I feel like I’ve heard the phrase “Children don’t come with a manual” delivered in two completely opposite tones.  A new parent in exasperation, as well as a new grandparent with a knowing wink.

They’re right in the very limited sense that, when giving birth you don’t deliver a baby, the placenta, and a (hopefully laminated) 500 page book outlining exactly what to do with the first delivery.  But they’re wrong when they claim manuals are not available.  There are THOUSANDS of manuals — Amazon lists 60,000 results when you search for “Parenting Book.”

I’ve read a few, but none have had the impact of “Parent Effectiveness Training” by Dr. Thomas Gordon.  Gordon was a student of Carl Rogers, and I’m a big Rogers fan (weird fandom, I know), so I figured it was worth picking up.

It was!  Read it!  I’m also going to review it a little so I remember it better.

In the book, Gordon outlines some key attitudes parents should have, as well as some skills that they can develop to become better parents.  Many of these attitudes overlap with attitudes required for “helping relationships” that Rogers outlines in “On becoming a person,” so they resonated with me.

The skills are useful because they offer concrete things to practice and do, and I think most of them also help develop attitudes.  I think this is one area where Rogers and Gordon probably wouldn’t be in perfect alignment — Rogers was more focused on cultivating the appropriate attitudes and then allowing those attitudes to organically create the right behaviors.  I’m not going to say one perspective or the other is right, but I will say as a parent sometimes just maintaining the appropriate attitudes in your head is a struggle, and it helps to have something concrete to fall back on when you would otherwise just … lose it, you know?  When a child has created a mural in their room with feces, it is difficult to maintain an acceptant attitude.

I’m going to briefly outline some of these attitudes and skills below.  If they resonate, or seem interesting, pick up the book!  I can’t recommend it enough.  I also hope to write blog posts about each attitude and/or skill to, again, help me remember and implement them.

• Be who you really are — many people talk about being a “friend” parent or an “authoritative” parent, but Gordon’s point is to just be who you are as a person — to not put on a “front” for your child.
• Communicate acceptance — this one is too complicated and easy to misunderstand for a simple paragraph, so I’ll just say it’s probably not what you’re thinking, and it is how you communicate to your children that you love them and that they are safe with you.
• Allow the owners of problems to resolve them — Gordon uses the concept of a “behavior window” to illustrate that some problems parents own (when a child does something that bothers the parent), and some problems children own (a child having a hard time with something at school) and that you need to approach these problems differently.
• Passive listening — allowing a child to talk without redirecting them in any way
  • This often involves “Door openers” — short phrases that invite children to talk
• Active Listening — this is a listening skill that helps parents work with children to both understand what is really on their mind, and to help them work through problems themselves.  It can be incredibly powerful.
  • Both passive and active listening are involved in avoiding what he calls the “12 communication roadblocks”
• Sending “I-messages” — this is a way of communicating with a child when a behavior is unacceptable, without putting down or demeaning the child.
  • It’s also a really good way to clarify for the parent what the behavior exactly is, and if the child needs to change something, or the parent does.
• Changing behavior by changing the environment — this is something I’d realized early on in parenting.  It is often much easier to change the environment into one where kids can have more freedom, then to constantly be restricting your kids verbally (or physically).
• No-lose conflict resolution
  • This is a huge one that stretches for several chapters and includes effective and ineffective means of conflict resolution, as well as tackling more fundamental question like “should parents resolve a conflict using their parental power”

When you write it all out it’s not a huge, graduate degree curriculum.  There’s a half dozen skills that, if learned, greatly improve daily life in a family, help the parents have less stress, and help the children develop into thoughtful, considerate people.  So read the book!  I’ll come back and look at these skills one-by-one later.