If you could create the ideal home for your family, what would that look like? What would it include?
By Nathalie Bowman
Think about this question in terms of the physical ideal if you’d like, but more importantly, think about the environment you’d like to create. What is the feeling in your home when you first enter? Do you and your children feel glad to be home, or does it sometimes feel like a burden to be there?
What would you like it to be? Is your home welcoming or private? Does it matter? Do the children feel free to be themselves; do they love learning; do they feel free to make mistakes, knowing there will be consequences, but they will be loved as they learn to do better? Do you feel confident in your ability to draw boundaries and discipline with love?
There are two primary parts to creating your ideal home. The first part is about you, the parent. The second part is about you, the parent. Yes, creating the ideal home is much more about the parents than about the behavior of the children. When the parents work on themselves first, things fall into place with their families.
Part One is to focus on your heart. In order for you to create the ideal home, your heart must be clear, clean, and open to Living Love. You must focus on your own ability to love and understand others, to have hope and light as a foundation in your own heart as you raise your family. This is where you really begin to know who you are and the gifts you bring.
Many parents today are raising their families without having a personal foundation of love, acceptance, and understanding. Many of us (including myself) are coming from broken homes, abusive relationships, not knowing how to love or even what love really is. Society is telling us that strong, stable families just aren’t the norm anymore, and we just have to deal with it and do the best we can. However, those strong and stable families are the most important component to bring order and joy to our world. No matter what difficult things one has been through, there is always hope. Every family has the potential for relationships of joy when we focus on cleansing and healing ourselves and our hearts first, which will enable us to fully love those around us.
Part Two is to retrain your brain to use good tools and techniques for positive discipline in your home. Many people were raised in an environment where harsh punishments were the way to whip kids into shape and make them do what they were told. When you think about it, why do we make children feel bad (through punishments) in hopes that they will DO and BE better? When put that way, it makes no sense! I have been learning a lot about the concept of Positive Discipline and am excited to share some of these life-changing ideas with you.
My family of 10 (8 children) has been in quite a bit of chaos due to my past inability to understand and give love and my lack of knowledge as to how to discipline with love. What are the rules? How do I teach my kids about what’s wrong and right and about obedience and how to be a good person without forcing my agenda on them? Without forcing them to do as I say? How do I teach them to make good decisions for themselves? How do I teach them to have confidence in their ability to solve their own problems? If I jump in and try to do everything for them, they won’t know how to do things for themselves or create solutions.
Wow. Being a parent comes with so many conundrums and I just didn’t know what to do when it came right down to discipline. The “Positive Discipline” philosophy and tools have answered these questions for me. Positive Discipline is a great solution that have made a huge difference in my family. As I study parenting techniques and work on becoming a better person, I see a beautiful combination appearing. Focus on your heart and learn to love + retrain your brain to use positive discipline and you have a powerful, confident, joyful foundation on which to build your ideal family.
In my articles over the next two weeks, we will be learning some specific ways to focus on love and learn positive discipline so you can feel more confidence and joy in your parenting, and your ideal family can be for real!