Parents are the prize!
Did you know that you are the best reward you can give your child? Your attention and energy truly are the prize your children desire. Every child’s heart longs for intense, positive connection with parents. As a parent struggling with an intense child, deciding what type of help to seek can be very overwhelming and confusing. Remember this: when a child acts out, is defiant, or appears to shut you out, they are actually crying out for a connection with you. When you use the Nurtured Heart Approach, you hold the key to transforming your child’s behavior from the inside out by giving your children what they need the most – loving interaction with you.
Dan is committed to empowering parents with the tools they need to create a healthy home environment. If you want to provide your child with the best possible climate for success, are looking for parenting tips or seeking social skills training for a difficult child, or if you are struggling with behavior issues or a child with ADHD, the Compass 4 Life Program can help.
The NHA Helps Bring the Joy Back Into Your Family Life
As a parent, you may be frustrated by the poor results you experience from correcting, lecturing, initiating time outs, or removing privileges. These traditional approaches to discipline rarely work with intense children. To understand the reason for this, remember that the child desires your attention above all else.. When most of your interaction with a child involves correcting “bad” behavior, the child gets the message that the way to get the attention they need from you is to behave badly. The NHA teaches you to turn this paradigm around, producing less need for discipline and more time to enjoy your child.
The child labeled “difficult” has problems controlling his or her energy – either they have extremely excessive energy, or they appear extremely lethargic. The highly energetic, disruptive child unconsciously seeks the reward that your attention provides. The lethargic child may have given up on ever receiving what he needs from the parent, and responds by shutting down. How do we reach these children? We show them that the reward (our energy and attention) is given as a result of doing well, and that negative behavior produces no emotional response.
This is why the fastest and most powerful solution to your child’s behavior may not be therapy for the child, but coaching for the parents. By adjusting your responses to a child, you become empowered to change their behavior. This is how Nurtured Heart Approach can help! Through parent coaching, Dan works with you to set specific goals and strategies to ensure positive future behavior.
The difference in your child’s behavior will be evident!
- Improved self-esteem
- More confidence when interacting with peers and adults
- Ability to manage strong emotions and impulses
- Enhanced social skills
- Ability to confidently make decisions
- Academic success
These strategies will address present behavior by helping you, the parent, gain the skills, tools and techniques you need to approach parenting with new confidence. Using the Compass 4 Life Parent Coaching Program, you will be able to help your child transform their behavior from adversarial to productive. How is coaching different from counseling? While counseling is beneficial to getting to the root of the problem, coaching allows you to build on that successful discovery. The key is that you are setting goals for the future, not trying to rework the past.
Build Your Child’s Character from the Inside Out
Dan’s Parent Coaching Program creates a new paradigm that shifts the energy and attention of parents away from negative behavior and places an emphasis on a child’s character and effort. Parents learn how to put NHA strategies into daily practice and how to de-energize a child’s negative behavior while energizing and encouraging more positive outcomes. The goal is to send the message that there is no longer anything to gain from “acting out” and instead, to focus on the greatness that lies within each child, developing them and nurturing them with relentless, evidence-based, positive attention.
Discipline and strictness are also essential parts of the NHA. However, Dan teaches parents specific “time out” techniques that are effective, short, and do not engage the parent’s emotional energy. When followed by a “time-in” of loving and positive connection, the child quickly learns that the rewards of good behavior far outweigh any results of acting out or disobedience.
The ideal NHA parent is…
- Willing to look at their parenting style and relationship with their child in the context of their child’s behavior.
- Willing to ask themselves what they are doing or not doing that is contributing to the child’s acting out behavior.
- Humble enough to try new ideas, yet brave enough to trust themselves.
- Self aware, willing and able to look at their role.
- Wants to better understand their child’s needs.
- Confused because their parents were successful and when they were children they did not act the way their kids do now.
The Compass 4 Life Program is a 7-week training course, developed to educate parents on how to smoothly integrate the Nurtured Heart Approach (NHA) into their daily lives. Dan models the program on two books by Nurtured Heart creator, Howard Glasser: “Transforming the Difficult Child” and “Transforming the Difficult Child Workbook”.
Whether the child has challenging behavior or not, the approach will strengthen them from the inside out, creating their inner wealth. Inner wealth refers to the belief system a child possesses that says, “I have what it takes to be successful despite the challenges of life”. This goes beyond self-esteem. Children with inner wealth want to use their gifts to help others and they desire to reach their potential while making wise choices. Children will do this, not because of external rewards or fear of consequences. Rather, because of the internal feeling they receive when they love others and themselves.
The Nurtured Heart Approach works most effectively as parents master the approach. The Compass Program works closely with parents to ensure that happens!
The Compass 4 Life Program provides:
- Customized coaching using NHA strategies to meet your family’s specific needs
- Instruction on proven techniques you can immediately use to transform difficult behavior
- A guide to recognize opportunities for discipline that highlight learning and forgiveness rather than punishment
- Continuous contact and support in managing your child’s difficult behavior
Parent coaching, using the NHA, teaches parents how to adjust their energy and attention in order to focus on what is going right, and not accidentally reward what is going wrong. It helps you develop the relationship you have always wanted with your child.
