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The third element of ADHD Parenting Coaching is what. What should I teach to help my kids be successful and create a better family life? The answer to the question is simple. Parents should be teaching behavior skills. Behavior skills set expectations and allow families to build strong bonds. Behavior skills make parents’ lives more comfortable as they reduce frustration, anger, and feelings of hopelessness.
In the 1960s, 20 million dollars of research was done into successful parenting techniques. The study found was that successful parents did very similar things. Sometimes parents understood what they were doing, and other times they didn’t. Researchers determined that parents could be taught how to be successful parents and the behavior skills of
Teaching-Family Model was born. The behavior skills of the Teaching-Family Model are parenting guides that give parents the steps and words they need to implement the skill successfully.
Each behavior skill is on SmarterParenting.com is broken down into concrete steps. These steps help parents know what to do and how to do it. Each behavior skills creates a different outcome.
For almost 60 years, parents, teachers, therapists, and other personnel have used the Teaching-Family Model to help kids and families find success. It works! Studies have confirmed that teaching behavior skills are possible and create favorable outcomes.
The goal of using behavior skills is to teach your child how to navigate the world without you. The steps of the skills are pretty straightforward. Sometimes parents struggle in the implementation of them and need some help with parenting skills
ADHD Parenting Coaching allows our ADHD expert, Siope Kinikini, to look at your family’s needs and determine a tailored action plan.
Sign-up for a free 15-minute mini-session and watch the behavior skills of the Teaching-Family Model transform your life.
Episode Transcript
This is episode 42. 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.
Hello my friends. How is everybody? Everything here is going fantastic, especially with the Smarter Parenting Team and everything that we’re pushing out. I am super excited to be sharing some new things that are happening with Smarter Parenting, but we’ll talk about that maybe a little bit later. For this podcast, though, I am actually going over those five pillar things that are involved with the Teaching-Family Model.
Those five elements that actually make it so powerful as a tool. I have covered in two previous podcasts, relationship. That’s the why. Because the Teaching-Family Model answers the five fundamental questions of, why are we using this model? What is the focus of it? When should we be teaching? How much time does it take? It answers what. What should we be teaching these children? And how. How should we be presenting it in order to be sure that they are grasping the concepts? And then the final pillar is do, Role-play. And that helps cement everything in.
So I’ve covered two of those aspects earlier and today I am going to talk about what. So what are we teaching? What is it that we need to be teaching the kids and what specifically should we be including in our teaching? You should be teaching them skills. There are parenting skills that are available on the Smarter Parenting website. All of the skills that you will find on the Smarter Parenting website were developed over time and through studies that have proven that it can change children’s behavior.
What they’ve done is they were able to observe the effectiveness of people who were working with children and they noticed that all these people who are working with children where they saw the most dramatic changes, all these people, all these parents and teachers, were all using very similar elements in their interactions with the children. All of these elements were evaluated and there were just common things that all of them were doing that sometimes they were aware of and sometimes they weren’t.
So by being able to make a list of those, they created what we call the skills. And the skills are found on Smarter Parenting website. Skills like Effective Communication. They found that adults working with children, especially high-risk children, they were teaching those children how to effectively communicate and they were all using very, very similar techniques and using very similar steps. So they combined those and they formalized it into steps.
When you jump over to the Smarter Parenting website, you’re going to notice that there are very specific steps for very specific skills depending on what outcome you would like. So if we take, for example, Effective Communication, you’re going to have some very specific steps on what you need to do, what your child needs to do in order for it to be effective.
If you want to prevent your child from doing something that may be harmful in the future or from making a mistake or a bad decision in the future, there is a skill there called Preventive Teaching and it has some very specific steps. It tells you, “You should do this. Your child should do this. You should say this.” It actually gives you a script.
When I was working with families, this actually was one of the most comforting things that I heard from parents is that they were grateful that we even provided the words that they should use. Specifically what they should say during each step along the way. That’s amazing, right? So there is no real guesswork in this. It really is kind of a plug and play. Where you will take the skill, you can use the vocabulary that they have outlined and you will continually teach to behaviors that you may observe. Right? Super, super, super easy.
