Parenting Styles and Dreikurs' Approach

• Systemic practitioners like Bowen, Whitaker, Minuchin, and Haley often decline to specify what constitutes adequate parenting, as teaching parents directly wouldn't align with their models.
• Three models have provided the core teachings for most parenting programs in the United States. These models are Adlerian-Dreikursian, communication-based (Ginott, Gordon, Satir), and behavioral (Gottman, Krumboltz, Meichenbaum, Patterson, Skinner).
• Family practitioners are expected to address parenting issues in schools, hospitals, community agencies, and clinics.
• Becoming parents is often linked to critical stress in a marriage.
• Family coaching is a growing industry in the United States, Canada, and Europe, serving as intermediary between parent education and family therapy.

A Short History of Parenting

• John Broadus Watson became a foundational figure in behaviorism and created one of the first U.S parenting manuals.
• Watson was heavily influenced by Ivan Pavlov's classical conditioning theories.
• Watson began combining Pavlov’s theories with Thorndike's Darwinism at Johns Hopkins University.
• Watson conducted the Little Albert experiment; pairing a loud noise with a white rat to teach Little Albert to fear white mice.
• Watson wrote articles on child rearing for magazines like Cosmopolitan and McCall’s.
• Watson's 1928 "Psychological Care of Infant and Child" advocated treating children like little adults, emphasizing objectivity and distance.
• Watson advised against excessive mother-child bonding, cuddling, or even kissing, warning that closeness could hinder adolescents and ruin future careers.
• Alfred Adler's "Understanding Human Nature" was a popular psychology book that sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
• Adler advocated for a more personally engaged parenting approach, unlike behaviorism.
• Adler rejected psychology based on instincts, biology, reflexes, or environmental controls.
• Adler believed children form goals and make choices to reach them.
• Adler believed that people interpret stimuli, experiences, and activities before choosing a response.
• Adler viewed human behavior as goal-oriented, with both short-term and long-term goals.
• Adler said that the fundamental goal for everyone is to belong and feel valued.
• Lack of cooperation, competence, compassion, or courage can lead to children developing "useless goals".
• Rudolf Dreikurs, a colleague of Adler’s, developed a typology of mistaken goals for children's misbehavior: attention-getting, power struggles, revenge, and demonstration of inadequacy.
• Dreikurs based his approach on social equality and a democratic atmosphere between parent and child.

Additional parenting and family dynamics concepts

• Disturbing behaviors are a sign of discouragement, counteracted by encouragement and logical consequences.
• Skinner's operant-conditioning model says that behaviors are shaped by reinforcement.
• Continuous primary reinforcement is prescribed for shaping behaviors.
• Intermittent reinforcement is the strongest behavioral motivator.
• Authoritarian parenting (with corporal punishment) is often nonproductive.
• Effective communication is central to shared living, based on John Dewey’s concept that community is built on common understanding through communication.
• Irrational thoughts produce disturbing feelings leading to ineffective behaviors.
• Satir introduced the nurturing triad: two adults forming a team to support a child's growth and self-esteem.
• The goal is to provide encouragement and tend to emotional development.
• Congruent communication involves clarity and emotional honesty.
• Satir identified four stress positions (blaming, placating, super-reasonable, irrelevant) that individuals adopt in difficult situations, which actually worsen the communication.
• Satir emphasized the importance of social interest while communicating.
• Both Thomas Gordon and Haim Ginott built parenting programs around effective communication with children.
• Gordon’s parent effectiveness training was integrated with Dreikurs' approach.
• Ginott’s communication model is considered the base for Gottman’s emotion coaching.
• Jane Nelson's Positive Discipline focuses on solution-focused outcomes.
• Effective parenting requires carefully monitored programs based on operant conditioning, especially with children who exhibit extreme behavioral issues.
• The Total Transformation Program (Lehman, 2004) blends authoritative-responsive parenting, effective communication, and reinforcement theory.

