Motherhood Tips 4

Thursday, 04. February 2010 by Renee Ellison

Please forward to other mothers who spend the majority of their social contact hours relating with persons yet in progress…somewhere between just walking and sky-diving.

Parenting Tip: Training vs. tyranny
Parenting is not really very much about punishment at all, it is about TRAINING.  Anticipating the problems and TRAINING the responses.  Your goal is to train so well ahead of time, and THOROUGHLY THROUGH and AFTER each encounter, that your child will eventually rarely need punishment at all.

Training involves talking about expectations ahead of time (tactical psychological warfare) for high-schoolers, but involves actual practice SESSIONS in the flesh for the youngins.  (Please note, the common examples I use below are in everyone ELSE’s home, not yours!  No, I did not look into your home just this morning to find these examples.  They are everywhere.  You’re among very friendly, understanding OTHER mothers just like yourself.)

Let’s look more closely at building the foundation, what those practice SESSIONS look like. Have as your goal, to take some time in small quiet moments, (you DO have SOME of these throughout your days), to raise the standard of acceptable behavior in your child’s MIND. When your child is peaceable, take that time to inspire, to describe, to practice what obedience FEELS like in the flesh…CALMLY.

A horse trainer puts his horses through the paces in PRIVATE, BEFORE they encounter the spotlights and the distractions.  And after the young horses have been in the spotlights and he notes the weak areas, he brings them back to the practice arena again and again, to diminish what can go wrong in the spotlights the next time…he actually OVER-TRAINS his beloved horses to ensure it WON’T go wrong.  This is precisely what a professional musician does.  Practices like crazy, and then performs.  Whatever passage falls apart under pressure gets hauled back to the practice room to give it “what for” once again!

Train your child to come to you at your FIRST REQUEST in your own living room.  Or your own backyard.  Practice it.  Practice it when he is happy.  Give him a big reward at first.  Praise him.  Practice WHISPERING the same command and getting the same obedient response.  Then ratchet it up a level.  Practice it when he starts getting absorbed in something else and doesn’t want to.  Practice it.  Repeat it.  Go over it again.  The goal?  First call, instant response, cheerful attitude every time.  Don’t quit until this is engraved into his autonomic nervous system, and he knows you mean business.

Now this is the anatomy of a training session.  This method can be used to obtain obedience in any area:  It can be done over what to eat, what to wear, how to do a chore, how to sit in a car-seat,  how to not talk when a guest IS talking, etc. over 1,000 points of a civilized life.

One:  First of all you have a nice quiet talk about all the people who do this attribute splendidly, in your current life, among relatives.  If it’s applicable, you can also point out historical and biblical characters who were models of exemplary behavior.

Two:  Then ask a few questions.  “When Daddy sits in the car and buckles his seat belt, does he thrash about or scream?  Have you EVER seen daddy scream putting his seat belt on?  Have you ever seen Julie’s daddy, down the street, do that?  Do YOU want to still be screaming when YOU ARE A DADDY over such a little thing as a car seat?  Have you ever seen your mom throw her food?  Have you ever seen Aunt Tizzy slam her book down?  Have you ever seen Uncle Harry hit and bite your grandmother!!!  Barking dogs do these things, not people!

“Now, because you CHOSE to scream, thinking you WERE a barking dog, or CHOSE to throw something in the house, thinking you were in a baseball field, you will now face the consequences, so that you can make BETTER choices next time.”

Three:  Then you practice what obedience feels like in the flesh.

If the child protests over anything you ask him to do, you make sure and have him do a little bit MORE of the thing he just protested about…until he can do it peacefully without the protest.  You surprise him with this outcome LATER, not during the crisis.  Just get through the crisis.  Then later in the day have a quiet talk, “You know when I asked you to do such and such, earlier in the day, you threw a little fit.  I just want you to clearly understand that every little fit will always COST you something…even if you don’t see the results right away.  They WILL eventually happen to you…EVERY time, so now:

…because you threw a fit over the shoes or shirt I asked you to wear today, you will wear them AGAIN tomorrow…and if you throw an ADDITIONAL fit right now over THAT news, you will be wearing them again the next day.

…because you threw a fit when you got in your car seat before we went to town, I will now bring the car seat in the house and set up the sand timer next to it and you will sit in the car seat until the sand runs out (just a minute or two) QUIETLY, and if you have trouble with that little task, we will do it again, when you least expect it and when you are happily trying to do something else.

…because you threw a fit over the broccoli, you will now have ONLY the broccoli, BEFORE you get anything else to eat.”  Then just place one tiny lonely spoonful on an empty plate, placing the full plate of preferred food immediately next to it so that the child SEES his upcoming reward.  Make it a policy that with all food only serve a tiny portion of everything.  You can always dollop on seconds, and thirds later, after they have eaten the little bit of everything.  You will waste next to no food this way.  Families who don’t adopt this plan with all food, waste unspeakable amounts of food/money, feeding their trash cans.

Meet each protest with a protest of your own…a quiet dignified one.  Every time.  If your goal is to train up a magnanimous adult and not a rigid willful one, you’ve got to train IN the flexibility, adaptability, and suppleness, and train OUT the habit of the quickly formed smoldering storms.

