Taking control: Should single mothers be equipped with parenting techniques?

Of all the things going through your mind, the most
effective route is seeking the wisdom from within
 you, the spiritual self is always knowing and
above any situation! 

The main ingredient in parenting is love because it provides physical and emotional security.  As a child develops, he/she should be empowered with accurate information and appropriate social skills. Single mothers often struggle in modeling optimum care because they lack basic parenting skills.

What are basic parenting techniques?

The most challenging parenting function is walking the talk. A single parent may read and understand the key principles of parenting but face challenges of modeling them because of her own socialization flaws.  Attempting to act on what you do not believe in could be emotionally taxing and kids are smart in picking the negative vibrations and window dressing behavior. According to Psychology and Life by Philip G. Zimbardo, getting the first desirable response from your child so that you can reinforce it is a daunting responsibility. He lists the following techniques: “ a) increasing motivation;  b)  lowering restraints; c) structuring the environment; d) forcing; e) providing a model; and f) giving instructions…”  These techniques are said to be essential in instilling desirable behavior:

1.    Increasing motivation: Most parents perform this task initially when encouraging a child to sit, walk and in potty training. This technique would apply for teaching a child how to make up a bed, tidy his/her bedroom. A single mother on the other hand lose touch because she must work to further her studies in order to maintain her upward mobility and do not have time to supervise these chores. 

2.    Lowering restraints: Denotes reducing constraints. When rules are not consistent they will eventually stop to be binding. This poses a challenge for a single mother because often she over-compensates her inability to spend quality time by overlooking non-compliance to established rules.  Violation starts when mom has to keep kids occupied and entertained by watching television.  Television is addictive and always has a negative impact on study time and performing of house chores. Once this is broken, single moms face the challenge of enforcing rules as children grow up.  

3.    Structuring the environment: Occurs when teaching siblings to work together to address competitive behavior. Competitiveness could ruin relationship between mom and kids or between siblings. A single mom must be vigilant and address this destructive behavior immediately.

4.    Forcing:  Parents apply this technique successfully until kids become teenagers. Forcing is necessary to teach a child to eat nutritious foods, do assignments before playing and waking up at a particular hour to go to school on time. This approach backfires when a child leaves home; they simply do not know how to handle their freedom. A single mom must therefore explain why certain values must be enforced.

5.    Providing a model: A child learns by imitating both parents and other adults. Since a single mom is not able to play a role of a father, this gap could lead to feelings of inadequacy for a male child. A single mom should be aware of this need before birth and seek support for trusted male relative to spend quality time with a male child during the first eight years. Basic social skills for a male child includes fishing, repairing locks, gardening and changing car tires.

6.    Giving instructions: All learning involves giving instructions. The challenge is doing so when mom is not stressed so that it becomes a coaching session not exerting power. Giving instructions from a coaching perspective is the best approach because it reflects love and will transcend all development stages.  

Most parents use trial and error approach hoping to hit on appropriate stimuli for producing desired behavior. When parents fail, they blame environment, modernized schools where kids are not punished for poor behavior and other ‘bad’ peers.  Without exception parenting is a huge task that requires accurate content and lots of unconditional love to apply all of the above techniques for deriving desirable outcome. A single parent’s role therefore is to identify and be aware of how or when own childhood issues surface. Identifying triggers could empower a single mom to be aware of the motivating factor behind her parenting style.

Taking control: Watch out for your psychological attachment!

Psychological attachment is a negative outcome of experiences that become a belief and influence undesirable behavior which includes unhappiness, stinginess, hate of authority and controlling tendencies.  Such beliefs tend to be anchors that could deter you from experiencing positive or full life.

Identifying your psychological attachment!

Attachments are the main cause of your inability to interact or maintain ideal relationships. For you to understand the concept, let us discuss a few examples of situations that challenges you and you are unable to change:

1.    Unhappiness: Often you may blame your hormones if you are a lady and yet there is a deeper emotional baggage from your childhood socialization.  If you were raised by parents who uttered “no” more than “yes” you may unconsciously feel deprived of unconditional love and feel generally confused about loving other people unconditionally.  You have developed a behavior of striving to please someone to earn his/her attention or love.  This will work against you when you exit into adulthood and look for a life partner. Actually the only qualifying person for you would be one who is vulnerable and would give in to your manipulations and controlling habits.

Solution: First identify if you are an unhappy person.  That is, if your happiness is conditional on someone making you have positive feelings.  Unhappy people preempt undesirable situations so that they can maintain their unhappiness. In other words you need a coach that would help you to expect situations that would make you happy.  You must learn to be happy!

