This is a good starting place for anyone new to Stand Tall Families. We love to help families grow closer together through fun and encouragement. There is a strong focus on building family culture. Culture can be defined as a shared set of values, ideas, and rules of behavior that allow a group to function and keep itself going. On our site, we will apply that concept to groups of people who live under one roof.
There will be loads of posts to give you ideas to connect and build your children up. Children learn most of what they know through watching the examples that are right in front of them. Especially when they watch the people they esteem the most. That is a heavy weight that is put on parents, but the good news is that we can teach so much through positive, fun interactions.
How do we do that though? We don’t claim to have the only way, no one does. What we have to offer has been garnered over the past 30 years of education, experience, and parenting. We’ve had lots of fails and lots of people passing on their wisdom to us. Now it’s our turn to pass along! It is our hope that readers will be inspired to build their kids up with encouragement and fun to be healthy adults.
The encouragement you receive here will be to focus on building an atmosphere of cooperation, instruction, and peace. A spirit of cooperation between parent and child sets the stage for vital lessons to be learned. When parents can instruct their kids without conflict, peace can be the order of the day. And when the home is a place of rest, kids can recover from the world and grow. No one grows, physically, emotionally, or mentally, unless they have time to recover.
We say this with a disclaimer… please do not picture our experience as having been this 100% of the time… you can ask our kids! We will laugh together at the ways we learned the hard way and experienced lots of trial and error. We had to find the path forward towards this, but the intentionality and effort are half the battle! If we can do it, so can you!
Creating a family culture that offers that sweet space for growth can be accomplished most of the time through skills that are widely used by child therapists. Although it takes some learning and practice, parents can affect the behavior of their children greatly by utilizing these interaction skills; praise, reflection, imitation, description, and enthusiasm. These PRIDE skills were developed and tried through 40 years of research for Parent-Child Interaction Therapy. Keep in mind, we are only applying these to general family situations. If you feel like you need professional help, contact a local therapist or go to www.pcit.org to find a practitioner near you.
I hope that you are excited about learning to edify and build up your kids. There was a time in our life when we had written on our whiteboard in our kitchen, “5 + for 1 -.” We needed a constant reminder during those toddler years where correction and redirection were the language of the hour. We needed to dig in and look for positives too! It takes work sometimes, but it is a complete game-changer. It’s still challenging and still the highest use of my time and effort. Nothing else has had a more positive effect on my family and I believe the same will be true for anyone who is dedicated to that end.