The Power to Parent series is a relationship-based approach to parenting that restores parents to their natural intuition and helps children realize their innate potential as human beings. Learn more...
Part I of the Power to Parent series focuses on the adult-child relationship as the context for raising children. Parents and professionals learn how this relationship is meant to develop, what can go wrong, why parents must matter more than peers, how to cultivate a context of connection, how to win back one's child if need be, and more.
Part II of the Power to Parent series focuses on how to help children realize their potential as human beings. Since growing older is no guarantee of growing up, knowing how to foster maturation is key to raising children.
Power to Parent III: Common Challenges
Raising children is rewarding, but not always easy! Every child gets stuck from time to time on the road to maturation and every parent faces challenges at some point on the journey. Part III of the Power to Parent series focusses on the typical challenges of parenting. Dr. Neufeld equips parents to read the signs of a child in trouble, live with a sensitive child, cultivate resilience in a child, lead an alpha child, soften a defended child, discipline a stuck child, and more.
A growing number of children and youth are presenting as demanding, prescriptive, bossy and controlling. A disturbing number of these alpha children are turning into bullies as well. Alpha children can be challenging to manage and, by their nature, are more likely to present with troubling behaviour. This is making the child-adult dance much more difficult than it used to be or needs to be, despite the plethora of advice-giving and strategies available today.
Emotion, long dismissed as a nuisance factor, is now confirmed to be at the core of development and well-being. New revelations about the nature of emotion have shed fresh light on the pivotal role of feelings in play, brain development, discipline issues, anxiety problems, maturational processes, behaviour problems, attention problems, mental health issues and much more.
Adolescence literally means 'growing into maturity'. An adolescent is neither child nor adult and therein lies much of the difficulty, the turbulence, the confusion and the challenge. They need us, yet need to not need us. We are their best bet, yet their instincts are to resist us. Unlike primitive cultures, our highly complex society requires a lengthy adolescence with very few rites of passage.
Aggression is one of the oldest and most challenging of human problems. Dr. Neufeld exposes its deep developmental roots, revealing why conventional approaches to the problem are so ineffective.
Aggression is one of the oldest and most challenging of human problems. Dr. Neufeld exposes its deep developmental roots, revealing why conventional approaches to the problem are so ineffective.
The Attention Deficit Disorder label has brought concerns regarding attention to the fore of public consciousness but unfortunately without the foundational knowledge that enables parents and teachers to find their way through a glut of confusing and often conflicting information. This course brings all the pieces of the puzzle together, bringing fresh insight to this problem and providing clear suggestions of how to deal with it.
Counterwill is a name for the instinctive reaction of a child to resist being controlled. This resistance can take many forms: opposition, negativism, laziness, noncompliance, disrespect, lack of motivation, belligerence, incorrigibility and even antisocial attitudes and actions. It can also express itself in resistance to learning.
Discipline is one of the biggest challenges faced by parents and educators. We all want good behaviour from our children, but as a culture we have fallen to instant fixes and one minute answers without weighing the costs on our child's well-being. When the challenge is to impose order on behaviour without putting in jeopardy healthy attachment and development, many are at a loss of how to proceed.
The Wisdom of Play
Play – at least the kind that builds brains, forwards development, and serves our emotions – is becoming an endangered activity among those who need to engage in it most and this includes us as adults. The science of play reveals the mind of Nature and gets to the very heart of the developmental approach.
Preserving Play in a Digital World
We live in an age of technology, with information and entertainment at our fingertips, and at the fingertips of our children. While this reality may have its conveniences and advantages, it can also preempt the time and space needed for play in our children's lives. Research is now confirming what age-old cultures have intuitively known all along, that play is actually a vital part of healthy development. What kind of play do children (and adults!) need in their lives? How do we make room for true play in a world ready with quick fixes? In this course, we explore these questions and discuss what we can do as caring adults to preserve play in a world that is moving too fast.
Making Sense of Preschoolers
No one is more susceptible to being misunderstood than the preschooler. Precocious, brazen, obsessive, endearing, hysterical, impulsive, anxious, delightful, unreflective, dogmatic, generous, unstable, aggressive, resistant, compulsive, and anything but consistent -- the preschooler could qualify for any number of personality and behaviour disorders. To make sense of a preschooler is to possess the keys for unlocking the mysteries of human nature as well as for the unfolding of human potential.
One of the most challenging and crucial questions of our time is why some bounce back from adversity, seemingly unscathed, while others fall apart and become emotionally distraught and dysfunctional. Once upon a time and not too long ago, the dominant idea regarding stress is that it is what happened to us that told the story. Trauma had its crippling effects. Divorce had its fallout. Stress, if sufficient enough, would lead to our undoing. The corollary to this idea is that good experiences (or the absence of adversity) would ultimately lead to emotional health and well-being. It turns out that neither hypothesis holds water.
What has become apparent is that it is not what happens to us - good or bad - that explains how we are ultimately affected, but rather something about ourselves that sets the stage for the story that unfolds.
Resilience is probably the most important topic of our time. It holds the answers to emotional health and well-being, to mental illness, to healing and recovery, to prevention, to addiction, and much more. Resilience is not only the best overall prevention but also the best focus for intervention.