2.     Stinginess: This refers to hoarding on what you possess. This is a form of insecurity which says you may never come across this, so keep it and make it last! When children hear lack more than conditions associated with prosperity, they learn to hang on stuff! They get fixated on the lack mode.

3.    Solution: Planet earth was created to be a resource for all living and non-living and mankind is in charge of it all! Again, you must develop a new mentality through coaching and replacing socialization and cultural myths with facts about the abundance of the universe. You must learn to share and to replace poverty mentality with abundance. 

4.    Hate of authority: You can be a hater of authority because you had overly controlling parents.  Do you have subtle dislike or resentment of your parents when they express their opinion; your teacher who demands submission of assignment; your pastor who reminds you to honor your parents; boss who sets production targets? If so, you are classically conditioned to dislike anybody who exercises authority over you.

Solution: You must learn that authority was established with creation and it is meant to establish orderliness and accountability. For an example, your teacher must ensure that you learn and pass well for your own good. He/she is also accountable to meet a set pass rate of the school.  When you understand this, you will learn to love your teacher as someone who is dedicated to assist you to meet your personal goals.

Taking responsibility over your life includes assessing your own behavior and noting lack of control on certain regular incidents.  It is easier when you do this rather than hearing it from another person because you are likely to be defensive.   Try self education on this subject and set a period beyond which you will seek professional help if you cannot loosen your anchors!

Taking control: First things first – Do you know who you are?

The process of socialization shapes behavior to conform to societal values and beliefs.  It instills foundational perception of your environment and therefore configures you to see and attain preconceived standards.

First things first!

If you are able to read this article, it means you have passed the phase of close monitoring in which your parents had to approve the content of your non-formal and formal learning.   It is said that an infant accumulates foundational principles from birth to eight years. This simply means if you have been exposed to positive environment, you have positive foundational information which will help you to perceive the world positively.  The same principle applies for negative or non-educational environment.  The remaining gaps are filled through peer education and other social institutions. The essence of this awareness is to challenge you to ask yourself the following questions:  Who am I? Can I describe myself according to how I perceive myself?

The rationale for knowing who you are!

Can you successfully formulate your goal when you do not know who you are? Attempting to know who you are is discovering your given talents and spiritual gifts because they will reveal the purpose for which you exists. It is an awakening to the fact that what you see could be the tip of an iceberg.  Your parents may have raised you but they can never accurately define who you really are! Only you know who you are!  Why? Because you learned to comply with what you were taught even when you felt otherwise about certain rules, values and beliefs.  If you do not revisit this exercise to audit what those values and beliefs are, you cannot live your life nor input refined knowledge into your version of socialization for your own self development.  

Why is evaluation of who you are important?  It enables you to consider whether you are on tract on three aspects of your life:

1.     Relationships: What do you understand by ideal relationships? How do you rate yourself on the scale of 1 to 10?

Tips: Do you relate to people without another voice editing how you should speak, open to other people or even disproving your conduct? Do you feel as if someone is watching you and monitoring your behavior? If this is the case, you need to discover why!

2.     Wealth: Do you know what wealth is and how you feel about attaining it?  How do you rate yourself on the scale of 1 to 10?

Tips: Is accumulating money part of your personal goals? How do you feel about having money and living without any lack? Have you self-educate yourself about getting rich? 

3.     Health: Do you still buy food that you ate as a child? Have you added any knowledge about eating right and maintaining healthy lifestyle?  How do you rate yourself on the scale of 1 to 10?

Tips: If you still eat food that your parents taught you to eat and has not improved anything, it could be that they were diet conscious and very good in life-supporting lifestyle or you have not really thought about improving your health.  Without good health your attempts for good relationships and accumulation of wealth could be futile.

The principle of first things first in this context denotes an awakening of the sense of self; the personalized definition which confirms or edits attributes that define how you perceive yourself.  It is identifying given tools that are meant to assist you to reach your goals.  Your goals are made up of these given unique interests and skills so that your life could be meaningful and satisfying. 

Taking control: The past is toxic and steals your life!

The past is everything that is not happening now. It pertains to the negative experiences which caused your emotional wounds and halted your social and spiritual growth.

Preview of the source of your present life.

