Sometimes good stress management is just a matter of changing how you think about life. As a businessperson and trained project manager, I often think of life in terms of projects that have a beginning and an end. For that reason, I am going to use project management and business language to explain the stress involved with parenting.
People often say to me, your kids are so well-behaved - how did you ever get such good kids. Well, believe me, when I say, it’s no happy accident that I have well-behaved kids. I put in a lot of time and effort to making this a reality and I use an approach called empowerment. This means that I go out of my way to teach my kids how to think for themselves and make good decisions; I set boundaries and offer love and support and all that good stuff, but the three biggest things I do to produce such well-behaved kids is that I control what crosses their lips, I control what they see and hear in the media and I control their schedule. None of this is rocket science, but it is also not for the weak-hearted. As I said before, my parenting accomplishments are no accident. It may sound strange, but I have carefully planned how I will raise my children and you can too.
The first step to solving any problem is to decide how serious you are about fixing the problem. If you aren’t going to get serious, then don’t even bother getting started. Parenting is not like a New Year's Resolution. You can't just forget about it once you are bored or at the first sign of trouble.
If you are going to be a parent, then it’s going to take hard work and a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Don’t try to fool yourself or anyone else into believing that you will be successful if you're always too tired or too busy or too anything else. In the business world, any business that wants to solve a big problem, like building a bridge or filming a movie or designing a new computer program has to get behind that project with all of the company’s resources. Parenting is no different. If you truly want to turn your kids into well-behaved, empowered and healthy and well-balanced, then you have to get behind the project and commit all the resources you have available. It will require change and often it’s big change. Are you prepared to make these big changes or are you just planning to PLAY at fixing the problem? If you aren’t planning to fix the problem for real, then you will probably do more harm than good.
Over the years, I have witnessed parent after parent whine about their kids’ behavior. They blame it on the system and they blame it on this label or that label, but the truth is that kids haven’t changed much in the last 100 years, except that maybe they have access to way more information. What has changed is what we feed them that messes up their body chemistry, what we let them see and hear, which messes up their mental health and what we let them do which messes up their future.
I am not talking about going back to the days of Little House on the Prairie, but I am talking about big changes.
So, to sum up, the first step in solving any wellness challenge is to get serious. I call it developing a Wellness Charter. You have to commit to solving the problem or you have to charter the project. To charter something means to give it the go ahead. There is no project in history that has been completed successfully without the company first fully chartering the project. Solving your parenting wellness challenge will be no exception to the rule.
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