Pick your Battles, a wise bull knows when to charge.
Something’s are worth arguing about.
Love them unconditionally and set them up for success.

Level of Sentence Choice

• Eliminate Blaming and Placating language. Utilize computing and leveling patterns in stressful situations
• Not use open insults or smart cracks, sarcastic remarks or put downs
• Discourage use of verbal attack patterns in our own language and others
• Refuse to provide sentences that can feed hostility loops
• Take care not to give others commands and criticisms when we can transmit the same information in another way to not demoralize or cause the other person to lose face.

Stop. Look. Listen. And Learn.
What happened? Let’s sleep on it.

Please sit on this chair, I’ll be back in a minute.
(Go where you can compose yourself,
look at the situation calmly, logically and listen to your self talk)

Balance between love and limits

1. You are a healthy authority over your children-- Real love includes limits
2. Hold children accountable for their actions -- Be firm but fair
3. Let reality be the teacher -- Learn from mistakes, allow failure
4. Use actions, not words -- Walk, don’t just talk, your values
5. Stick to your guns -- What you see is what you get
6. Relationships come before rules -- Ask -- and give -- respect

1. Be loved and accepted
2. Be secure and relatively free of threat
3. Belong, to feel part of a group
4. Be approved and recognized for the way in which one functions
5. Move toward independence, responsibility, and decision

1. Don’t take misbehavior personally
2. There is a reason for all behaviors
3. Love them no matter what
4. Parents don’t own their kids
5. The tail does not wag the dog

Behavior has a purpose.
When children misbehave there is usually a reason:

Intentional

1. Gaining attention
2. Using power to control
3. Avoiding pressure and expectations by appearing to be inadequate
4. Seeking revenge

Unintentional

1. Undiagnosed issues
   1. Medical (Migraines, pain)
   2. Neurological (brain based issues - Fetal alcohol, ADHD, ODD) 
   3. Nutritional (allergy or food sensitivity)
2. Inexperience - not knowing behavior is not appreciated
3. Experience - exhibiting behavior that child thinks is normal

Encourage Positive Attention Seeking

• Recognize and encourage achievements
• Place a premium on cooperation
• Create an environment that encourages creativity and experimentation
• Always let children know that failure is not fatal
• Don’t reward or encourage competition between siblings
• Expect the best in all situations. Shoot for excellence not perfection

• Decelerate the conflict by speaking quietly but firmly
• Don’t argue, simply state what is needed and remove yourself from the scene
• If child is old enough, or receptive enough, sit down and talk reasonably, pointing out simply what you expect
• With younger children who display powerful behavior by refusing to obey, simply give them a choice

Every child who complains, protests, criticizes, argues or just plain "lips off" is a victim of the same problem: discouragement. Completely discouraged children appear unintelligent, they are anything but that.

Ants and other insects fall prey to curious kids who wonder, "What would happen if I pulled it apart," or, "What if I shine the sun on it through a magnifying glass." But what does it mean when your son or daughter turns his or her curiosity on the family pet?

"This is like many other areas of child development where parents have to consider the developmental age of the child," said Susan Jenkins, a psychiatrist and director of Associates 2000, which specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of people with neuro-developmental disorders.

"For instance, a four-year-old who spends the afternoon dressing the dog up and trying to feed it peanut butter looks differently than a kid who’s 12 doing that--the 12-year-old knows it annoys the dog." Some mild experimentation with insects is normal; indeed, society tolerates it. But cruelty to furry domesticated critters is not.

"A week back, a cat was just standing there in the water (by the City County Government Center)," said Dave Brunette, an animal control officer in Rochester. "It wouldn’t move. It was terrified. We brought it to the shelter. It wasn’t mean. It wasn’t a biter. It was just totally traumatized. My guess was a teen-age group found this cat, abused the heck out of it and threw it in the river. There was no way it could have ended up where it was. They obviously did something to it because it was so traumatized."

Hard to prove

For animals, there is little recourse, Brunette said. And, as veterinarian Laura Toddie of Heritage Pet Hospital noted, most people deny such behavior, making it difficult to prove. "Maybe you’ll see a real timid animal, you’ll approach them for a vaccine and all of a sudden they’ll cower and snap at you," she said. "I’ve wondered what has happened to this dog to make it act like this? There’s nothing I can do, unless you have direct proof." For the people who victimize animals, something can be done–it’s called therapy.

"A kid that deliberately kills an animal--for instance a child who deliberately kills a furry pet like a hamster or a dog–there’s generally something seriously the matter there," Jenkins, the psychiatrist, said.

"The worst case scenario would be some serious kinds of mental illness, like paranoid disorders."

Although there are no absolutes, continued cruelty to animals may be a precursor to antisocial behavior in adulthood. It may also be a sign your child has been sexually or physically abused.

