Creative Parenting Skills

CREATIVE PARENTING SKILLS Joan E. Haley, M.Ed. Let’s say two percent of parents consistently enjoy their role as parents and have perfect children who are obedient, loving, and confident. They don’t want or need ideas for raising their children. At the other end of the continuum, there are probably two percent of families with extreme special needs, usually because of health issues with the parents or the children. Creative Parenting Skills is for the ninety-six percent of the rest of us. Specifically millennial moms with children ages 2-8, who might experience insecurities about raising and disciplining their kids as they navigate the confusing and tumultuous waters of parenting, would benefit from the proven, data and experience-based strategies in Creative Parenting Skills (CPS). By addressing a wide range of issues for anyone touching the lives of children of any age, parents and caregivers can gain skills necessary so that parents and children flourish. This readable, easy-to-understand book of relatable techniques for daily challenges aims for parents to be confident in their ability to raise cooperative, loving children. With a master’s degree in child development and adult education, and more than twenty years of teaching parenting classes to hundreds of people, Joan Haley is well-suited to write this book. Issues are approached realistically, taking both parent and child where they are with practical solutions that work. Haley provides vivid examples and scenarios pulled from real life experiences from parents attending the CPS classes and gives parents an action plan to implement now. As parents, it’s up to us to help our children understand how this big ole world works, what’s right and wrong, how to cultivate empathy, resilience, a solid self-worth, and good character, all the while communicating love, support, and respect. What an amorphous and overwhelming job description! Parenting is not only a fulltime job it is hard (but rewarding) work. Too many of today’s parenting books shame, blame, and weigh parents down with the “right” way to raise kids. Moving away from punitive discipline, Creative Parenting Skills uplifts, teaches, and empowers parents with a clear, step-by-step plan for eliminating children’s unwanted behaviors while fostering the self-esteem of both parent and child. It equips parents with proven, realistic solutions that are eminently actionable to improve everyday parenting situations. By replacing punishments with positive teaching, parents gain essential tools to guide the personal growth, self-awareness, and learning of children. Creative Parenting Skills has two sections. The first presents a fail-safe, step-by-step, framework for eliminating children’s unwanted behaviors. Discipline is presented through the lens of promoting the child’s learning and self-discipline. The second part focuses on specific ways to bolster self-esteem, responsibility, and autonomy in children. Each chapter contains specific wording for implementing the skills and the rationale for using them, key points summarizing the tenets in the chapter, a workbook section meant for the reader to further integrate the skills contained in the chapter, and a self-reflection part for readers to think about how the skills relate to them as adults. By providing a practical step-by-step framework, CPS gives the reader essential skills to guide children to be loving, respectful, contributing adults and to enjoy this most important journey along the way. As a useful handbook for learning and growth for children of any age, Creative Parenting Skills will be the go-to book for parents, educators and caregivers to consult over and over again.