarred parents turn out to have had histories of victimization as children themselves and they are just plain tired of being victimized—this time, by their own children. What they must tell themselves constantly is that their children do not want a bad relationship with them. They just got sucked into a vicious cycle that they don’t know how to get out of. Jeff and Laura Larson met with me so that I could see whether there was room for change on their end. I described what Chandra said to me about the times she does get up on time and come downstairs for breakfast without incident. Why not take the opportunity to reinforce that little positive piece? Jeff was pretty firm that, after all these years of “taking it” from her, he wasn’t about to “molycoddle” Chandra. As he put it, “She’s old enough to know better” without all that “baby stuff.” I don’t believe in challenging people who, to me, seem to be missing the point. I find it works better to help them arrive at that conclusion by themselves. Now wasn’t the time to ask him why that “baby stuff” wasn’t given to her as a baby. He’d probably say it was and we’d be going round and round. DrDeb: You’re right. She is old enough to know better. Yet, nothing is changing and nothing will change on her part. So now what do we do? Laura, bless her soul, took responsibility right away. Laura: One thing that’s got to change is my attitude. I’ve got to get over my grudge against her. I’ve got to make a point of being nice when her behavior warrants it and not harbor resentments from the past. This will be very difficult, but that’s what I’ve got to do. Jeff made no comment. I often find that one parent operates from the heart and allows compassion to kick in—thank God—while the other parent doesn’t, at least for a while. What I’ve also found is that these things take some time and that both parents don’t necessarily make the switch at the same time. It was difficult for Laura Larson, but six months into some intensive work on her own childhood and her own reactions, there were some noticeable changes. Eventually, when Chandra did well, Mrs. Larson would be very warm and positive in her verbal reinforcement. “Doing well,” meant simply doing what Chandra was supposed to do, like get up on time, not get in trouble in class, do her work, and so on. The Larsons were not looking, at this point, for star student status or anything out of the ordinary. As Laura Larson changed, and Chandra started to perk up, cooperate, and do what was expected of her, Jeff Larson slowly warmed to his daughter. He went out of his way to talk to her and ask her what was happening in her life. It was, in the end, her father she came to for advice on a boy that she thought was kind of cute. Jeff Larson came on board with the program late in the game but he worked the hardest when he finally did. He had had a rough childhood himself and became a tough, no-nonsense kind of guy. He was totally unprepared for the sweetness of the newly budding relationship with Chandra now that her behavior was getting under control and her mother was working on herself as well. He loved it when she came to him for advice. It was a strange and delightful experience to have a pleasant conversation with her in which she actually wanted his opinion. Truth be told, no one in his life had treated him quite that way before. This positive experience made him—finally—receptive to the therapist’s input. It became clear to him that positive interactions do work and he started making a supreme effort not to bring negatives in where they needn’t be. One morning, Laura had to be out of the house early, and Jeff, who worked nights and slept late in the morning, was astonished to see Chandra home, moping around the house. His automatic reaction would have been to get angry with her for not getting off to school on time. Instead, he took a deep breath to calm himself down and give himself time to think and said, “What’s going on?” Chandra shrugged. That shrug was a clear avoidance reaction, but he didn’t want to deal with it; he was focused on the fact that she was really late for school. “Honey,” he said gently, “you’ve been so good up until now, getting yourself off to school on time and everything. I hate to see backsliding like this.” Jeff was clear: Her behavior was “backsliding,” but she was being “so good up until now.” He decided that anger or annoyance at her lateness would not get him anywhere. He decided to underplay focus on the bad behavior and appeal to her good progress so far. Chandra’s father decided that paying attention to the undesired behavior would just reinforce (increase) it, which is the opposite of what he wanted. He decided instead to appeal to the good person that his daughter was."
Look, it’s me, Jeff, talking. Sometimes it’s really difficult to change your attitude, to admit you could do things better and be different. But if you just go with the flow, follow the ideas in DrDeb's book, things will get better for you and your child. They did for us.
Ha. Jeff thought he had it difficult. Well, my wife, Marissa, and I have an 18 year old in trouble with the law. An 18 year old who never listened. Do you think DrDeb could fix that problem? My name’s Leonard; our wise-guy son is Sam and we’re in the book, too.We were parents too full of the ghosts of our own pasts to adequately reel our kid in. If you woke up one morning and reality suddenly hit you, would you know how to undo eighteen years of neglect, take care of yourself, and do it right for your teen? Well, I actually discovered one small thing that I could change which made a powerful impact on our son (page 189). And, by the way, that led to the inevitable problem that occurs when parents who used to be abusive suddenly stop--and the child takes advantage. But I learned how to handle that too (page 231). [Please note that all names and stories are made up. I don't use real people in order to protect their confidentiality.] Why should you listen to me, anyway?You have two ways of knowing that I know what I'm talking about. The most important one is that I raised four children and they all came out wonderful! How about this one little tidbit? Not a single one of my children went through what is called “adolescent rebellion.” They didn’t have to. Not when they’re raised according to the tools in this system. And another tidbit: My daughter is now successfully raising my grandchildren according to the same principles.The older one is three-and-a-half and the little one is one. Guess what? There is practically no sibling rivalry! Why, just yesterday, my daughter told me that the older one was building with Legos and along came the little tyrant with a block in his hand. With a few simple instructions on her part, my older grandchild gently guided his baby brother’s hand onto the top of his building, not merely allowing him to participate, but helping him to do so! The other answer tells you the story of how I came to write this book at all, and that story gets back to my children, too.You see, when I was just a child myself, I was fascinated with people and decided that I would learn as much as I could about them. I studied Marriage and Family Therapy for my Ph.D. and about the time that I had to make a decision as to what to investigate for my dissertation, I looked at my children playing on the floor and my heart filled with love. Then my eye glanced at the newspaper I had read that morning, in particular one awful, gruesome story, and I thought, "How could anyone hurt a child?" More to the point, "Why would they?" This puzzling question tormented me and I ended up doing my dissertation on verbal and emotional abuse. I interviewed people who talked of their childhood with such intense pain that I knew my mission would be to do whatever I could to stop it. And that is how I came to design two systems on the subject, one about overcoming abuse in marriage and the other about preventing it in parenting. Jean and Ricky you may have met in The Secret Marriage Killer: Eradicating Verbal and Emotional Abuse. If you haven’t, but your relationship needs help, you might consider reading that when you finish this one. The other people on this page, Jeff and Laura Larson and their daughter; Chandra, Abigail, Matthew and their son, Andrew; Leonard and Marissa and their son, Sam, are a few of the more than three-dozen individuals and families that you will meet in this system, How to Get Your Kids to WANT to Do What YOU Want Them to. The information is both digital and should be downloaded and a binder will be coming in the mail!
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