In the case of physical abuse, "cruelty to animals is a way for the child to feel a sense of power and control," said Jeffrey Clark, a licensed psychologist with Zumbro Valley Psychological Services, who has treated children who were cruel to animals. "It’s kind of like a chain of command: the adult is bigger and stronger than the child; the child is going to pick an object for abuse that the child is bigger and stronger than. So it can be an indication of abuse, but it’s not guaranteed to be that way."

"The first question I would ask is what is going on in this kid’s life that sets him or her up to express this kind of anger or violence in that way. I don’t think it exists in a vacuum; there have been indications of that type of anger and frustration for a long time."

Pattern of behavior

Historically in psychiatry and psychology, cruelty to animals is one of a triangle of behaviors that can act as a precursor of antisocial and criminal behavior in adulthood. That triangle also includes fire setting and chronic bedwetting.

"If a child is being consistently cruel to animals, it could be an indication that there is a problem with conscience development, as indicated by a lack of remorse and empathy that this animal might be experiencing pain as a result of this behavior," Clark said. Jenkins adds: "By age four or five, certainly by six, we expect children to be able to understand the feelings of others, so you’ll hear mothers say, ‘How would you feel if Sandy did that to you?’ By age five or six, we clearly expect kids to be able to identify with the feelings of animals, too."

Reprinted from "Foster Focus," February 1999, published by Olmsted County Community Services, 2116 Campus Dr. SE, Rochester, MN 55904-4744.

No one deserves to be abused

For free and confidential services call your local women’s shelter 24 hours a day. Call a local church to get the number. Or call 1-800-438-6439 or 1-800-338-SAFE for more information. This article is reprinted with permission from "The Advocate," October 1998, published by the Olmsted County Action Program, 1421 SE 3rd Ave., Rochester, MN 55904, tel. 507-285-8785

One of a child’s very first senses upon emerging into this world is the warm, nurturing touch of a flannel blanket, wrapping snugly around to protect and provide warmth and security. While the infant child doesn’t yet have the intellectual capacity to realize it, this sense of nurturing touch, and the ability to give in the same special way to others. is one of our most powerful gifts.

It feels good to remember or imagine moments like that, doesn’t it? We get warm, fuzzy feelings envisioning such innocence, safety, and security.

Crackle, crackle. A little static as the news comes on. "The School Board has reached tentative agreement with teachers and a number of PTAs on a new ‘no touch’ policy in district schools. The policy was developed in response to threats of lawsuits by local parents against elementary school teachers who have been seen routinely touching students in the classrooms. While no official complaints have been filed and there have been no formal claims that any of this involves inappropriate touch, the Board felt there was justification for a strict policy to keep things from getting out of control. Specifically, the group recommended . . ."

Pop! goes that bubble of warm, fuzzy feelings.

Farfetched? Extreme? Don’t bet on it. Touch and how to handle it between nonparent adults and children has become a relatively common topic of discussion. And while few of the people discussing it will say it this way, for many people the real issue is men touching children.

Touch is an extremely broad topic, so the discussion that follows will begin an exploration.

If you talk to the people working with children in your community, including coaches, childcare providers, teachers, counselors, and parents, you will find that many of them and their organizations have, are, or will soon formulate policies on touch.

Some, like the statewide Keeping Youth Sports Safe and Fun program launched in January 1994 by the Children’s Trust Fund and Minnesota Amateur Sports Commission, saw a need as well as an opportunity. They involved nationally known expert Cordelia Anderson of Sensibilities, Inc., to develop this program which focuses on helping communities create or strengthen safe and fun youth sports programs.

Independent individuals working with children, such as childcare providers, are also developing approaches to appropriate touch. Men in that environment are uncommon, yet receive special attention primarily because they are stepping out of traditional gender roles and into an intimate setting with young children. Below you’ll hear about some of the challenges faced by men in these situations.

Organizations such as schools, are approaching the topic individually or by district as the need arises. For example, Cordelia Anderson is working with the Minneapolis School District to help them define appropriate alternatives to a proposed "no touch" policy. Later in this article we see how one elementary school teacher finds a comfort zone with his students.

The approaches to touch with children are as varied as the people formulating them, but perhaps most striking are those which stray into "no touch" territory as a proposed solution. While not common, such policies are being proposed in some large organizations as an apparently acceptable alternative to consider.

What has happened? How could we have devolved so far as to think that any kind of "no touch" policy seemed reasonable?

After working in this field for over 20 years, Cordelia Anderson becomes deeply concerned when she hears about organizations or individuals caring for children talking about adopting "no touch" policies. "At a time when children, especially young children, need all the nurturing touch they can possibly get, this kind of policy can be extremely damaging." Years ago she developed the touch continuum, illustrated here, to help explain touch to groups. She stresses that lack of touch occurs on both ends, on the left as touch deprivation, and on the right when people fail to set appropriate boundaries and limits.

