How to be a Better Parent

Some Children Just Won’t Listen!

What do you do if your child simply won’t listen to you? You’ve tried cajoling, pleading, begging. You’ve nagged and repeated, shouted and screamed. You’ve asked nicely, then more sternly, you may even have laughed it off (‘kids, eh? What can you do?’). Exhausted and exasperated, you resort to: ‘if you do that just ONE more time…’. Then what?
Can’t think of anything? What’s a fair punishment after all? No party today? No toys tomorrow? No playdates for a week? No chocolate for a month? No computer for a year? No doing anything ever again unless I say so?!!

Parents Need a Parenting Manual

Parenting may be a joy but it isn’t always a bed of roses. Nature permitting, anyone can have kids. There’s no pre-requisite training and unlike your new TV, your little bundle arrives without a full set of instructions. For those of you with naturally easy, highly co-operative little darlings, you can stop reading now. But for the rest of us, a little help and support (preferably on hand, as and when, for the next 20 years or so!) is not to be sniffed at. In the pages of this section, you’ll find tried and tested parenting methods, courses, books and CDs. And do you know what? They actually work.

Help at Hand!

Fairy godmother Noël Janis-Norton can be found in leafy North West London with her highly effective Calmer, Easier, Happier Parenting programme. Calmer, Easier, Happier Parenting is about positive parenting techniques, designed to smooth the parenting path and restore harmony at home. Fed up with tears and tantrums? Check out Noël’s articles on our site, listen to the CDs (they are worth every penny) and more than anything, if you’re really in trouble, go and see her. Noël does one-to-one sessions and runs weekly parenting courses. The techniques are easy to learn are absolutely invaluable for calming tricky kids.

But if North West London proves too far, Noël has trained the founders of The Parent Practice, who run similar courses in South London with great success. (See ‘It’s Okay to be Angry’.) And if you’re out of London, heck there’s always Skype. (Unless you’re in LA, in which case you’re in luck because Noël runs courses out of there too.)

Family therapist and Human Givens practitioner, Miriam Chachamu, has also worked with Noël. Miriam is the author of easy-to-read, easy-to-follow parenting guide: ‘How to Calm a Challenging Child’. It is packed full of positive parenting tips, excerpts of which appear on our site. For more on the Humans Givens approach, go to our ‘Natural Health and Treatments’ section. But for now, I would suggest you start with Descriptive Praise, the first of our articles and the number one motivator for tricky kids.