Key Concepts

• Methods used by Native Americans involved holding a hand over the baby's mouth and nose when it cried until the baby passed out, causing brain damage.
• Methods were used to prevent game from being scared away or giving away the location of camp during wars.
• These methods were used into the 1900s, long after its usefulness had disappeared.
• European heritage includes antiquated parenting methods dating back to the 16the century.
• European societies were organized in strict hierarchies with kings, princes, and nobility at the top, and laborers, artisans, and serfs at the bottom.
• It might be found that children in a serf's family want to run away to not cut hay; this lead to the need to teach that child to “know their place”.
• Two autocratic methods remain: reward and punishment.
• There is a move towards the principle of equality and Western democratic states, where children will eventually gain equal rights.
• Autocratic parents are reduced to yelling, screaming, blaming and fluctuate between coaxing and public spankings.
• They then give up in order to get a little peace and quiet.
• The myth of external control outside of laboratory settings has long been known, but continues to still permeate almost everything parents do with their children.
• These authoritarian approaches do not work and are ineffective.
• More effective approaches include taking children in as partners, providing guidance and leadership, and taking time for training.
• Current parenting styles range from autocratic-authoritarian to permissive and ultimately neglectful.
• Models are democratic and Baumrind refers to these as authoritative-response.
• The autocratic proceeds from adults being in charge and presum assumes that parents know the proper way for children to behave and use bribes to keep children in line.
• It is with high demand and control.

Parenting traits and types

• Responsiveness refers to the level of warmth and attachment in the disciplinary relationship between the child and parents.
• Permissiveness began in the 1940s and 50s, assuming saying NO to a child is useless, is and characterized by parental avoidance of conflict.
• Neglectful parenting means being indifferent to children and their needs.
• These parents are disengaged and low in responsiveness.
• Effective parents are those that prepare their children through a democracy by helping develop perspectives, voices, and use consequences through learning.
• Active engagement is involved- choice giving, listening, guiding in a nonpunitive manner, and reasonableness.
• It can be realized when a child is big enough to get to the stove, for instance; and the hand will come close and then experience will be gained, but avoid childhood pain too.
• Emotions- it is essential to train children that parents are needed to teach and develop them.

The need to train children

• Children need to train different emotions so as to not confuse different feelings to meanings.
• Emotion coaching, when they are listening for it and reflecting it back to them- has positive effects and attachments.
• They solve problems better and in both math and reading, stay calmer when faced with emotion.
• Emotion coaching provides some protection from infectious illness, helps people maintain moods, and alleviates the negative effects from divorce.
• Gottman has verified this.
• In contrast authoritative parents had low self esteem, psychological distress, and were not well socially.
• Earlier, Rudolf identified 4 goals for children being misbehavior: attention, power struggle, revenge, and inadequacy.
• Parents reinforce patterns and reactions.
• Interventions that involve effective natural and/or logical consequences, encouragements, active reflection, and giving them choices.
• The most effective interventions include Total transformation, positive discipline, STEP, and active parenting.

Parenting techniques

• Interventions that prove effective for families are the psychoeducational approaches to family relations.
• Democratic engagement can be taught and serves as a preventative approach to child bearing.
• One meaning of encouragement is to build encourage as life's tasks face family, to reinforce strengths.
• Encouragements recognizes effort and improvement, and that children learn to handle life while children's have good faiths between them.
• Children tend to grow better on a positive environment- that is, a parent had faith in the child and can have faith in the things that a child should do.
• Children get about 5 times more if they have more abilities and also they have the strength.
• Accentuating the positive is a way to notice and pay attention to those unique talents.
• Minimization to avoid frustrations and mistakes is a way to avoid negatives.
• Natural consequences are found when no one is there or they are not there; a parent can do what it has to do.
• It can be used if clothing is wrong with the weather or lunches are left behind etc etc.
• Logical consequences are logical by learning the needs as they appear to be, and helps children lean in their best way.
• These are designed as a way to implement or follow direct situations of needed help.
• The child gets a better understand to whatever is at hand that way.

