About Relationships In Balance
It is my mission to use the experiences of my life, its successes and great failures, and the principles I have come to know through experience to help others along the way.
Parenting has its challenges to say the least, but it can also be fulfilling and greatly rewarding. Effective parenting requires a lot of work, and being a loving parent is a life-long duty. Parenting counseling will give you an opportunity to discover the principles of parenting. It can help make parenting make sense, and make parenting simple—though it’s not likely to make parenting easy. It can help you to unite your parenting goals with your parenting methods.
The ultimate goal in parenting is to raise children to be independent and emotionally strong and balanced. Effective parents agree on their parenting goals. Effective parents agree on the methods used to achieve their parenting goals. Parenting counseling can help parents support each other as parents, and converge their efforts toward achieving parenting goals.
Children (and adults) change their behavior for one of two reasons, fear of consequence or love. Motivation that comes through fear of consequence brings about conformity to a rule or expectation, while motivation that comes through love brings about conversion to a belief in the goodness of a rule or expectation. Effective parents use both the fear of consequence and the love motivation to encourage growth in their children. Fear is useful in parenting young children who cannot yet grasp the concept of love or act out of love despite their impulses. As children grow older and are able to perceive acts of love by others, and as they obtain the mental capacity to begin to understand the concept of love, they will increasingly be able to control their behavior because of love for their parents.
Parents will use these two motivators successfully if they are effective communicators. Parenting counseling focuses on the use of motivation through effective communication. Effective communication is an essential foundation for maintaining the parent child relationship during the teenage years. The success of all relationships relies on effective communication. Parenting counseling builds effective communication between parents that will then carry over to empower healthy relationships with children.