From Theory to Practice

Central to all these struggles is the need to protect children from exploitive or abusive touch. And again, one area of special scrutiny is men working with children. Why are some people so concerned about this, and why right now? Carla Ahman is a Learning Readiness Coordinator and Child Development Specialist for Childcare Resource and Referral in Rochester. In this role she gets a lot of questions from home daycare providers, some of which deal with touch.

"The topic got the most attention a few years ago," she said, "with some of the widely publicized abuse cases". She sees a positive side to that: parents are learning more about what kinds of things they should look for in a childcare setting. "So often," she says, "parents look for the provider who’s closest or cheapest. What they need to seek is an adult who can have a positive relationship with a child and provide a good influence." She places touch issues, from male or female providers, in the same category as home safety, car safety, nutrition, and other issues— one item within a collection of important things to ask about. One of the things their group has worked on with staff in childcare centers is having staff ask the children if they could give them hugs, and also asking the children for hugs.

Developing that kind of relationship, which stresses active decision making on the part of the children, establishes boundaries and gives the children both a real and a perceived sense of control over what happens to their bodies. Everyone agrees that a sense of personal control and responsibility is a key part of raising and educating children, but experts also stress that it’s not that simple. The "good touch/bad touch" curriculum is common in schools and other settings, but experts like Cordelia Anderson and others stress that such material should be used as a piece of the approach rather than the entire approach. The equally common "private parts" approach needs to be viewed similarly, in this case because kids can also be subjected to inappropriate touch to "public parts" of their bodies. The consensus: We need to protect children from being exploited in any way.

Male caregivers

Key players in this movement to protect children are the male caregivers. Men making a living from caring for other people’s children face special challenges because some of the parents are afraid of what they’ll do to their children. The parents of a toddler being cared for by a male home daycare provider faced countless questions from their friends: "Aren’t you afraid of what might happen?" "Why is he doing that instead of a ‘real’ job?" "Doesn’t it worry you, leaving your daughter with a man all day?" And so on. Their responses were interesting: No, they weren’t any more afraid of what might happen with a man than with a woman; they had asked the same safety and health questions to all providers. And they discovered that most male providers were doing this for the same reasons the female providers were: a way to be with kids, which they loved, make a reasonable living, and be home as necessary for their own children. Finally, no it didn’t worry them, leaving their daughter with a man all day—after all, she was sometimes with her father or grandfather all day, or playing with the neighbor kids and their father for an after noon. What did worry them, however, was how concerned their otherwise open–minded friends were about the situation. "I do think about it, and it bothers me sometimes that I do have to think about it," muses Warren Knipfer, a Head Start lead teacher and former home daycare provider in Rochester. "Kids come up and hug and jump on me, and over the years I’ve had to start thinking more about this. As you get further into the daycare business you talk with other people, particularly men, and when a man is doing daycare or in a center he’s under more scrutiny than a woman would be. It’s hard not to pull back sometimes because you think, I can interact with these kids, but who’s watching . . . ? You get a little paranoid."

At the beach at Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis a couple of years ago, long-time daycare provider Michael Kauper was having a picnic after taking his daycare kids to swim lessons. Spread out in front of the lifeguard stand, they were among at least 100 other people all enjoying the wonderful summer day. "Suddenly," Michael recalls, "three squad cars pulled onto the beach and a mob of policemen got out, some with radios and nightsticks. They found me and separated me from the daycare children and started questioning me. Later one of the officers explained that two elderly women who had been sitting 30-40 feet away from us had called the police and said I was kidnapping and molesting the children on the beach. The children were really scared, and so was I."

Males working in nurturing roles surely attract attention in today’s society because they are breaking out of gender stereotypes—as nurses, elementary school teachers, daycare providers, [foster care providers,] and at-home, full-time parents. Anytime people step into new roles, they face both institutional and personal roadblocks. What is so surprising, however, is the strident hostility from both men and women, faced by these men as they take on these nurturing roles.

Where nurturing touch means so much: school and sports

Like childcare providers, today’s male teachers and coaches face real personal and legal challenges about how they touch the children under their care. In schools, these concerns are more readily apparent in the elementary schools where the lines meet for the low numbers of males and the high needs the children have for personal attention. These teachers are struggling more and more frequently with how to deal with these kids they care so much about. Elementary school art teacher Larry Crea has been teaching for over 20 years, and, for now, has found an approach that works for him. He worries, though, about how the rest of the world looks at the issue of touching in schools. "I feel sorry about the way our outlooks have developed with regard to feelings of expression and physical contact between teachers and students. As a society we’re less well off for being more withdrawn and more clinical and less open and genuine than human beings should be—or are naturally inclined to be. "

"It makes me feel a little sad that we can’t be as genuine with one another as we’d like to be. I’m a little envious that they (female teachers) can be more nurturing in a more physical or more conciliatory way, with little or no notice being taken. But as a male I’m aware that my actions would be scrutinized in more depth than those of a female—it’s a little frustrating.

