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Smarter Parenting uses the Teaching-Family Model to help parents in strengthening relationships. It’s the “why” of what we do. We want all families to be happy, healthy, and prosperous and to reinforce positive relationships. When strengthening relationships is the goal, doing the work is easy as we understand the purpose.
Learning how to be successful is a skill that families can learn. The Teaching-Family Model gives parents concrete steps that can be used over and over to get the desired results. The Teaching-Family Model teaches parents how to harness success and strengthen relationships and is used by agencies around the world.
The Teaching-Family Model is a specific Behavior Model that helps parents in raising kids so that they can navigate the world successfully as the role of parents is to teach our kids how to function without us.
The five elements of the Teaching-Family Model helps parents understand the Why, When, What, Where, and How.
The Why is the relationships portion. We teach behavior skills because we want to build and maintain strong relationships. The why changes our focus as we ask ourselves, “Is this strengthening or damaging our relationship?”
When tells us when we should be teaching the skills for the learning to be most optimal.
What is the actual steps of the skills. It’s dong the skill “recipe” so we can get the desired outcome.
Where is understanding the relationship and where you and your child are emotionally.
How is Role-playing and is doing the skill. Role-play is practicing so that kids can understand and do the steps of the “recipe.”
Sometimes we need a little help in putting together the five elements of the Teaching-Family Model. That’s where ADHD Parenting Coach Siope Kinikini can help. Using the five elements of the Teaching-Family Model, he will show you what your family needs to do in strengthening relationships.
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Episode Transcript
Hello! Did you know that Smarter Parenting offers coaching? And to begin coaching, we offer a free 15-minute session where we can discuss what needs you have with your child. When you sign-up for coaching, I’ll send you a questionnaire so we can maximize our time together. Login to the Smarter Parenting website and sign-up for coaching and receive your 15-minute free session.
Today, we’re talking about the Teaching-Family Model and relationships. This is episode 36. Let’s get started.
Smarter Parenting welcomes you to our podcast series, the Parenting Coach for ADHD. Here to heal and elevate lives is your parenting coach, Siope Kinikini.
I’m super excited today. I hope everybody’s doing great. Because the information I’m going to share with you is super important to helping you understand what it is that we do here at Smarter Parenting, but also the way that we focus all the interventions that we do and The Model that we use.
There is a very specific Model that we use. And it’s a Model that can be used over and over again in different aspects of our lives, in addition to helping our children who struggle with ADHD. In fact, it’s a Model that’s been used for children in helping to develop responsible adults and teaching them skills that help them towards greater independence on their own. So, that’s what we’re going to talk about. We’re going to talk about The Model that we use at Smarter Parenting.
Now, The Model itself is a fascinating thing, because it wasn’t developed by me, but it’s being used around the world by different agencies. So, there are a lot of different agencies around the world that use this specific Model. It’s called the Teaching-Family Model. If you want information about the Teaching-Family Model, you can find that information online. There is an association for the Teaching-Family Model. And agencies around the world are using it in helping their children.
In fact, there’s a yearly conference that’s held somewhere around the world. This year, it’s going to be held in Cincinnati, and I will be presenting there. So I’m super excited to go and talk about Smarter Parenting and some of the things that we’re doing in reaching out and helping families online.
So, anyways, at the conference we have agencies from like Australia, New Zealand, from Europe, from United States, from Canada. They come to this conference, and we all share the ways that we are helping children around the world.
The Model itself was the outgrowth of this effort, a study that was done in the 1960s. Now, there’s a video that we created for Smarter Parenting about the Teaching-Family Model that gives its history and also explains a little bit of how it’s been used in different populations to help families around the world. So, if you want to see that, you can find that also on the Smarter Parenting website. We’ll be sure to provide a link for it as well on here or on our YouTube channel, so you can learn more about the Teaching-Family Model.
But the one thing that I want you to focus on with the Teaching-Family Model is that everything about it has one focus and that is not in other fluffy areas. The main purpose of the Teaching-Family Model is to create and reinforce positive relationships. That’s a positive relationship with a parent and a child, with a guardian and a child. It’s about relationships and how to do that.
