Empower Your Children and Yourself
Why don’t my kids listen? How can I stop yelling and threatening? What can I do about my kids’ social media obsession? How can I handle arguments over homework and chores? How can I get cooperation?
You’re not the only family who faces challenges with your kids! Good news: There are parenting skills that can bring some harmony into your relationships.
Positive Discipline (PD) classes and workshops provide you with non-punitive ways to encourage and empower your children and yourself. You’ll acquire tools to help you strengthen family relationships, teach life skills, solve everyday challenges, and raise capable children.
PD provides the framework for making decisions that are right for your family.
Mary Lynn Fiske
Positive Discipline Parent Educator, Positive Discipline Classroom Educator
Current Schedule & Registration
What makes PD special?
Unlike other approaches, PD maintains that it’s not helpful to punish children for misbehavior. Nor is it helpful to reward them for behaving well. “Children do better when they feel better” is the PD mantra. Children have a deep need to belong and to feel they matter. It’s the job of parents to steer them towards socially useful and socially acceptable ways to fulfill these needs.
While other approaches deal with children’s behavior, PD suggests looking for the belief behind the behavior and addressing that as well. Think of an iceberg. The visible part is what people react to, but to fully understand the iceberg it’s important to investigate the part that’s concealed below the waterline.
Role play and “experiential” activities are at the heart of PD classes. We don’t sit and talk about what happened at home with the kids, we stand it up. Role playing in class the actual situations we confront at home allows us to get in touch with our own feelings and to experience the situation from the child’s point of view. Classes are a process of discovery. Participants see for themselves how their own behavior may be getting in the way of their long-term parenting goals.
As humans we assimilate the behaviors we repeat. Practice Makes Permanent. In PD class we practice new behaviors and our brains do the rest.