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One of the central tasks of parenting is teaching psychological skills to your children. If you want them to have the psychological skills of productivity, joyousness, kindness, honesty, fortitude, and others, you'll have a much better chance if you actively teach these skills. One of the first steps is gaining familiarity with what psychological skills are. The following is a chapter from The Competence Approach to Parenting in which I go through a fairly detailed description of the Psychological Skills Axis. If you want to spend some time thinking about the skills that make up psychological health, in some detail, you can click on this chapter. When you have gotten familiar with the psychological skills axis, you can make an informed decision on what skills are highest on the priority list for your child to improve in at this time. You also can generate a list of concrete examples of those psychological skills. You then watch for those examples, and others like them. When you see them, you try to make your response reinforcing. One of the keys is expressing excitement and enthusiasm, particularly if your child is a "stimulus seeker." You also try to remind the child of the positive examples regularly, in a way that is pleasant for both of you. For more on this strategy, you can read the following chapter from The Competence Approach to Parenting. Rejoicing Over Your Child's Positive Examples of Psychological Skills One of the goals of parenting is to help your child not to become a spoiled brat. I am convinced that spoiled brathood is a rather prevalent condition among children in the U.S., particularly among the children of the wealthy. The following selection is a list from a chapter on not spoiling your child from The Competence Approach to Parenting. I fancifully suggest that parents "meditate" on these "mantras" if they wish not to spoil their children. Mantras For Meditation on Not Spoiling Your Child A big problem for our society, and for parents, is that of entertainment violence. This Chapter from The Competence Approach to Parenting reviews evidence on why entertainment violence is harmful and what to do about this problem.
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