Most people’s negative experiences are the larger part of the pie and therefore have few incidents of positive events that worth recalling.  Generally, you have accumulated this much because of the socialization process from infancy until you left home for higher education, left to live by yourself or got married.  It was so because during that period, various parties imparted values and beliefs into your life, thus influencing your perception of the world.  In other words you became what was taught and remained ignorant of all things your mentors did not know.  For an example, did your parents know about the importance of growing spiritually? Were you taught spirituality concepts such as chakras and the impact of energy imbalance? Do you recall hearing your parents discuss universal laws and how they impact on prosperity? All these indicate that you are what have been imparted in you through informal and formal education.   The bulk of non-formal education that would enable you to answer these questions and apply them in socializing your own children is your responsibility.

The principle of detoxifying your present life!

If you agree with me that you have been configured by both good and bad programmers, it is prudent to take cognizance of this situation through conscious auditing of your social and spiritual programs and content.  It is clear that you can only do this if you have some form of awareness of what is ideal in relation to what you want to achieve in life.  In other words, this inquiry will occur only if you have critically analyzed your progress towards your goals and how you are doing on three aspects that drive you to set goals – relationships, health and wealth.  This is what I refer to as the process of detoxification of your present life.  It is an ideal exercise which will enable you to recognize and weed out bad habits by consciously choosing to apply empowering principles. The key question if you have a weight problem would be; how can I improve my self image?  You do not want to recall negative names that described you by your family members or school mates. Empty yourself of any negative description of your present self; simply seek positive motives that add value to your life.  Adopt empowering descriptive words such as I am beautiful, powerful, loving and hard working person.

Detoxification of the present self makes room for an ideal one.  It is a conscious decision to mould yourself according to how you perceive your future. Most importantly, it seeks to empower you to take responsibility over your limitations by developing teachable attitude.  Blaming your failures on anybody is disempowering yourself to take control over your life.  

  

Taking control: How to identify a skewed compromise in contract relationship!

Compromise is finding a middle ground where both parties in a contract relationship feel that their respective views are represented. It is a means through which a couple sustains a newly formed and agreeable environment.

A contract relationship refers to a marriage because both parties have agreed to a life-time relationship regardless of any conditions that may occur in their lives.  That is a serious contract!  This denotes that two strangers have considered a list of factors and agreed with most of them.  It also means they have discussed those that were not simple to understand and consciously regarded them as tolerable.  However, a person in love tends to tick most of unclear factors as tolerable until the hype wanes off and the reality sets in. 

Societal norms are sustained through informal education. Social roles are those chores that you have been socialized to do as a male or female person.  Traditionally, a male child would be encouraged to play outside with his toys which in most cases are cars and guns. In the case of female child, it would be toy-babies.  A male adolescent would hang-out with his father to look after the animals and plant food at the fields or garden.  A female adolescent would be indoors with the mother learning the housework including cooking.  Modernization has bridged the gap; both must learn how to clean the house and cook as soon as they prepare to leave home to join institutions of higher learning.  Strangely, males would do this until they get married.  Immediately they tie the knot, a man becomes the master of the newly formed homestead and the woman continues with all that has been taught! Why?  Join me to draw the pointers of skewed compromise in small matters:

1.    Were social roles included in the list of important subjects? I doubt if they were considered important.  They would come into play when both have full time jobs and arrive home at different times.  This matter would soon be the cause of a somber mood, silent resentment and then boom! A full and bitter war of words would be ignited! In Christian marriage, a woman would remember to submit under the husband and restrain from any expressed bitterness.  She would also remember that she must not let the sun go down with her anger! At this stage, the issue of social roles would revert to tradition. The woman would have to do her social chores hundred percent regardless of her career schedule and attending to her husband’s needs!

2.    Did we clarify the dress code? The answer is no!  Such matters were not important.  Discussions centered on having certain number of children, and how they would be raised if you are a Christian couple. If not, you did not agree on the church you would go to and whether you would allow your children to freely roam about and experience anything that is considered cool. The matter would surface when your teenager show up with a tattoos and a ring on the nose.  I wonder which party would compromise in the name of peace!

3.    Did we explain accountability? Hurriedly! In few words you were made to understand the importance of communication during counseling and have never really discussed what you would do with your income. So now that you want to build a house, you need to budget and account for all expenses. Such change of financial freedom would likely stir the romance!

Compromise is skewed when it applies to one party under the banner of submission.  Compromise may hide the controlling spirit which usually steals the joy in one party; then creep into the relationship to destroy the Creator equation which says man must love his wife and she must submit.  Ultimately compromise could kill the marriage and destroy that which was meant to transcend the grave.  Do consider these matters and talk about them; you would rather delay tying the knot than overlooking the issues of skewed compromise!