Positive Toddler Parenting™

Want a happy, positive, and well behaved 1 to 4 year old? Read on!

Thanks to Colleen Newman at My Baby And More for ideas and help in making this class successful!

Feel free to visit the Positive Toddler Parenting™ Blog for more tips and information!

Parenting isn’t easy.
With love, limits, and lots of involvement, parents can have a major influence in developing happy, healthy and well-behaved children. Parenting education is the key to raising successful children, creating competent, confident parents, and building strong families and communities. We focus on parent-child communication, nurturing relationships, setting limits, and respectful discipline practices.

We all want the best for our children.
When we bring them home from the hospital, we never imagine how they will be when they reach toddler hood. We are not prepared for the "no's," the messes, the defiance and more! Some days we are at our wits end. Many parents, out of frustration, ultimately resort to methods they said they would never use such as: yelling, grabbing, demeaning their child, spanking and more. This teaches children the person that is bigger can push the "little guy" around. This may lead to bullying behavior later in school, starting at the preschool age! Is that really what we want to teach our children? Do we want to see our toddlers grow to be successful in school and go on to be successful in life? To make good choices for themselves? This course will help you to understand your toddler and see the world through their eyes. Help your child be the positive responsible person you know they can be, by being the positive parent you want to be!!

The Positive Toddler:

Parents are taught how to deal with temper tantrums (and how using ASL can aid in this).*

How playing with your child helps them learn about themselves and their environment.

The importance of introducing music education and instruction at a young age: Research proves that early integration of music into the daily routine helps improve your child's ability to think, create, reason, and express.

Parents will also learn alternatives to yelling and spanking, and how these really affect your child's development in the long run.

Other areas of concern will be addressed as well. (tattling, anger management, sharing, bullying behavior such as hitting, biting etc…).

Baby and Toddler Sign Language:*

How to utilize Wee Hands signing strategies and techniques to easily integrate signing into everyday life with your child, lessen frustration, increase verbal communication and more!

The tools to start your Wee One with the signs they will use most and be able to communicate both verbally as well as with signs, successfully.

How to recognize and identify your child’s early signs.

How to recognize, respond to, and create interactions to communicate with your child.

Your own personal signing manual to immediately get going with the program at home.

* A minimum of 50 ASL signs taught as well as 4 songs to use throughout the day.

Here are a few tips to define success, integrate your parenting goals into your daily activities, and shift your thought process to be more proactive and less reactive:

1. Listen. Listen for understanding. This requires that you stop what you are doing and think about what your child is saying. In difficult situations, stop, get on her level, and look at her. Then say, “I am listening. I am trying to understand what you need or want.” Then listen. When your child knows you are listening and care about what they need, you will lessen the chances of temper tantrums.

2. Make a plan and make it easy. For each of the most important success factors, identify ways you can model to your children that value or behavior while you go about your everyday life. Get your children involved in the process. This is your opportunity to be proactive and reinforce positive actions each day.

3. Be Respectful. No matter what, always teach respect by being respectful. Your words and actions are extremely important in interactions with everyone. Treat your child as you want him to treat you and other people. Remember the "Golden Rule."

4. Set an intention to succeed. Set the image of parenting success clearly in your head and act as if it were already accomplished. Make a commitment to make your success image come true.

5. Review at different stages in your child’s life. Find a way to remind yourself of your intention and your action plan. Review it periodically to make sure it is still relevant to you and appropriate to your childrens’ ages and interests. One of the best ways to ensure that you stay on track with any goal is to find an accountability partner – your spouse, a friend, a coach.

6. Be A Playful Parent. When we play with our children we truly get on their level. Play naturally helps children express and understand their feelings and their environment in safe ways. Play encourages imagination and creative tendencies.

7. Use Humor. Having a sense of humor helps your child become less stressed and feel comfortable in communicating with you.

8. Appreciate your child’s unique personality and talents. Children come into the world with their own personality. While we can guide, support, and influence some aspects of their behavior, who they are at the core is pretty well established in utero! That’s part of what makes them unique and precious, and they should be celebrated.

9. Offer Choices. Instead of giving orders, give your child a "sense" of control by offering them two choices. Children are more willing to cooperate if they feel like they have some control over the process. Give them some “control” throughout the day and you will notice a big difference in their level of cooperation.

10. Use Time In. Time in helps your child to see what he or she did wrong, and correct the problem, rather than just punishing.

11. Be Consistent. Include even the youngest children in making "Family Rules". Then stick to them. It's confusing for children when rules are only enforced some of the time. Only set limits you know you can enforce and then be prepared to take a stand.

12. Say Yes! By using the "When . . . Then" method– If you are looking for cooperation, yes will always work better than no. Try rephrasing the situation to start the sentence with yes. For example: Your child wants to eat ice cream but it is almost time for dinner. Instead of saying no and risking a confrontation or temper tantrum, say Yes! “Yes, when you eat your dinner, then you may have ice cream.” Don’t for get to stick to it!

13. Decide what parenting success means to you. Imagine a point in your child’s future (college graduation, wedding, etc.) when you will reflect on the adult your child has become. Set the platform to be proud of the wonderful person they have become, respecting their inherent traits as well as the values they hold and how they treat others and make decisions.

When you consciously and intentionally model the traits and behaviors you wish for your child, your opportunities to foster those values grow exponentially. You may never get a formal performance appraisal for your job as a parent, but it’s nice to know that you’ve done everything you can to help your child be the best person they can be. Now that’s a job well done!