The Nobility of Parenting

Family First
by Dr. Phil McGraw

(Page 2 of 3)

As a parent, you're the head of your family, and therefore you occupy an unbelievably powerful role in shaping the tone, texture, mood and quality of this interconnected and vitally important unit. You're a system manager. By successfully managing this system, you can parent your way to a phenomenal family — and avoid the problems and erosion seen in so many of the families in your very own neighborhood.

But let me ask you:

• What kind of family manager have you been up until now?

• Are you working on a day-to-day basis at managing your family, treating it as a project, giving it the priority it deserves?

• Are you creating a family environment that brings out the best in your child?

• Do you have the skills necessary to give your child his or her best chance at succeeding in this world?

• Have you overcome any "family legacy" that has contaminated the way in which you define and parent your family?

• If the other parent is in the home or active in the children's lives post-divorce, do the two of you have a parenting plan that provides guidance based on consistent values?

• Do you have a plan and an objective in mind for what successful parenting is and will yield in your child's life?

• Have you created an environment that generates feelings of safety, security, belongingness, self-confidence and strength for the child or children in your charge?

• Is your family nurturing your child's individuality and acting to ensure that he or she will become the unique and authentic person God intended?

I know you just answered those questions, but I ask you to go back and read them over again, and this time answer them keeping in mind that you are writing your children's future with your answers. Those questions are just a beginning of the self-examination you must be willing to do if you're going to strengthen the foundation on which your children are basing their lives. Frankly, I know that some of you reading this book right now are making choices and decisions that are setting your children up for disastrous failure. You may not know it, and you may not see the effects today, but trust me, you'll see them in the future if you're making the same mistakes so many well-intending parents unwittingly make. Are you one of those parents? Are you setting up your child to turn to drugs, violence, promiscuity, alcohol or withdrawal from life and all it has to offer? I intend to make it very clear to you whether your parenting practices are likely to yield unfortunate results, and if so, how to change them, starting right now this very day.

If you want a healthy and nurturing family, and successful and productive children, you must commit yourself to acquiring the insight and skills necessary to live the values that you know in your heart are so important. You didn't pick this book up because you wanted to study up on a bunch of child development theories. You bought this book because you care about your children and want action-oriented information about how to give them their best chance for success. You picked it up because you care about your family life.

I've so often heard parents say, "I would die for my children." Well, I don't want you to die for your children, but I do want you to live for your children.

Your role as a parent is the highest, noblest calling you will ever have in your life. What's more, I believe that you can and will rise to that challenge if given the proper knowledge and tools for this important task. I know that you already possess the most powerful and important ingredient to succeeding. That critical factor is an unconditional and heartfelt love and devotion you have for your child. But it takes much, much more than love and good intentions because you aren't the only influence in your child's life.

You must become highly aware, deeply committed and pointedly proactive. Parents everywhere are in a major tug-of-war with a slick, false-promising, glittery, well-marketed world to determine who is going to write the script of their children's lives. Given the current state of the world, I intend to hang on to my end of the rope with both hands and play a key role in writing that script. Solid values and morality seem to have stopped being a way of life and have simply become a punch line for the jokes of the fast-laners. Gone are the days when cheating in school was just some isolated case of some lazy kid copying off of the smart kid; today over half of students admit to cheating. Some kids are even using high-tech electronic pagers during tests and plagiarizing term papers off the Internet. Where once a kid could buy illegal drugs on a street corner in the bad part of town, today he can do it on the Internet from the kitchen table while you sit not ten feet away. In a phenomenon called "friends with benefits," children as young as twelve and thirteen are engaging in oral sex with no more thought or consideration than you once gave to holding hands or a peck on the cheek. No relationship, no emotion, just sex. One hundred percent of the children with access to a computer can view pornography with the click of a mouse. Our kids today are what I call an All-Access-Pass Generation.

It would be Pollyannaish for me to suggest that it is possible to shield your child completely from all of the negativity and temptation in today's world. I can't do that and I don't think anybody else can either.

