Welcome to Jeff Drake's Successful Parenting Help Desk

The Purpose:


Greeting and welcome to a place to explore how to help children grow up. It is a place where parents and professionals and all who are helping to raise children can come with their questions, worries, struggles and yes, successes too. Together we can use this place to build and share a storehouse of useful experience, knowledge and research. The goal is to create a tool that will help us all be able to think more deeply and act more effectively and to give our children what they need to grow up into successful adults.

The Focus:

As we look at the the issues and concerns of those who are helping to raise children we are open to any and all topics. Experience has shown that helping children becomes easier and more effective if we can succeed in three key ways:

1. Knowing when it is good to help a child, and when it is good to leave the child to learn on their own. Parenting must change as the child changes, or become ineffective. We will focus on gaining an understanding the phases of child development so that we can work 'with' and not 'against' them.

2. Using specific communications skills builds strong and cooperative realtionships between adults and children, the strong relationships in turn help parents, teach and children learn more effectively. The second focus will be on how to build in these communications skills when working with children.

3. Understanding that children come hard wired with their own particular combination of character traits. This means that working with children is never a matter of applying 'one size fits all' techniques. It is important to understand the special challenges and assets of your child's type if you are to work with them successfully.

The Process:

Things I will do:

As topics and problems arise from your questions and feedback, I will post important resources from my own parenting curriculum, Successful Parenting, as well as from many other resources, and provide links and to reading that I feel will help us all move forward and understand children, how they develop and how we as adults can best help.

What you can do:

Ask questions and make comments that arise from your efforts and experience raising children. Here is the chance to start a conversation that will help you find a good way to move forward. When you have,through great effort solved a problem, here is a chance to share that with someone else and save them the worry and bother of their own trial and error searching.

A place to begin:

How do you teach your children social and emotional skills such as handling their own emotions like fear and anger, learning to share and take turns, being careful of others feelings? Where do you find the most difficulty?

I look forward to your responses and the conversations that grow out of them.

Jeff Drake 9/6/09