Disappoint Your Children Or Else …
- Read Attitude Is All You Need! Second Edition to discover how to improve your relationship and communication skills quickly.
Single Parenting Issues: Parenting a child requires that you focus on their long-term developmental needs & not on their or your emotional needs.
“For the Lord hath given the father honour over the children, and hath confirmed the authority of the mother over the sons.” —Ecclesiasticus 3:2
- Read and discover the best diagrams and maps of how people control and manipulate you.
- Games come easy when single parenting. Learn to stop them.
Single Parenting: Babies Require—
- Babies need someone else to soothe them and care for their every need.
- Babies cannot fend for themselves.
- Babies can only whine to get what they want.
- The emotion of the moment is everything with a baby.
- When you care for soothing the baby in the moment, you also care for your relationship with the baby.
Single Parenting: Relationship Over Emotion
- Unlike parenting a baby, parenting a child requires that you focus on their long-term developmental needs and not their emotional needs of the moment.
- You must put the relationship over the discomfort of the moment—both their discomfort and your discomfort with their whining, blaming, and damning you if you do not fix them and insist that they learn to fix themselves.
Single Parenting: Kids Learn Whining Is Easier than Working
- Why should the child work for what they want when they know they can whine for what they want?
- After all, it is easier to whine than it is to work. It is you who have trained them to whine for what they want.
- Now, train them to work for what they want.
- The child’s job is to make you feel bad so you will do what they want.
- Your job is to choose to be an adult and help them learn to fend for themselves, especially when they are mad at you for it.
Single Parenting: Respect Yourself
- You do not respect those you manipulate, nor do your children.
- You lose your children’s respect and love by not maintaining boundaries, rules, consequences, and choice of words.
Single Parenting: Imaginary Bank Account
- You cannot expect your children to remember all the times that you sacrificed for them and then to do something once for you or your way.
- Your savings account exists only in your mind.
- Instead, teach them to follow the rules now and to find rewards from following the rules, not manipulating the rules.
- Read for diagrams and maps of how people control and exploit you.
- Games come easy when single parenting. Learn to stop them.
Single Parenting: Please Your Ego, Or Love Your Children
- The truth is that you are pleasing your ego (your idea of who you want to appear as) when you rescue and give in to your children (codependency).
- You are not doing it out of love. Love requires that you stand firm and help your children develop, not give in to their demands.
- Your children will one day be mad at you for not bringing them up well.
- All your excuses about not wanting to hurt them now are really about not wanting to hurt your own ego.
- Don’t destroy your children for your self-image!
Single Parenting: Democracy in Part
- Do not argue the rules.
- Set a time to develop and revise the rules every three months.
- The rest of the time, do not argue the rules.
- Laws are laws until they are rewritten as part of the political process (legislature).
- Teach your children how a democracy works by having time to review rules and propose new rules.
- But the rest of the time, do not argue rules.
- Arguing rules with a boss at work or a police officer on duty will get you more problems, not less.
Single Parenting: Boundaries or Destruction
- By giving in and not standing firm, you are teaching and training your children three things: (1) to be insecure, (2) to be manipulators, and (3) to despise you as a wishy-washy loser.
- Studies consistently show that children do better in life if they grow up with discipline.
- Studies also consistently show that children are insecure and unhappy in a home where there is no consistency, no boundaries, ever-changing rules, and meaningless consequences.
- You are setting up your children to have little self-discipline and little respect for others.
- You are setting up your children to have lifelong problems in relationships and at work.
Single Parenting: Teach Self-Soothing
- Your job is not to save your children from frustration.
- Your job is to help your children learn to soothe themselves.
- Teach your children to problem-solve and cope, not to be dependent on others to fix and rescue them.
- Children who are constantly rescued easily turn to drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, eating, romance, spending, and other addictions to fix themselves as they never learned how to fix themselves.
Single Parenting: Teach Self-Discipline
- Where are your children going to learn self-discipline, self-soothing, self-control, self-respect—if not from you?
