Long story short, when Barry was two and Steven, six months, a neighbor with a young child clued me into The Family Education Assoc., which was associated with a branch of The Alfred Adler Institute of Psychology. She said they’d met twice monthly and learned how to parent kindly and effectively rather than loudly and resentfully. Being a teacher, myself, my inquiring mind replied sure when my friend invited me to accompany her to the next meeting.
One meeting and I was hooked for life—not only did attitudes improve between my beloved, independent two year old son and myself but by the time David was born, five years later, I’d been invited to teach positive parenting techniques (over the next 25 years) at the college level. That led to my facilitating seminars at professional conferences as well as writing a monthly column for a popular parenting magazine.
By repling ‘sure’, my family benefited, and my career turned an unexpected corner offering endless opportunities for personal and professional growth. I’ve been absorbing, using, teaching, benefiting from and thankful for the absorption of positively focused thinking techniques, which first took hold of my mind when I was a 27 year old inexperienced mother of two, and resultant of countless changes for the better, our trio of positively focused sons have grown up to be each other’s best friends and ours, as well.
My column was composed of a series of true stories concerning how our family handled sibling conflicts with creativity, and while Barry, Steven and David were a trio of mischievous boys, the creative portion of my mind invented five parenting tools, one of which is The Line Of (self) Control. Today, being a family of adults, we continue to brainstorm. together, calmly, respectfully and generally successfully whenever a classic problem remains unresolved, overlong. And every change for the better has happened because fifty years ago, my mind was open to trying something new. 🙋🏻♀️Annie
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