But what I can do is help you add to the plus side of your child's ledger. Since you can't eliminate the bad influences, you must create deep, meaningful and consistently positive and well-grounded experiences, values and beliefs to counterbalance the negative. You must do it even though your children may roll their eyes and seem resistant. You must do it even though you're being pulled in a million different directions every minute of every day. That it is difficult makes it no less important and no less necessary.

Bad results don't just happen in the lives of other people's kids, and that is why there is all the more reason to vow to protect your own. Raising your family is not a dress rehearsal, and it can be a 24/7 job that will last for twenty-plus years, so you ought to know how to do it and do it well.

As I've pointed out, what you need in addition to the love in your heart is a very specific, step-by-step plan of action for leading your family and parenting with purpose. What you need is a really good guidance system so you know that you are tracking the target of success from one day to the next. You need to know how to create a phenomenal family and acquire the tools that will make that happen. Your family is worthy of everything you want for them; what you will learn here will help you.

All your children will ever be, they are now becoming. Let's be honest: If you're like any parent I have ever met you want your child to be the star in his or her own life — the soloist in the choir, the quarterback on the football team, the lead in the play, the beauty queen, the honor roll student or the one in the best schools. Not only that, you also want your children to be happy, secure, self-assured and confident. You want to protect your child from getting shoved in the playground, picked on by bullies or molested by sickos, safe from failure and adversity and from social and interpersonal pain in general. On top of it all, you want your children to love you, accept you, respect and admire you.

What you do with them today, when they are two, three, four, five, six or sixteen years of age, will determine what they will do at age twenty-four, thirty-four or forty-four. You are raising adults. Right now, they are under construction, like a new house being built from the ground up. Once that house gets completed, it is subjected to the forces of nature and the wear and tear of life. Will its foundation crack, or its roof leak? Will it hold up or cave in?

Will your children withstand the pressures of their lives and worlds, or crack when the going gets tough? Is theirs a strong foundation for what is to come? The answers to those questions depend largely on how you mold and shape your children, their values, their behavior, their ability to make sound decisions on their own, and how well you honor their individuality and nurture their unique gifts and talents. In short, it depends on what you do today to help them become responsible adults tomorrow. Do you know the saying, "Children are messages we deliver to a future we may never see"? You are preparing future adults and you are preparing future families. You're in hot pursuit of what's best for your children and your family, but you may not know which way to go or how to reach for it. That's what a "really good plan" is all about.

I'm sure it's no surprise coming from me, but the key to that plan is you. As in most things in life, the challenge of raising a successful family cannot and will not happen until you decide to clean house inside yourself first. The journey begins with you. You can't be one kind of person and another kind of parent. If you don't scrape away all the layers of your past pain and disappointment and self-destructive legacies and bad spirit, then no matter what else you learn about successful parenting, you'll have such low standards and poor values that you'll continue to sabotage your, your children's and your family's opportunities for a joyful life.

I believe we all have something I call "personal truth." Your personal truth is what you really believe about yourself when you're not "performing" and not wearing your social mask and trying to put your best foot forward. It's what you really believe about yourself when nobody is looking and nobody is listening. This personal truth is so important, because I believe that we generate for ourselves and our families the results that we believe we deserve. If we do not believe that we, our family, are worthy of a phenomenal life, we will never have a phenomenal life. If you believe you're some second-class citizen, some undeserving individual, then you'll generate results that are consistent with that belief. That's why it's so important that you look first to yourself to make sure that there is not some compromised sense of worth or value that is limiting what you can create for your family.

Your personal truth will be clearly reflected in what I call your "attitude of approach." You probably inherited most or all of your approach and that may not be a good thing. If, for example, you were abused, emotionally neglected or just overindulged, those life experiences may have powerfully and boldly written on the slate of who you are, causing you to carry forward a compromised personal truth that can and will infect your children with the same things you learned. As a result you may have a much more challenging time raising a joyful child and creating a joyful family, the very two things that should be uppermost in your priorities. Joyful children don't come to be because they were born with a "joyful gene." Joyful children are taught how to live, think, interact, control their emotions, express themselves, discipline themselves the same way they learn how to ride a bike or tie their shoes. They're taught how to be joyful. That is one of your challenges, since the ability to raise joyful children is a learned skill.

