The Lost Art of Parenting: Training Children for Success

The Lost Art of Parenting: Training Children for Success

By Rick and Becky Kraemer

Published by Rick & Becky Kraemer at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 Rick & Becky Kraemer

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Art of Role Modeling

Chapter 2: The Art of Chores

Chapter 3: The Art of Discipline

Chapter 4: The Art of Family Meetings

Chapter 5: The Art of Household Rules

Chapter 6: The Art of Stability

Chapter 7: The Art of Raising Children for Adulthood

Chapter 8: The Art of Family Purpose

Chapter 9: The Art of Friendship

Chapter 10: The Art of Hospitality

Chapter 11: The Art of Hosting

Chapter 12: The Art of Building Self-Esteem

Chapter 13: The Art of Siblings

Chapter 14: The Art of Decision Making

Chapter 15: The Art of Negotiation

Chapter 16: The Art of Restoration

Chapter 17: The Art of Eating

Chapter 18: The Art of Clean Bedrooms

Chapter 19: The Art of Finance

Chapter 20: The Art of Homework

Chapter 21: The Art of Proverbs

Chapter 22: The Art of Sex Education

Chapter 23: The Art of Travel

Chapter 24: The Art of Toilet Training

Chapter 25: The Art of Fashion

Chapter 26: The Art of 12 to 14 Year Olds

Chapter 27: The Art of Talking to Teenagers

Chapter 28: The Art of Dating

Conclusion: Are We There Yet?

Appendix A: The Kraemer Family Purpose and Values

Appendix B: Reading Recommendations

About The Authors

Introduction

As children we all swore that things would be different when we were parents (When I grow up, I’ll never yell at my kids for painting the dog!). If our vow was to never yell at the kids when they were bad, then what is the opposite of yelling at them? Is it the silent acceptance of bad behavior? If we don’t do something, they’ll continue to misbehave. And what is the opposite of being abandoned by our fathers? Is it permissiveness? Spoiling our children and giving them excessive freedom won’t leave them with a sense of security and belonging. On the other side of the spectrum, what is the opposite of hovering, micromanaging helicopter parents? How do we use natural consequences to train our children?

We don’t want to wander lost through our childrearing years, repeating bad habits and doing our best to survive, while desperately hoping that our children will turn out all right in the end. We want to parent with purpose and intent, but we’re just not sure how to do that. Despite our best intentions, and the glut of conflicting advice available to us, we need to address that nagging feeling that there must be some secret, lost parenting knowledge that is just beyond our grasp. What are these lost parenting arts, and how do we use them to raise successful children?

Chapter 1: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Over the years we’ve crammed a lifetime of intentional training into our children, which we’re eager to show you in this book. But despite our best efforts, the most valuable life skills our kids learned from us haven’t been a result of our brilliantly planned, scheduled, and structured teaching. Instead, they’ve absorbed both good and bad skills by osmosis. Whether it’s the noble and courageous act of reaching out to someone who’s suffering, or leaving the empty milk containers in the refrigerator, they learned it without our direct instruction. As they interact with us, watching and learning from our examples, they begin to emulate us. In times of crisis or uncertainty, they’ll draw on those household experiences and examples they’ve had growing up, and then use them to make critical and life changing decisions. For better or worse, we’re their role models.

Because our actions have so much influence in our kid’s lives, our lifestyles are critical to raising successful children. When we want our children to be kind, moral, generous, responsible, healthy, and purposeful, we need to first display those characteristics in our own lives. No amount of lecturing on healthy eating and exercise is going to sink into them if we mumble it from the couch through handfuls of potato chips. Every time the two of us talk about the changes we want to see in our children’s behavior, we have to re-evaluate our own lives. Are we parents living the lifestyle we want to pass on to our children? While our kids were preschoolers, we would casually throw around the phrase, I hate it when that happens. Eventually, our children began to tell us that they hated objects, activities, and even people, which is pretty strong language for preschoolers. When we asked them if their feelings were really that strong, they told us that they didn’t truly hate anything or anyone, but were just using words that they’d heard us using. We decided that hate would be a bad word in our house for a while, and shortly after we stopped using it, the kids did too.