Active Listening traits

• Active listening and reflection means understanding and choosing to do what must be done through the use of paraphrasing.
• The child: Father, John Hit me.
• the Father: you were playing with John and hit you.
• Child: i don't know why!
• Father: it surprised you and your feelings hurt
• Child: i don't ever want to play anymore.
• Father: Right now you're angry

Other approaches to a child in need

• Active listening tells them to find a way to evolve and solve problems.

I-statements

• These are designed to keep ownership of a problem- an adolescent is playing music loudly.
• the response if one feels stress is: I am feeling stressed, because I can no longer play it or allow you to play.
• The child: Does not like her teacher.
• • the best response is to stay the active listening route.
• If a short person wears shorts, then that is the need to be learned. Giving choices:
• limited as they are to what may be needed to handle, parents can let them choose, if at risk give the choice to pick style.
• It means that negotiation should only happen between high school and elementary.
• win-win must prevail as families do what is needed.
• Most important: Emotion training is to ensure that the child begins naming them and validating them.
• Children are invited to problems where faces can match to whatever their situation is.
• Functional families focus with individuals where learning and contribution exists.
• Everything is ready to self-maintain.
• Like others, it must be designed as such to renew and creatively evolve when people need to create something ready to go as what is to be had through stepparents.

Steps to parenting a difficult child

• To allow a stepchild to be a good friend, this might also have the means to be natural.
• There will be steps backward for every forward there will be awareness.
• Counselors can make use of that.
• In instances of difficulty, then parents must turn to cognitive therapy through structured processes.
• Most notably they can apply this concept: Primary reinforcements involves the candy to shape and do it well.
• The rewards may act as incentives.
• Through words these can be the things like good job to reinforce- and good to positive reinforcement.
• The intermittent type of reinforcement is where the child can learn and the parent helps to achieve as needed over time.
• Shaping is the process that involves learning slowly with gradual steps to get from A to B.
• When children do a new routine, you can apply this.

Important things to keep in mind

• To ensure you're not doing anything wrong and/or a lot of things are going well it is important to remember (cont):
• Behavioral Extinction - where they either diminish, or not that quickly, to make you realize the reinforcement you're using is making it worse.
• you must stay removed in all cases where this is to apply
• if you are not, then you strengthen intermittent types of reinforcement which is bad

Key Interventions and Important notes

• Key Intervention
• Use: punishment but only in the forms if time-out for good measures, do not overdo it as it relates to bad behavior.
• Use: Focus more on behavioral exchange over revenge as it is needed with contracts and enforcement of agreement.
• Never understate: Modeling provides expected results and augments the power of behavior
• Do not use*
• Uncontrolled: Self regulation, do not allow to occur the vice versa, have self control.
• Miscommunicated: Listen, be polite, use statements as needed, etc.
• Hateful: Do not cause the environment and/or the people involved.
• Unintended: Enforce a set of requirements to avoid negative outcomes.
• Unfulfilled: Ensure kids comply to the above - the more the are expected.

Multicultural Counseling and Gender Issues

• Skills of all of the above are available well and in several languages with supplement guides to better it too
• This to create a better view as how to use that to teach and or explain to ethnic demographics.
• Amy Chua book ignited debates of culture differences - where chinese are deemed to act the same way as another parent in asia .
• It is said chinese parents overrides wishes as it prepares them for life; to be good, be serious, etc.
• There is the need and should be a way that they can act as a cultural and gender appropriate for the family.

Teaching younger women

• There still needs to be a lot of research as to why the younger women need that sort of development.
• And to fulfil the opportunity for women to be whatever there is too.
• Perhaps the highest prejudiced area right now are gays, and the way those families exist.
• Even in the face that they exist, there are warranted bias that must be met by how the children must be raised despite social standings.

Explore parenting styles like authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative. Understand responsiveness in parenting and the historical context of permissive approaches. Learn about Rudolf Dreikurs' theory on mistaken goals in children's behavior and parent-child relationships.