Family Leadership Training

Overview and Philosophy

Purpose: to create environments which invite and develop caring, responsible, self-directed members of society.

Mission: to teach adults how to shift management strategies from those that rely on motivation by reward and punishment to those which invite children to develop the internal control to initiate and maintain positive behavior, and to produce secure, connected, competent and autonomous citizens.

Vision: education within each community that teaches Esteem skills to those entrusted with children's care: parents and grandparents, child care providers, preschools and schools.

Background: for the past 10 years, Patricia Belvel, the founder of TCI, Inc. has served as an educational consultant in school districts in northern California, training teachers in classroom management strategies. Observation in over 3,000 classrooms prompted a real concern about the lack of internal control and the high need for external control in classroom settings.

Research documents a significant change in children's behavior in the last the ten years. Students come to school with fewer social skills than they did previously; they lack an ability to work together and resolve conflict. Suicide rates are alarming; drug use is prevalent.

Many young people today lack a sense of identity, purpose, self-respect, and responsibility for their own actions. Adherence to social norms is dependent on what they might get or what they can avoid; they have little sense of inner direction or internal motivation. Research identifies two common characteristics in youth 'at risk':

1. alienation, a lack of connectedness and belonging
2. lack of positive social influence; young people don't feel that they make a difference.

With sociological and technological changes, there are fewer natural occasions for children to learn the basic prerequisites of caring, sharing, deciding, acting and following through. Parents today often have little opportunity or training in how to teach these social skills. While it is valuable to train educators to provide these abilities, the parent is the child's primary teacher and should be the focus of training. Parents hold the key to building social values.

Today's society requires effective parents to be consciously competent, as they parent on less than two hours a day. Preventive parent education is more effective and less expensive than intervention, e.g. drug rehabilitation, juvenile probation, prison. Parent education should be provided as early in the child's life as possible.

Training & Consulting Institute's object is to provide parents with basic skills, based on a self-esteem model that builds relation ship and develops a sense of security, connectedness, competence and influence.

Meeting the Objective

How TCI's Family Leadership Parent Education meets the objective:
The foundation of the Esteem model is bonded, connected relationships between parent and child.	Family Leadership Parent Education teaches parents the skills necessary to build high self-esteem.
Empowered parents focus on what they can do rather than who is to blame or why by viewing family problems as learning opportunities rather than as individuals being problems.	Families learn a parenting system that develops the child's ability to initiate and maintain positive behavior rather than depending on the external motivation of rewards and punishment.
Parents are regarded as the primary teacher.	Parents gain tools that prevent and address the cause of problems instead of the symptoms.
Participants gain principles and concepts that can be applied to a variety of situations rather than a set of rules or prescriptions. Immediate and long term benefits:
family stress is reduced	skills transfer to other relationships
people are able to work together more effectively	successful responses can be recognized, repeated and taught to others
a systems approach is easy to use and remember	family relationship is strengthened

Parenting Modules

• Module 1: Parenting 101 - Building the Foundation
  Establishing Security & Connection (prerequisite for all modules)
  • The Parent/Child Relationship
  • Parents' Coping Styles
  • Gifts Without Strings

   

• Module 2: Self-Esteem
  Creating the environment for self-confidence
  • Security - consistent vs. rigid
  • Connectedness - bonded vs. isolated
  • Competence - capable vs. helpless/dependent
  • Influence - involved vs. conforming
  • Handling children's perceptions
  • Communicating during upsets

   

• Module 3: Setting Parameters/Boundaries (prerequisite Module 1)
  Creating Security & Competence
  • Clarifying Family standards
  • Family Rules
  • Household Procedures
  • Target Talk - upholding norms

   

• Module 4: Handling Upsets - Children's and Parent's (prerequisite Module 1)
  Maintaining relationships during upsets
  • Listening
  • Discipline vs. punishment - alternatives
  • Temporary interventions

   

• Module 5: Problem Solving (prerequisite Modules 1, 3, 4)
  Developing a sense of influence: Avoiding Power Struggles
  • Creating opportunities for decision making
  • Teaching responsibility
  • Problem Solving conversations

   

• Module 6: Staying on Target (prerequisite Module 1 and 2 and others)
  Creating a forum for support
  • Facilitated Review & Support meetings