The Pillars of Connect Four Parenting
Being the parent we hope to be stems from our ability to support, nurture, and guide our children.
To-do lists, life stressors and wounds from the past, in addition to the regular demands young children place on parents, can dampen this ability. Tantrums, sleep-deprivation and the physical challenges of attending to little ones can make parenting feel hard. This is why parenting techniques alone may not help make your children listen better or reduce battles and frustration.
Applying the pillars of Andrea Loewen Nair’s Connect Four Parenting plus using her practical parenting techniques will help you manage the hard parts of parenting, and foster a positive parent-child relationship while raising cooperative, resourceful and content children.
Parenting becomes more enjoyable when patience goes up, frustration goes down, and clever language is used to inspire children to cooperate.
As a psychotherapist with trauma-recovery training (and a mom of young children) Andrea is uniquely positioned to provide this information. The bulk of other parenting material is written by medical doctors, psychologists and researchers who provide wonderful health information, theories and data, but who aren’t equipped to offer the tools for managing things like negative core beliefs, unhelpful self-talk, and exhaustion which can hijack a parent’s good intentions making the delivery of that information hard to do.
Andrea’s holistic approach takes the theories and research into consideration, helps parents understand their personal roadblocks and provides tried-and-true parenting strategies that work.
The Four Pillars
To connect with positive and negative core beliefs.
We can get hijacked by negative self-talk, which can make it impossible to calm down, be empathetic or support our children when things get tough. We can inadvertently be hard on our children when our intention is to do the opposite.
Identifying the negative core beliefs that hold us back and the positive ones we need to keep us going, removes obstacles to reaching our parenting goals.
To connect with empathy—the cornerstone of positive relationships.
Understanding how to empathize with our children (even when that is hard to do) provides parents with the foundation to growing a positive relationship with that child for life.
This relationship in turn sets the stage for future positive connections for that child, creating the secure base necessary for a strong support network—our ability to handle the hardest moments in life is strongly influenced by how supported we feel by others.
To make it possible for your child to strongly connect with you—to fill her attachment tank.
Each person has a strong need to feel important, heard and understood. Our ability to fill these needs for our children, to fill their attachment tank, influences how they see themselves and how able they feel to listen to you.
Knowing about how people connect with each other—how your child will connect with you—sets the stage for a sold base that can withstand the bumps in life.
Children feel more able to follow your instructions when they feel a strong connection with you. Connect first, direct second.
To connect with and process emotions.
Experiencing feelings is a normal part of life. Unfortunately, many parents today find dealing with their own emotions and those of their children incredibly difficult because the skills needed to manage emotions weren’t typically taught when we were children.
When parents feel capable with tolerating and coaching themselves and their children through intense emotions, much of the stress of parenting is reduced.
Once these four connections are made, a parent can more easily use Andrea’s techniques to reducing yelling and frustration and increasing cooperation.