Home Management Tip: Hands that work
Wear green gloves.  Or thick blue ones.  Yellow housecleaning gloves are worthless.  They tear on the way home.  Get good thick work gloves at a janitorial supply store or a hardware store and wear them frequently.  Get one size larger than your hand size, so that you can slip them on and off effortlessly many times a day, plunging your hands in and out of all kinds of water, grime, grease, and sludge.  Wearing these gloves dissolves all squeamishness over any unpleasant job.  So “armed” there is no job that will defy you, no matter how dirty.  Because you gain the upper “hand” physically, you gain it psychologically, too.  Put ‘em on, whistle Dixie, and go tackle your house.

Kitchen Tip: Triglyceride euphoria
Coconut oil is fabulous for your health.  It has completely replaced butter in our house.  Order a big bucket of it and dig in.  You can have 1 or 2 large TABLESPOONS of it a day to good effect.  It has medium chain triglycerides in it seldom found in most other foods, that your body’s cells simply go wild over.  We think organic virgin cold pressed (expeller pressed) is best…but any coconut oil will do, for awhile, if money is tight.  If you need a source from which to order it: a homeschooling family in California gets it straight “from the coconuts!”  order at 1-877-841-2861 or see their website at http://thehomegrownfamily.com/ and click on the open coconut in the upper right.

Sewing Tip: Machines, the good, the bad and the ugly
Let’s talk machines.  The verdict is out there.  Every big-city sewing machine repair guy knows the answer to which are the best machines, because they and their assistants fix 3 to 4,000 of them per year, including all the public school machines, if they’re good and their reputation gets out.  I’ve spent not a few hours hob-knobbing with repair guys over machines in several different cities.  I always beg to watch (thinking I’ll figure out how to fix them and save money for the future).  Never happens, but I DO find out lots of OTHER things by talking to them WHILE they work.  Bottom line: you want a machine that is seldom in the repair shops.

That would be a…?  …A Bernina.  “Nothing sews like a Bernina.  Nothing.”  (Those are the words of their own world-wide uncontested logo…and apparently most everyone agrees).  ‘tis the Rolls-Royce and BMW of sewing machines, all wrapped up in one.  It produces a perfect patented hook stitch every time.  Crafted in Switzerland in a white gloved manufacturing plant, dotted with precision scientists.  Impeccable manufacturing history.  Owned by one positively brilliant Swiss family for generations.  The last machine they rolled out involved 6M dollars to design, involved over 19 new patents…and took them two years to develop.  Cost?  $17,000.  Too bad your embroidery sewing machine can’t also be your house!  Solution?  Hunt for used basic Bernina machines on E-Bay, not too old, because it is hard to get older parts for these.

If you can’t find an affordable Bernina, purchase a good solid Janome.  Janome has done its homework and is an affordable utility machine made in Japan, not China.  (They even have just produced a brand new treadle sewing machine to replace the old clunkers if your grandma has a spare old treadle around, and you wanta be prepared if the power goes out.  The Amish are replacing their old machines with these.  A dealer in New Jersey has been offering a good deal on these.)  If you use inferior machines, it won’t be long before you are using no machines at all…too much hassle.

If you’ve already got a basic machine, save your pennies to purchase a serger next so that the inside of your garment seams can look just as good as the outside…like store bought “ready to wear.”  The Janome Professional 1100D is top of the line excellent and if you don’t want to have to thread one BabyLock Eclipse, Imagine or Evolve priced from lowest to highest threads itself.  Look on E-Bay.

Unless you plan on spending a great deal of time and money sewing, skip the embroidery machines.  Pay someone a little something to embroider a collar or two FOR YOU or purchase little pre-made appliqués and hand sew them on.  You’d need a whale of a lot of little two inch embroidery projects to compensate for a 5 to 10 G machine!  Of course if you’re obsessive compulsive about colored thread, go for it.  Used.

Marriage Tip: Absentee husbands
Ruth Graham, Billy Graham’s wife had an absentee husband.  Every time she kissed him good-bye, it was a long time before he hugged her hello… meeting him often again and again only on stage or on national TV.  Suzanna Wesley had an absentee husband.  He lived on the road as a traveling galloping pastor, periodically galloping through the home just long enough to start the babies…all 17 of them.  Many women cope with absentee husbands.  Husbands who are even HOME and STILL absent!  Some women wistfully dream of their husbands getting a home-based business (99% of which fail, if they are the ONLY means of income) so that they can be home to HELP with HER job, too, not just in the evenings but for every single hour of the day.  Some husbands work too late at night.  So what do we do?  Tell him, remind him, sometimes heartfully implore him, and then promptly FORGET IT and GO ON, at least today.  Do the same thing tomorrow.  Adjust and adapt and GO ON.

Ruth Graham said to the children as soon as Billy Graham took off down the road…”OK, children, race you to the attic… let’s go clean ‘er up !!!  As soon as pastor Wesley was out of sight, Suzanna Wesley started in on grammar lessons… AGAIN… holding John and Charles (the profoundly scholarly and spiritually strong founders of the Methodist church) under her wise, exacting, all-seeing intellect.

Once I asked an old German lady how she coped with her husband being gone so much: “She looked at me puzzled, “Why I just get busy and do my projects, I get sooooooo much DONE, when he is not home!”  And she had a VERY happy marriage when he WAS home!  Some women have the reverse problem, a husband who is HOME too much!  But that is another day’s topic!  I tell ya, if it isn’t one problem, …it’s another….

Devotions Tip:
Prayer is your own private “Mount of Transfiguration.”  You simply come out of the closet different from when you went in.  Prayer has its holding power for hours afterwards.  And over a lifetime, where you spent your time, how many trips up that mountain you disciplined yourself to take, can actually be seen in your face.