- If you are not modeling these characteristics and holding your children to these standards, then you are destroying and not loving them.
Single Parenting Issues
- Click for more information.
- Read for diagrams and maps of how people control and exploit you.
- Games come easy when single parenting. Learn to stop them.
Single Parenting: Quotations on Arguing from Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
Listed Alphabetically
“Arguing with your children demonstrates you are going to dance their dance.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Arguing with your children gives credence to their position.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Arguing with your children gives your children equal power and voice, which they don’t have, so this will cause resentments later.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Arguing with your children ignores the fact that their purpose is to gain power and control, not truth.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Arguing with your children ignores the fact that they are not struggling to understand but only to undermine.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Arguing with your children lowers your position and raises theirs.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Arguing with your children proves you are going to dance with their position.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Arguing with your children puts you on the defensive and your children on the offensive.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Arguing with your children shows a lack of understanding of the dynamics of arguing.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Arguing your children’s garbage convinces your children that you respect their garbage.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
Single Parenting: Quotations Various Sources
Listed Alphabetically
“A leader leads by example, whether he intends to or not.” —Anonymous
“A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary.” —Dorothy Canfield Fisher
“A parent owes their children three things: example, example, example.” —Anonymous
“A wise man thinks all that he says. A fool says all that he thinks.” —Church bulletin board
“Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?” —Samuel Johnson
“Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.” —Orson Card
“And all thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great shall be the peace of thy children.” —Isaiah 54:13
“And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” —Ephesians 6:4
“But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation;” —I Peter 1:15
“Children have more need of models than critics.” —Joseph Joubert
“Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.” —Rabbinic saying
“Don’t speak unless you can improve on the silence.” —Spanish proverb
“Draw me not away with the wicked, and with the workers of iniquity, which speak peace to their neighbours, but mischief is in their hearts.” —Psalms 28:3
“Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.” —Colossians 3:21
“Foolishness always results when the tongue outraces the brain.” —Unknown
“For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,” —II Timothy 3:2
“For the Lord hath given the father honour over the children, and hath confirmed the authority of the mother over the sons.” —Ecclesiasticus 3:2
“Home ought to be our clearinghouse, the place from which we go forth lessoned and disciplined, and ready for life.” —Kathleen Norris
“If it’s your job to relieve your child’s frustration, then it’s your child’s job to annoy you.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“If you want children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.” —Abigail Van Buren
“If you want to work for world peace, go home and love your families.” —Mother Teresa
“In disputes between parents and children, the children always get the upper hand.” —Achad Ha’am
“Paradoxically, even though parenting is the hardest and most important job there is, parenting is also the job with the least education, requirements, and training.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Parenting is the only job you are guaranteed to fail at.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Pleasant words are as an honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.” —Proverbs 16:24
“Some man holdeth his tongue, because he hath not to answer: and some keepeth silence, knowing his time.” —Ecclesiasticus 20:6
“Something you consider bad may bring out your child’s talents; something you consider good may stifle them.” —Chateaubriand
“Teach your children to put God first and to soothe themselves, and you are a successful parent.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“The best leader is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” —Theodore Roosevelt
“The best thing any parent can do for their children is to love their other parent.” —This is a paraphrase of someone else’s saying.
“The first duty of love is to listen.” —Paul Tillich, 1886-1965
“The most precious things in speech are pauses.” —Ralph Richardson
“Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.” —Midge Decter
- Read for diagrams and maps of how people control and exploit you.
- Games come easy when single parenting. Learn to stop them.
Single Parenting: Related Pages
- Communication Skills: Free Help
- Parenting & Management Issues: List Pages
- Parenting: 4 Main Failures
- Parenting: A Strategy
- Parenting: John Rosemond VideO (External Link)
- Parenting: Kevin’s 10 Rules
- Scripture Topic: Children
- Scripture Topic: Parenting
- Read for diagrams and maps of how people control and exploit you.
- Games come easy when single parenting. Learn to stop them.