Are we kind and generous in our interactions with ourselves and other people, or are we self-serving? Are we exercising and eating right, or are we stuffing ourselves with junk food in front of the television? Do we establish goals and pursue them with discipline, or do we wander through life without purpose? Is our language wholesome, and our communication free from deception? Do we take responsibility for our actions? Do we love each other unconditionally and selflessly? Do we put in the work to stay married for the rest of our lives? Do we fight without shouting, calling each other names, or using other hurtful tactics? Do we honor our agreements? Do we have our addictions and anger under control?

These are the aspects of successful childrearing that we can’t teach to our children through lectures. We have to live the way we want our kids to live, and not just when we think they can see and hear us. If we want our children to have admirable character, we have to become adults of good character. Kids are too smart, and will see through our ingenuous attempts to fake good character. Some friends of ours had a toddler who was tightly bonded to his purple dinosaur plush toy, which they misplaced right before an airplane trip. In exasperation, the mother exclaimed, Where is that little purple s**t? Do you know what that toddler called his plush toy for months afterward, including every time he saw the character on television? You guessed it, everywhere he went, he called it Purple s**t.

Rick has been through several breakfast phases since the kids have been old enough to prepare their own breakfasts. For a while, he was eating peanut butter on toast for breakfast, and we suddenly noticed we weren’t going through any cold cereal, but were using a lot of peanut butter and bread. Then Rick began microwaving an egg in a bowl for breakfast, and suddenly all the kids were microwaving eggs for breakfast. The same thing happened when he started eating yogurt for breakfast, and again when he returned to cold cereal. For a while, we had extra leftovers, so Rick started re-heating leftovers for breakfast, until the kids started cleaning them out for their own breakfasts. Lately, we’d returned to cold cereal and milk again, but Rick started pouring yogurt over his cereal instead of milk. The other day, we discovered that a gallon of milk had gone bad, but we were out of yogurt again. It seems that the older two kids were pouring yogurt on their breakfast cereal.

Once the kids were old enough to serve themselves breakfast, we began stocking cold breakfast cereal in the pantry, and gallons of milk in the refrigerator, under the assumption that they would eat cereal and milk for breakfast. We never told them to eat toast, or eggs, or yogurt, or leftovers. They just picked it up from Rick on their own. If they are imitating us in such trivial things as breakfast foods, what truly good and bad habits are they catching from us? We parents need to have good character, so our children can catch it from us. We need to be the kind of people we want our children to become. We need to take a deep look at our own motivations, thoughts, and actions, and Rick needs to start eating vegetables for breakfast.

Chapter 2: The Art of Chores

Rick was raised in a rural culture, where families farmed or ran family businesses, and every member of the family pitched in make the family business successful. Becky also grew up in a household where children were expected to contribute to the success of the family and the family business. Because of our backgrounds, we’ve always felt that children were not in a family to be served, but to serve the family’s common goals and obligations, to the best of their ability. Our society has swung over to the side where every family activity centers on developing the child, without regard to the needs of the family or society. In a world full of private lessons and nannies, it is still reasonable for children to contribute to the household by helping with cleaning and other chores, or by supporting the family’s aspirations and values inside and outside the home.

We view our family as a team. We’re similar to a sports team, because we have individual players working toward the same goals. In sports teams, everyone specializes in what they do best. Some defend, some pass, and some score, depending on their talent, experience, and level of skill. In the same way, members of our family are working toward the same goals, but each of us brings different talents, experiences, and skills. By allowing our children’s contributions to be personal and individualized, we give them the freedom to do their best, while still working together to achieve our family goals. And the more we understand each other, the better we work together. We don’t ask our introvert to be the life of the party, but we do lean on him to build really deep 1:1 relationships in small group settings. In a household run by a radically extroverted mom, with a constant flow of people and telephone calls, we recognize his need for more time to regroup alone in his room, but then we rely on his ability to draw out shy people and make them comfortable when they visit. As long as he’s working toward our family’s goals, he has the freedom to approach family life in his own, personal way.

