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Where the Heart Listens: A Handbook for Parents and Their Allies In a Global Society. Eve Sullivan
Читать онлайн.Название Where the Heart Listens: A Handbook for Parents and Their Allies In a Global Society
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780970314314
Автор произведения Eve Sullivan
Жанр Личностный рост
Издательство Ingram
As any parent knows, raising kids is much more than a walk in the park or a day at the beach, although these tranquil moments are absolutely essential and keep us going in the less-than-peaceful times. For better or for worse, raising children also involves the “screaming meemies” and the fall-out from declarations such as “I will not wear those shoes!” ... “I told you to be home on time for dinner!” ... “I'm quitting school!” and “I hate you!” These confrontations test our parental mettle. In Parents Forum workshops, we help each other look at the examples we are setting as we navigate and negotiate our way through these day-to-day hassles.
Parenting styles can range from authoritarian to permissive, from dictator to doormat. Of course neither extreme is effective in all situations or over the long term. We incorporated into our program a model (described in Mary Pipher's book Reviving Ophelia and used in other parents programs too) for evaluating our parenting style that helped us find ways to be authoritative without being dictatorial, and ways to be loving without letting our kids walk all over us. At the heart of parenting, of course, in times of conflict or contentment, is communication.
As we developed Parents Forum workshops, we adapted tools from the Straight treatment program that had proven invaluable in helping my family resolve our communication problems. These include an examination of the balance in our lives (the handy guide), an exercise for identifying our feelings (feelings list) and a conversational formula for talking about feelings. With these, Straight had helped me to create a new base of emotional and intellectual honesty, right underneath my feet. On this firmer ground, I found the courage to ask myself questions I had not thought of before. As these evolved and the teacher in me wanted to share what I had learned, I wrote a simple curriculum based on eight questions to teach others what I had learned through such desperation.
One essential theme running through all eight questions, taking a purely personal view, is, “What is the role of this activity, challenge or conflict in my life?” The other essential theme, taking an interpersonal view, is “Do I need help -- or do you need my help -- with this?” As a mother I started out doing, or arranging or managing everything for my kids. I thought that was my job. But as a child grows, the job changes. If I hold on too tight or do too much, my son or daughter has too little opportunity to learn and grow. In fact, many of the struggles that come up in conversations and in our workshops have to do with judging when to hold on and when to let go. Simple role plays accompany several of the questions. These dramatic (and sometimes melodramatic) interludes help us look at our behaviors, especially on occasions of children's misbehavior.
With these role-plays and the discussions that follow them, we are able to uncover the issues motivating and the concerns fueling the conflicts we experience. In the process we often discover strategies for handling the conflicts in a positive way.
We believe that putting the Parents Forum workshop tools and questions to use in everyday interactions with family and friends can help parents discover -- or develop -- and follow the rules they need to be the best they can be, on any given day. Whether in private reflection, conversation with spouse, partner or friend, or in group discussion, the tools and questions enable individuals to clarify the issues that concern them, the challenges they face and the choices they have.
The idea for Parents Forum was clear: a positive program for parents. But how could we get parents who did not have any pressing problems to get together and talk about what was going right in their lives? We knew we needed to offer parents incentives or rewards of some sort, like the lollipops (now story books) that doctors give along with immunizations. So we came up with the idea of having a prize drawing at each of our workshops and other events.
In our early Parents Forum efforts to get donations of prizes (restaurant and book or toy store gift certificates, movie and museum passes) for parents, we found local merchants intrigued by our idea of a positive program and generally supportive. Some board members have joked that “No one has ever said 'no' to us” -- and it's almost true. Most people really want to support children and families in their communities and welcome opportunities to do so. These solicitations accomplish two goals besides meeting program costs: they get parents talking (sometimes even bragging) about how they are helping each other and becoming better parents and, at the same time, they let other people in the community know about and share in those efforts.
From simple beginnings, Parents Forum has taken shape, somewhat different from the shape we anticipated. Our original goal of providing parent peer support remains unchanged but our approach to engaging parents has evolved.
Through early disappointments -- parents did not participate in our activities in droves, nor did they purchase our handbook by the dozens -- we realized, first, that agencies who convene parent groups are our primary clients and, second, that licensing our curriculum to these agencies is the most effective way to reach individual parents.
An unexpected partner has been a Massachusetts group, Children of Incarcerated Parents (COIP). An incarcerated father who had co-founded COIP posted a message to the Massachusetts Citizens for Children email list in 2003 asking for parenting education to be provided in prison. We began collaborating with COIP, collecting school supplies for children in their 'backpack project' and, with cooperation from the Massachusetts Department of Corrections program division, began giving our workshops at MCI-Norfolk. The experience of giving our workshops, about two each year from 2004 to 2008, has been, in a word, remarkable.
The first agency formally licensing our program was Parents Management Inc., Roxbury, Mass. (2006-2007) and the next was the Joint Committee for Children's Health Care in Everett (2007-2009). Both these community experiences have been very rewarding.
We continue to explore opportunities to partner with other agencies. We welcome inquiries from agencies interested in licensing our curriculum and, of course, from individuals who want to learn about what our program offers as well as from those who can share their talents with us.
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