When it comes to raising a family and parenting children, nobody ever really taught you the rules, let alone how to play the game. Think about it: Why are our kids turning to drugs, alcohol and sex at younger and younger ages? Because nobody has ever taught people how to parent their children in a way that keeps them from needing to turn to those escape mechanisms to feel the way they want to feel.

Since you didn't get any formal child-rearing training from society, you've probably relied on role models. Yet because our own parents were never trained to be effective mothers and fathers, what kind of role models could they be? In fact, I submit to you that if you've been fortunate to have parents who were positive role models, you — and they — can thank blind luck or even trial and error that they got it right, because it's a safe bet training had little to do with it. Simply put, this means not only that you may lack crucial information, but that the information you do have may be wrong. Sometimes, the hardest part in learning new and better skills is unlearning the old ways of doing.

I've designed this book to meet you at whatever point you find yourself. I did not want to guess at where that was. I did not want to assume that I knew what to include in this to ensure it was absolutely, bull's-eye responsive to your needs. Accordingly, I spent over a year designing and conducting a massive research project examining the family and parenting issues facing all of us raising children in today's world. The research project included over 17,000 respondents who generated over 1.5 million pieces of data. That data was then subjected to vigorous clinical and statistical analysis.

The analysis examines such issues as the most critical problems faced by parents, parents' greatest fears, children's levels of responsivity to different parenting approaches, parents' greatest needs for assistance and information and an overall assessment of attitudes and outlook for the future. (As you read Family First, pay attention to the "Survey Facts" that appear throughout the book. Each block of information contains eye-opening data about how mothers and fathers feel about their job as parents. You'll find more information about my National Parenting Survey in the Appendix.)

It doesn't matter whether you have good, well-adjusted kids whom you want to see do better and become better, or alternatively, defiant, misbehaving kids who seem headed for jail rather than college. Or maybe you have kids in crisis, a child on drugs or a teenager who is depressed. The tools are the same, whether your child is on the honor roll or the police blotter.

No matter how crazy things get or how stressed you feel, you know in your heart how fortunate you are to be given the precious, priceless treasure of children. I encourage you then to see this job of parenting as noble, as a privilege with which you've been entrusted and to take from that responsibility a feeling of meaning and significance.

Reading this book is not intended to be a passive experience. As you progress through it, you'll see that it's a hands-on, action-oriented book. Every chapter calls on you to play an active role. You'll learn, and put into play, skills in example-setting, discipline, negotiation, communications, intelligence-building, strengthening self-worth and self-confidence, behavior control and family lifestyle management, useful not only in raising your children, but also in structuring the content of your family life so that it supports and uplifts your efforts. Get these skills right and the rest of your life as a parent will be easy.

If you can bring up your children to be the confident, competent people they deserve to be, you'll have successfully fulfilled your purpose as a parent and given your children the greatest of all gifts. That's what I want for my children, and I know it is what you want for yours.

It is not too late. Isn't today the day to begin? If you have a great family with great kids, then let's build on that strength. If you feel you have blown it so far, then it is time to "re-parent" your children. Re-parenting means going back to the basics and setting new goals, rules, guidelines and boundaries. It means becoming the parent God intended when he blessed you with the gift of your children. Start by waking up every morning and asking yourself: What can I do today to make my family better? What can I do today to introduce something positive into my children's lives? What can I find that is good in each child and how can I acknowledge it?

Game on. My plan is for you and your family to be the winners.

Copyright © 2004 by Phillip C. McGraw

About the Author

Dr. Phil Mcgraw is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Ultimate Weight Solution, Self Matters, Life Strategies, and Relationship Rescue. He is the host of the nationally syndicated, daily one-hour series Dr. Phil. One of the world's foremost experts in the field of human functioning, Dr. McGraw is the cofounder of Courtroom Sciences, Inc., the world's leading litigation consulting firm. Dr. McGraw currently lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife and two sons.