What The Model does is it gives us some very specific steps to follow, so we can guarantee that the outcome is consistent and the same. Right? So, for me, I mean, I think about The Model as a way that we. It’s like recipes, like you can look at a recipe and in order to get the same outcome you need to add the right ingredients and follow the same steps. Right?
Instead of saying, “Hey, we’re going to make, you know, some elaborate. Oh. Let’s make a beef Wellington.” Well, there’s a lot of different ways to make beef Wellington, but for consistency’s sake and in order to ensure that everything is consistent, because children need consistency, and adults do too. It’s nice to have steps. You follow A, B, C, D and you follow those every time.
By being able to do that consistently over time, it becomes a very natural part of who you are and how you communicate. That consistency reinforces the sense of security and the sense of relationship between, because you know what the expectations are, between the child and the parent. Right?
So, the Teaching-Family Model is all focused on creating positive relationships, positive relationships. The skills that are taught there are also skills that you can use as adults with other adults in order to create positive relationships. It’s about relationships. Now, why are relationships important? I think a lot of us can answer why relationships are important. Either we long for a good relationship or we have a great relationship and our life seems to be better. Right? When you think about the power and the effectiveness of relationships, it’s really important to understand how it influences the way we behave in the world that we live in.
Take, for example, religious people. I’ve used this example many times with families. But people who are religious seek to have a relationship with whoever they worshiped, so whether it be God or whoever it may be. That relationship, and the definition of that relationship, actually shapes the behavior of the person. Right? Because they want to maintain that relationship. Right? And reinforce that relationship that they have. Relationships help us connect. And it guides us along this idea of, “Hey,” It’s as powerful as helping us realize, “Hey. Do I behave way because of my relationship with this person?” Right?
So, building a healthy relationship is paramount in helping your child learn skills of independence. Of being able to do things on their own. It’s helpful for their self-esteem. It’s helpful for helping them become more resilient, because they feel supported and they feel loved. They feel like somebody is there to help them move forward along their path. Right? So, super, super important concept in the Teaching-Family Model. Which is focused on being able to build some strong, confident, and effective relationships with each other. Everything, all the skills that you’ll find on the Smarter Parenting website, are all skills that are like a recipe book.
You’re going to plug this in, and you’re going to keep doing it, and you’ll get the outcome that you want. It’s very predictable that way. And so very, very helpful for parents when they don’t know what to say. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with a parent who, you know, is surprised by something their child does and then they’re like, “I have no idea what to say in this case. I don’t even know how to respond.” The Teaching-Family Model gives you exactly what to say and exactly what to do, so you can teach your child in the best way possible and maintain the relationship. Right? Those things brought together.
Now, in addition to that, the Teaching-Family Model for me has a couple of components to it, and that’s the way coaching works with us. So, let me point out, there were like five main aspects to the Teaching-Family Model, and we’ll get into these as we start creating more podcasts. But the five elements include the relationship. It includes spending the time to work with your child. Spending time being with your child and modeling the behavior you want for your child. It also includes teaching. What to teach your child. It includes something called quality components. Quality components simply means are you including all the steps in the recipe in order to make it successful? Right? And then Role-playing, which is the actual doing. So, it’s helping your child actually do it. There’s one thing in watching something positive and there’s another in actually doing it and having it become part of your mechanics, and your body movement, and the way that you think, and integrating it back into your mind.
So, the way that I break up those things, so relationship, time, teaching, quality components, and Role-playing, they all answer these fundamental questions. Relationship answers, why. Why we do this? We do this, because we want a relationship. The time tells us when, when we should be teaching, when is the optimal time to be teaching our child something new. Time. So, the teaching itself answers the question of what. What should we be teaching them? These very specific skills. This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to pull this recipe out and we’re going to use it, so we can get an optimal return by being sure we implement all of these steps.
