Where we unlock the secrets of excellent parenting so your kids can flourish!
After much anticipation, your baby has arrived and is finally in your arms. As hospitals are in the business of making sure your baby is born healthy and the mother is well, they quickly teach you about the umbilical cord, breastfeeding, and diaper changing. Then, they send you home…
You buckle that sweet little babe into the car seat and head home. There you go! You are set and know everything it takes to be a good parent! NOT! No one teaches you how to parent or what to do now that you are a parent.
Being a parent is one of the most important things we will ever do but
NO ONE EVER TEACHES US HOW TO PARENT!
And you didn’t even get a set of instructions or a manual! At least with your flat screen TV you got a manual! Where is the manual for this little one? Or an online link with little Jo-Jo’s name and how-to instructions?
Bet you spent hours researching which car seat to buy and setting up the nursery, but did you take a parenting class or read a book on how to raise a child? Most of us don’t. But WHY not? Before our little bundle of joy arrives, we‘ve most likely spent more time researching a vacation or the car we are going to buy than we have spent learning how to be a parent. Shoot! Before our first kid came, most of us had spent more time studying for our driver’s license than we had studied about being a parent. Or how about all the hours we spent studying for the class that we have never used the information from? Ever?
If you think about it, it’s kind of strange that we aren’t taught any parenting skills before we have children.
If you want to cut someone’s hair, you have to spend several years at cosmetology school. If you want to be a trucker, you have to go to school. If you want to work at a fast-food place, you have to get a food handler’s permit. If you want to have a daycare in your home, you have to take classes, get your home inspected and jump through all kinds of hoops!
Same thing if you want to adopt; they do a criminal background check, inspect your home, make you fix things that might be even the slightest bit dangerous, make you take parenting classes, put you through an extensive interview process, and dig deep into your psyche. Then after the baby is in your home, more home visits, more interviews, and doctor’s reports on well-checks and vaccinations…THEN, after you’ve passed everything, you can go to court and finalize the adoption…
But typically, you don’t normally have to learn anything to be a parent??? What???? That is so crazy!
Does good parenting just naturally happen? Absolutely not!
“The most important work you and I will ever do will be within the walls of our own homes.” Harold B. Lee
We tend to copy the parenting examples we had growing up. And that can be scary since our parents probably just did what their parents did, maybe a little better, maybe a little worse. And, some of us come from “happy homes” while others of us come from dysfunctional homes with toxic parents. Are we really going to leave our parenting skills up to chance? Or default? But that is what we do!
When you were growing up, did you ever vow to yourself, “I’ll NEVER be like that with my kids!” but then catch yourself, now, thinking you sound just like your mom or dad or see yourself doing the very thing you said you wouldn’t? Some of us succeed at breaking negative patterns but most of us are shocked to find just how much we parent like our parents did. We can hear our parents in our responses to our children. We are at the mercy of whatever type of parent we had and seem to be unable to break through those patterns we learned when we were so impressionable. Some of it is good stuff we want to keep but we need to get rid of the bad or, the not-so-good stuff we learned.
Oh, and hey! That little bundle of joy that (shockingly) is keeping you up at night now and has you turning to the internet in desperation to figure out how to get him to sleep through the night? He is just going to get bigger and challenge you in completely different ways. And, the tough times you go through when they are infants and toddlers, just turn into different types of tough times as they get older. And then they are teenagers…
We don’t think about learning how to parent until we have problems and then we wonder what in the world is going on. Suddenly, we run to learn how the heck to handle it!
What if, however, we really learn and study about how to raise our children BEFORE there are problems?
What if we set up the home and our relationships with our kids in the healthiest way possible, now? Oh, and what if you are already in the middle of the tougher times? That is O.K! It isn’t too late to make things better. Yep, the principles we offer help even with the older kids and tougher problems.
The principles, answers, and skills are here, waiting to be learned…
That is what we are about at Kudos for Families! We want to give you everything we can to help you in your parenting journey so you and your kids can thrive. We want you to have the knowledge and skills you need BEFORE there is a big problem so you can handle it coming from a healthy, helpful place.
“I want to have the knowledge before the problem so we aren’t trying to navigate the problem and inexperience at the same time.” T.S.
“I want to think first and react with the right amount of time needed for the outcome to be the most positive it can be.” C.W.
Everyone wants their family to flourish. Kudos for Families will help you set up a home environment where your kids learn values and responsibility and where family love and unity grow and thrive.