Now, I’m saying it’s super easy because the skill steps are easy. Implementing them is a little more challenging in that you’re dealing with a child that may be defiant to what you’re trying to do or challenge what you’re trying to do. But that’s okay because at least you know specifically what you need to be doing and it gives you a lot more freedom to adapt it to whatever situation you are doing with your child. So you know what needs to be done by just following each of the steps.
If you jump over to the Smarter Parenting website, you’ll notice a ton of skills there and it will outline it for you and give you the vocabulary that you need in order to teach. So what should you be teaching? You should be teaching the skills that are found on the Smarter Parenting website. Or that are from the Teaching-Family Model. It’s the same skills.
The power behind that is that you actually are using the very exact methods that have been used, tried and tested for generations by other people who worked with children at high risk. You’re using all that knowledge in your interactions. So it’s not like it’s, you need to recreate the wheel or you need to figure out how to make it work. These things work. They help you. They make it super easy for you to know exactly what to do when you need to do it.
Those are the things that you should be focused on as far as what you should be teaching. Okay? What you should be teaching. Now, the skills themselves are adaptable as well. Even though we give you a script and we give you what to say, they’re adaptable for whatever you may need. The important thing, and this is something that I highly stress to a lot of parents, is that they watch the videos, because there are video examples that show an example with younger children and with older children, they watch it multiple times.
I highly recommend watching those videos multiple times. Also, I highly recommend that they memorize the skills and that they practice the skills before they practice it with their child. So it’s going through this exercise of really hammering it down. Because think about it. If you were to go to a dance, right, and you didn’t know how to dance, but you watched the videos, and you watched them a lot, if you don’t practice it and actually do it yourself physically, you won’t know how to really do it. You’ll have some inkling because you’ll be able to see the way it looks in your mind according to the video. But physically being able to do it will be a lot more difficult. Whereas if you actually watched the video and then you practiced it on your own, if you show up at the dance, you should have some semblance of what it is that you’re doing.
It’s a part of guiding your child along the way. If you know where you’re going and what you’re doing, it’s easier for your child to follow along. The steps are not super difficult and there’s not a ton of steps. We’ve tried to simplify it to make it as easy as possible for parents to learn and also for children to absorb. So really this is custom-made. We are pretty much handing all of this on a silver platter for you to enjoy and we want you to enjoy it. In fact, we want you to partake of what it is that we are offering at Smarter Parenting.
The teachings that are there are very, very powerful. Very, very helpful. You’re hearing it for me, but there are thousands of practitioners. We’re talking therapists, group home leaders, correction officers, foster parents. We have social workers. We have so many people around the world that are using the exact same skills with the populations that they are working with.
Why recreate the wheel when you know what works? It works. I’ve seen it work, and I’ve seen it work over and over and over again. So that is that pillar, the third pillar, which is what. What do we teach? Well, you teach the skills from the Smarter Parenting website that are founded from the Teaching-Family Model. That is exactly what you teach and we offer it to you in a simple way that you can take and use immediately. This isn’t going to take you a long time to learn. Super easy skills. Super easy way to implement them and try them.
So that’s it for me this time. Feel free to leave a five-star rating and leave us a comment or a question that you may have. We would love to answer those as well. We here at Smarter Parenting are working on so many other things that I am super excited to share with you as time progresses, specifically with coaching and with clubs. Those are definitely things that we want to encourage. If you have an individual issue that you want to discuss and that you want us to coach you through, contact us. We would love to do that for you and work through what specifically we can do to help you and help your child with ADHD become successful. All right, so that’s it for me. Have a good one. Make it a good day. I’ll talk to you later. All right. Bye.
Video: The history of the Teaching-Family Model helping families
Episode 11: What is the Teaching-Family Model
Episode 26: Relationships–the Why of the Teaching-Family Model
Episode 41: When do I need ADHD Parenting Coaching?
Our Teaching-Family Model Family
The Teaching-Family Association
Behavior skills of the Teaching-Family Model