The quality components tell us how we are teaching it. It helps us evaluate, “Okay, do we emphasize this? How do we make it work better for a child?” Because all children are different. Then the Role-playing, is in the doing. So, that’s actually bringing it to the forefront of your child’s mind and helping them remember it and actually having it become a part of them.
The Role-playing for me is one of the most effective ways to help children integrate new behaviors into their everyday life. Right? So, you can watch somebody playing the piano. You can watch a video of somebody playing the piano, and they can actually teach you in the video how to do it. But unless you actually do it yourself, sit at the keyboard and do it yourself, you won’t learn how to do it. I mean, it’s just watching something and talking about something isn’t the same as actually doing it. So, that’s the last part of it.
So, again, we have those components. We have the focus on relationship, the focus on being sure that there’s appropriate time, that you’re using your time wisely. There’s the teaching. There’s the quality components. There’s Role-play. And they fundamentally answers the questions of why we do that? Because we want a strong relationship, when we should be teaching, when’s the optimal time to teach? The teaching part of it tells us what we are teaching. Which recipe are we going to plug in here. And then the quality components tell us how we’re doing it. How are we going to do it to make it effective for this child? The final piece is in the actual doing, which is the Role-playing. Right?
I’m going to actually, because this is such an important concept for people to understand about the Teaching-Family Model, I’m going to dedicate a podcast specifically for this, so you can understand it. If you call in for a parenting coaching session, we actually are going to go through those things.
We’re going to go, “Okay. So, when is this happening? What are you teaching your child? How are you teaching your child? How are you integrating the new teaching into what your child is doing? And then why? Are we hitting the goal of relationship, or are you trying to hit the goal of punishing your child and getting them to do the right thing, because the punishment is so severe?” Yeah. So, we answer all of those in a coaching session. And then we will actually tweak it.
So, then we provide you with information on where you can make adjustments along that path, so it can work for your child. We know that, because children are different. Remember, this Model has been used all over the place and it’s been used with children in high risk situations, where they’ve been removed from the home and placed in group homes. It’s been used there, tried and tested, and it’s moved from there into foster homes, into adoption agencies. It’s moved over into in-home services. It’s moved over into parenting classes. And it’s moved over here now into Smart Parenting.
We’ve actually taken The Model and it’s been, we’ve been able to replicate and do that across the board with a lot of different populations of children in different socioeconomic situations and from different cultures, and we’ve come up with the same results. So, it’s a fascinating thing, and I think it’s super exciting to be able to share it with you.
I’m sharing all this stuff for free, because I want to be sure that you get what you need, as much as you can get. I just want to give everything for free. If you need additional one-on-one coaching, parenting coaching, sign-up for it, and more than happy to focus on very specific issues. Everything on the Smarter Parenting website is for free. We want to give everything we possibly can for free. The individual coaching though does have a fee for it, because of the time. And that actually goes back into Smarter Parenting to help us support and sustain what it is we’re trying to do, which is help families around the world. So, it’s a great cause. If you want to make a donation, we’re more than happy to take that too. If you need one-on-one coaching, contact us. We would love, love, love, love to help you with your individual issues that you’re working on, and we can go from there.
Now, that’s it for me. It’s important for us to go through the Model, and you’re going to hear me referencing The Model in the future quite a bit, because it’s super important for you to understand and that it’s integrated into the parenting coaching that we do. There’s going to be a downloadable with this podcast that you can get on the website or a link in the YouTube channel. We’re going to make it available, the five pillars of this Teaching-Family Model that help guide you along the way. So, super excited to share this with you.
Please, please, please give us a five star rating. Share us with other people who you feel it may be beneficial for. We look forward to communicating with you again next time. So, take care. I hear my dogs barking, so I got to go. They’re ready for their bath I guess. Anyway, I will talk to you guys later. Have a good one. All right. That’s it for me. See you next week. Bye.
Resources discussed in this episode
Video: The history of the Teaching-Family Model helping families
Episode 11: What is the Teaching-Family Model
Our Teaching-Family Model Family
The Teaching-Family Association