Most parents parent the way they were parented. We don’t get an owner’s manual when our first little one comes along, and so we often rely on the hard-wired information about how to parent from being parented ourselves.

The good news is that parenting skills are just that…skills. No one is born a great parent. No one has it all figured out. And if we apply ourselves to learning as we go along, we will see that we gain skills and develop them over time. Parenting skills can be learned.

When we choose to learn about how children grow and develop, we become a student of how they were created and were designed to grow.

When we choose to practice positive approaches to a child’s misbehavior, we become more effective.

We can, over time, become better at encouraging our children and finding new ways to listen and talk to one another more freely.