      
Your Children Will
Whistle While They Work! by James J. Jones, Ph.D.
Introduction (cont'd)
Forward
Over the past several decades I have had the privilege of counseling and teaching thousands of families in the USA and Canada. Wherever I go parents ask the same questions over and over:
"How do you get kids to..." and
"How do you get kids to stop..."
Parents want their kids to study, clean their rooms, come in on time, do their homework, listen to them, pick good friends and music, and go only to clean and wholesome activities.
Parents want their kids to stop fighting and bickering, watching TV all day, leaving messes all over the house and if necessary to stop using tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and doing sex.
Parents continue to ask the question, "How can we control our kids?"
After many years I have drawn several conclusions from my experience as a parent, counselor, and teacher of parents.
Let me share a few of them with you.
- Parents "parent" by the seat of their pants and not from a foundation of knowledge. They "parent" as they were "parented" and have many bad habits and incorrect beliefs.
- Even the most diligent parents fail to find, study and apply the information now available on parenting, often because they do not know where to find it. They typically study one of the hundreds of unscientific books available on the subject.
- Many families in desperation have turned to family counseling. Some counselors report that they must teach the same things to the same families over and over because they forget what they are supposed to do from week to week.
- Mother and father often disagree with each other on even the most basic issues because they come from such different backgrounds.
- Children, the losers in all this inconsistency and confusion, take advantage of the situation.
- The parents who seem to love the most, often seem the most vulnerable to the temptations of rescuing and controlling.
- Because parents care, they make a big fuss over school work and clean rooms. The tension in the home also intensifies over conflicts concerning moral values, etc. Sometimes it gets unbearable, even to the point of abuse and children leaving home.
- Parents are racked with fear and guilt as they struggle to "save" their children and so they increase the control and pressure, all to no avail. Sometimes to their horror these parents see their children rebel against everything good. In an "In your face!" attitude these children set off to prove that they can live their own lives and will not be controlled.
Parents love their children and naturally want what is best for them. Often, the harder they try, the worse it gets. There are instances of parents being hospitalized with broken bones after being attacked by their children. Some actually live in fear of their children in their own homes.
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