"But I’m not going to curtail who I am and what I believe because of that. My feelings toward my students are nothing less than genuine and honorable, and if someone questions what I do I’ll do my best to explain myself to them. "

Like teachers newly being subject to such microscopic scrutiny, coaches are suddenly finding themselves targets of sensitivity training, touch awareness programs, and lectures on harassment. Coaching has long been the bastion of nearly total acceptance of whatever the coach did to handle the kids. Pushing children onto or off of the field, yelling angrily at them to "encourage" better performance, and touching both girls and boys in ways that make them uncomfortable, have long been commonplace and accepted by most parents and kids. Physical contact is clearly appropriate in nearly all sports, but what is and isn’t acceptable among players and between players and coaches is changing—much to the confusion of nearly everyone involved. New standards for more appropriate physical contact and effective teaching methods are being set by many national, state, and local athletic organizations (see Resources section for more information), and coaches are being expected to move quickly to adopt these new techniques and habits. Though basketball is classified as a noncontact sport, Stewart Shacter, who routinely coaches local basketball and baseball teams, notes that basketball coaches often need to deal with touch issues, such as when they teach body blocks—and to also be careful to "not be gender biased. You need to teach both females and males to do this—in a culture where the females I’ve coached are more reluctant to step forward and use their bodies that way." Yet lots of kids don’t expect nurturing touch from their coaches. It’s not uncommon for kids (and their parents) to refuse to tolerate any roughness or touch from teachers or bus drivers, but feel it is okay from coaches: "He’s just trying to get you to be the best you can be," and "That’s just how sports are; you can’t be a sissy," and from parents, "Oh, I dunno, you see that kind of behavior a lot . . ." In addition, coaches note that some community sports organizations don’t have a clue how to deal with touch and youth sports: some have become so accustomed to such rough behavior from coaches on the field that it seems perfectly normal, while others make knee-jerk decisions in a policy vacuum and take extreme, paranoid, and totally inappropriate position—like "no touch"—which do far more harm than good for the children. Long-time coaches of youngsters stress, however, that there are dozens of well-established positive ways to encourage performance without yelling and pushing kids, and as many ways to show them how you feel about their performance.

"Touch," Shacter poses, "is an incredibly important aspect in our lives—in life in general and clearly in sports—an an incredibly difficult thing to do well. It has to feel comfortable to you and to others. With young kids, it’s extremely common to hug the kids a lot during a game. And even with older kids, especially when they re hurt, physically or emotionally, they’ll bridge this gap."

High-fives and warm pats on the shoulder or back are the most common forms of touch to show support. Another form of touch is the normal physical contact which occurs in most sports.

Finally, Dr. Steven Bavolek of the private National Institute for Child-Centered Coaching, notes that we need to "let kids at all ages know they have a right to ask for nurturing touch from appropriate people, as well as to reject inappropriate touch—from anybody of any age". For any age kids, it’s the job of the parents, spectators, and coaches to monitor and correct this kind of behavior. The child should be a part of the solution, but it’s the responsibility of the parent.

Resources

Touch policies, articles, and a forthcoming book: Cordelia Anderson, consultant with Sensibilities, Inc., 612-824- 6217

Material on touch and preventing abuse for coaches, parents, and athletes: Keeping Youth Sports Safe and Fun; contact the Minnesota Amateur Sports Commission, 612-785-5630

Codes of ethics for coaches, parents, and athletes; coach certification training program: National Youth Sports Coaches Association at 800-729-2057 or Minnesota Recreation and Parks Association at 612-920-6906

Various materials on touch and abuse in sports: Dr. Steven Bavolek, National Institute for Child-Centered Coaching (private), 801-649-5822

Issues related to touch and fathering, anger, and social norms are dealt with in classes and support groups: Father’s Resource Center, 612-874-1509

Readers are encouraged to reproduce and share this article, published by the Children’s Trust Fund, 444 Lafayette Rd. North, St. Paul, MN 55155-3839. It comes from an 8-part series about children and fathers, created especially for the Children’s Trust Fund of the Minnesota Department of Human Services. It is written by Anne Carrol of Carroll, Frank & Associates.

• Believe the person

• Assure them they did the right thing to get through it

• Tell them they are not responsible for the sexual abuse

• Do not push for details

• Assure them you are glad they told you

• Empower them to make decisions

• Be sensitive to their need for privacy

• Be patient

• Be supportive of their decisions

• Remain calm - you will have feelings about the disclosure but do not direct them at the survivor