As a family, we want to impact our world beyond just surviving and collecting possessions. We have aspirations for the children’s ability to be independent and responsible citizens after they leave our home, and for their ability to change our world for the better. We have family values about how we’ll treat other people, and how we’ll try to better our world while the children are still in the house. We have a vision to do great things, and goals to achieve these great tasks. Those visions and goals require that our kids be engaged and actively supporting the family.

One of our family values is reaching out to hurting and lonely people, so our kids have blanket permission to invite friends over after school or for dinner. On the wise advice of experienced parents, we always keep extra food around, and prepare meals large enough to feed an extra friend or two, so we are prepared for spontaneous guests. This means that when a new student transfers into one of our kid’s classes, our kids may invite them over to our house, to do homework, play, eat, or just hang out because their own house is empty. But when we host a new friend, everyone in the family is going to feel some level of inconvenience, from sharing meals to adjusting schedules, to sacrificing turns at the video game consoles for the new guest. We believe that these large and small sacrifices give our kids a chance to build character, and understand that important achievements always require a level of sacrifice. If you haven’t been through the corporate experience of setting organizational missions and goals, and would like some guidance on creating family values and missions, we recommend Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families as a resource.

Chores

The simplest way for our children to support our family is through household chores. We don’t believe that either we parents or a hired helper should have the sole responsibility for maintaining our household; it’s a family responsibility and duty, as well as a chance to train our children in the cleaning arts. Obviously, young children won’t be able to pull an even share of the household cleaning and maintenance, but they can certainly begin to shoulder small burdens appropriate to their age level. As they aged, our children progressively took on more responsibility, including swapping around chores to become experienced in all areas. We had to tolerate a few shrunken shirts and white underwear accidentally turned pink, but when we release our children into the world, we’ll expect them to be fully capable of running their own households, since they will have personal experience with all aspects of household cleaning and maintenance.

Age-appropriate Chores

We’ve always had the perspective that chores are for the benefit of the children, because the oversight of family chores is far more difficult than it is to just do things ourselves. We’ve had many discussions and family meetings about the quality and consistency of chores, because they need such frequent review. When we first introduce a new chore, no matter what it was, it would always have been easier to do it ourselves than to have our child stumble with it. Chores are about teaching children responsibility, skills, and family support, not getting things around the house done to our exacting and (from the kid’s perspective), unreasonable standards. We had to teach each painstaking detail of the chore many times (yes, taking out the trash includes putting the lid back on the trash can, AND closing the door behind yourself). It took weeks to teach each new chore, doing the task together, and gradually removing ourselves, until the child mastered the task. Even then, we had to adjust our standards for quality, speed, and timeliness. Plus we had to remind, inspect, and re-train over the years; we had to remember that it wasn’t about getting us out of the work, it was about training our child to be a responsible adult. They will only be truly competent at their chores just before they are ready to leave the house and live on their own. We feel free to adjust the program for special occasions, like making the beds ourselves when house guests are expected. We’ve attached a suggested list of chores by age, along with some pertinent comments. We had to adjust for our children’s personalities, and start with plenty of training, assistance, encouragement and supervision when teaching a new chore.

Toddlers

- Put my dirty clothes in the laundry hamper (Expect socks to have minds of their own)

- Clear my dirty dishes into the sink (It will take practice to set them down instead of throwing them in. About 10 years practice)

- Throw away my wrappers and other trash (Start by having them bring trash to you)

- Put away my toys with guidance and assistance (The bigger the toy box the better, as long as the lid is