Active Parenting

Here's what we learned about this week:

To all you parents out there you should check out books by Michael Popkin on Active Parenting or activeparenting.com. We talked about it today and during Wednesday's class and it is quite interesting. I almost wish that I had children to practice it on. The idea is that rather than focusing on the undesirable behavior you should try to figure out the child's needs that perhaps are not being met. A memorable quote shared by Brother Williams goes something like this. You can never get enough of what you don't need because what you don't need can never satisfy you. I don't recall the original author of this quote. Anyway back to Active Parenting... One example would be:

Behavior
Undue attention seeking

Need
Contact & belonging

How to Help
Show interest in them before they act out, catch them when they're behaving, offer attention freely, they may just need a hug. Also teach them to contribute to the family or whatever group they may be involved with, it's not enough for them to just show up, and give them positive reinforcement and encouragement. Gotta go to class, ciao.

Week 10

I had the opportunity to read "One for the Money" by Elder Ashton for the third time in my BYU-I career. If it has been assigned in three separate classes it's probably important right?

To read the entire article please visit this website:

http://lds.org/ensign/2007/09/one-for-the-money?lang=eng&query=one+money

These are a few of the points that particularly stuck out to me.

~75-89% of divorces are rooted in problems with mismanagement of finances
~financial anxieties --> no love, peace, security, or contentment
~Elder Ashton strongly recommends that we teach our children early the value of work and earning. His opinion is that children do chores to earn their allowance instead of having it handed to them every week.
~Family unity comes from saving together for a common purpose. Each family member should contribute to family welfare (like a brother or sister on a mission) - I thought that this was a really cool idea, it will help the siblings feel more involved in the family.
~Don't forget to: use a budget, pay your tithing first and foremost, have medical and life insurance, build up your food storage.

H.A.L.T.

Don't you just love acronyms? I do! I learned two cool ones this week. The first one is in reference to communication. HALT... stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. These factors will make for ineffective communication. Someone in class made a comment that I enjoyed... "what's wrong with talking to yourself, who else do you have more in common with?" The other acronym is one that I heard in my Book of Mormon class, CPR. It could stand for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which saves lives or Church, Prayer, Read scriptures which also saves lives.

I just finished reading two articles by Elder Russell M. Ballard about councils. Apparently he has written a book and given several talks on this subject, so I guess it must be important. A ward or a family that is not taking advantage of all of its council members is a "shell of unrealized potential".
Possible Advantages of Councils (if used properly)

• great spiritual power
• inspired direction
• reservoir of insight and inspiration
• lives will be blessed
• the Lord's work is moved forward faster and farther
• UNITY!!
• better solutions
• prepares future leaders
• lightens the leader's load
• ongoing solidarity and strength

The council method is something that I definitely want to remember to apply in my own future family. I think it's important to not only discuss possible solutions between husband and wife but to get input from the children as well (when they're old enough to talk that is).

God, in His wisdom, has provided His children with the council method, let's use it!

Crises

Something from this week's discussions that I found interesting was that the Chinese character for crisis is equivalent to the characters for danger + opportunity. We learned that a situation can be viewed as a crisis or as an opportunity, the outcome depends on how we handle it. A crisis can actually be a blessing in disguise. It is important to try to see the big picture.

I especially liked this statement from a gospel standpoint: Heavenly Father loves us so much, he doesn't want our lives to always go smoothly because it is during the crises that we experience the most growth. Without crises we would return to Him exactly the same as when we left.

We also learned about different types of stressors. I will use my brother's car accident as an example. This was an external event, nonnormative, nonambiguous, definitely nonvolitional, I guess it was acute and I'm not sure on the cumulative or isolated. One way for Darren to cope with this tragedy was that he needed to be around people all of the time, because when he was alone with his thoughts I think he would start to blame himself for what happened and he needed to know that it was an accident. He and many others also turned to prayer and the Atonement for comfort.