Screamfree Parenting: The Revolutionary Approach to Raising Your Kids by Keeping Your Cool

Screamfree Parenting: The Revolutionary Approach to Raising Your Kids by Keeping Your Cool | Hal Edward Runkel | Amazing insight

books:

Screamfree Parenti...

	Screamfree Parenting: The Revolutionary Approach to Raising Your Kids by Keeping Your Cool Hal Edward Runkel Broadway, 2008 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 81 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

You Can Start a Revolution in Your Family . . . Tonight

ScreamFree Parenting is not just about lowering your voice. It?s about learning to calm your emotional reactions and learning to focus on your own behavior more than your kids? behavior . . . for their benefit. Our biggest enemy as parents is not the TV, the Internet, or even drugs. Our biggest enemy is our own emotional reactivity. When we say we ?lost it? with our kids, the ?it? in that sentence is our own adulthood. And then we wonder why our kids have so little respect for us, why our kids seem to have all the power in the family.

It?s time to do it differently. And you can. You can start to create and enjoy the types of calm, mutually respectful, and loving relationships with your kids that you?ve always craved. You can begin to revolutionize your family, starting tonight.

Parenting is not about kids, it?s about parents.
If you?re not in control, then you cannot be in charge.
What every kid really needs are parents who are able to keep their cool no matter what.

Easier said than done? Not anymore, thanks to ScreamFree Parenting, the principle-based approach that?s inspiring parents everywhere to truly revolutionize their family dynamics. Moving beyond the child-centered, technique-based approaches that ultimately fail, the ScreamFree way compels you to:

focus on yourself
calm yourself down, and
grow yourself up

By staying calm and connected with your kids, you begin to operate less out of your deepest fears and more out of your highest principles, revolutionizing your relationships in the process.

ScreamFree Parenting is not just another parenting book. It?s the first parenting
book that maintains?from beginning to end?that parenting is NOT about kids . . . it?s about parents. As parents pay more attention to controlling their own behavior instead of their kids? behavior, the result is stronger, more rewarding, and more fulfilling family relationships.

For those of you reading who are parents, know parents, or have had parents, the notion that the greatest thing you can do for your children is to learn to focus on yourself may sound strange, even heretical. It?s not. Here?s why: we are the only ones we can control. We cannot control our kids?we cannot control the behavior of any other human being. And yet, so many ?experts? keep giving us more tools (?techniques?) to help us try to do just that. And, of course, the more we try to control, the more out of control our children become.

?Don?t make me come up there.? ?Don?t make me pull this car over.? ?How many times do I have to tell you?? Even our language suggests that our kids have control over us.
It?s no wonder that we end up screaming. Or shutting down. Or simply giving up. And the charts, refrigerator magnets, family meetings, and other techniques in most typical parenting books just don?t work. They end up making us feel more frustrated and more powerless in this whole parenting thing.

This practical, effective guide for parents of all ages with kids of all ages introduces proven principles for overcoming the anxieties and stresses of parenting and setting new patterns of connection and cooperation. Well-written in an engaging, conversational tone, the book is sensible, straightforward, and based on the experiences of hundreds of actual families. It will help all parents become calming authorities in their homes, bring peace to their families today, and give kids what they need to grow into caring, self-directed adults tomorrow.

for more information click here

Great insights into parenting

I thought this was a great book on CD, one that really made me think. There are some folks who wrote 1 star reviews that wanted to have step by step directions in how to implement these ideas, but that is somewhat difficult when the main idea is to focus on yourself and not react to your child's behavior.

Also, being a parent of a two year old, I realize there are no formulas on how to be a parent, no "do this first, then do that..." kind of instruction. So if you're looking for that kind of advice, this may not be the book to read. But I doubt you're going to find that anywhere anyway.

Each chapter has reflection questions which are valuable, and ways the author tries to make his philosophy practical and useable. The author also reads the book, and has a good delivery and is very listenable.

for more information click here

Amazing insight

Hal E. Runkel offers amazing insight into the dynamics of parent-child interactions in his book/CD series, Screamfree Parenting. Not so much a how-to author, Runkel instead helps the parent identify systems of their own thought/behavior which have an impact on their children's development. He aids the parent in adjusting their responses to their children in order to encourage positive and benificial growth in their child. I've put his theory into practice with my own children with immediate and profound results. I highly recommend this book/CD series to any parent who is willing to look inside themselves to find causes and solutions for the myriad behavioral delimmas we all encounter when raising our kids!

for more information click here

Calm, Collected and .......

The idea seems very selfish; "focus on yourself first and your child second". However, it's more generous than it first appears. If I am able to focus on my needs, emotions and well being, I will be in a much better position, more optimistic, more energetic an less anxious then if I am totally child-centric. I have, as a father, become so consumed with how to "make my kids behave" that I have left myself out of the picture and lost control. (Once or twice) It's easy to say things like "YOU are making ME angry!" But really it is me allowing myself to get angry. ScreamFree really does an excellent job of making the case that we need to remain in control of ourselves and not give that control over to our children (at any age).

I don't believe the author means that our children shouldn't be in the top priorities a person has, in fact, he says as much. But if we don't take care of ourselves first we can't remain healthy, balanced and in control (at least in control of ourselves).

However, the book is a little unclear, at least in my opinion, on how best to keep the focus on ourselves and let our children make their mistakes without getting sucked into emotional traps. This, I believe, is especially the case in critical or embarrassing situations like in a library or church, and playing around hazards (like a lake or busy street). The younger the child the greater their need to have parents that will look out for them above any personal need we have at the time. Although, I will say that the story of a little 3 year old girl attempting to manipulate her father, so she wouldn't have to straighten up, or get ready for bed was very helpful. The instruction and illustration in this story was excellent.

For the most part, this book is right on target. I think that it is probably best suited for older adolescent and teenage children because they've been through and learned most of the life threatening and socially acceptable behaviors.

The book really dovetails nicely with the books from Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish, not to mention the work of Dr. Haim Ginott.

for more information click here

Does not know anything about Gifted Kids

I saw Hal on Matt Lauer.

While he may be on topic on raising kids, he is appallingly ignorant when it comes to gifted kids.

As a former gifted child and a parent of a gifted kid, I'd like to weigh in.

Gifted kids are at great risk for psychological problems if their gifts are not recongnized and they are not accelerated. What Hal proposed is not the recommended approach for dealing with gifted kids and will very likely lead to the kids being stunted emotionally and mentally.

Interested parents should look up Dr Ruf's book as a starting point on raising gifted kids, rather than listen to an ill-informed person who is out of their area of expertise.

Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind

for more information click here