Rediscover the Joy of Parenting
Quick and Easy Tips and Skills for Parents

A Letter to Parents
From Don A. Blackerby, Ph.D., Founder of SUCCESS SKILLS

Over the last 25+ years, I have dedicated myself to helping students of all ages succeed in school. I have developed ways for students to learn and think about learning and school that have truly transformed many students’ lives. Yet, every time I finish my work with an individual student and am ready to turn them over to the parents and school, I do so with much trepidation. I sometimes become painfully aware of how unskilled we parents are at truly helping our children when we are presented with a problem involving our children.

I am always reminded of the standard joke among parents--we are highly adept at physically becoming parents but are NOT highly trained at raising them. We joke about the notion that our newborn babies don’t come with “training manuals” and that we are left on our own to raise them.

We tend to rely on how WE were raised or what is the “popular” remedy or the always faithful advice “it’s just a phase, they will outgrow it.” Or the last resort or firewall, “I don’t know what to do—maybe it will just go away!”

Some of this lack of skills is painfully obvious to me when I interact with some of the parents and their children in my office. I sometimes cringe at what I see and hear. As the result of this, and after working with thousands of students and parents, I have noticed that I am starting to want to help parents as much as I want to help the students. So, my focus and writing is turning, more and more, to tips and skills for parents.

There are so many areas in which we parents need better skills--not advice. Advice is when we are told what we should do; skills are when we are taught HOW to do it. A prime example of this is when I coach students. Most students who are struggling in school have been told over and over what they SHOULD DO (e.g., that they SHOULD study harder or work at it more). I teach them a mental strategy for studying—like a specific spelling strategy, for example. Or, a strategy for memorizing their math facts, or how to read and remember what they read. Most students respond very positively and quickly to being taught HOW to do something and yet turn off of advice. We parents do the same thing (a message from OUR childhood, perhaps?).

Another example, we parents are advised that we should teach our children values, yet--HOW do we do that? We usually are given a lot of advice about the fact that we SHOULD DO IT, but the HOW is usually vague and incomplete. These booklets are designed to teach the How! And you can download them on to your computer—so there is no handling or shipping costs or waiting.

My original idea was to write a book which detailed some of the skills parents need to help their children with problems. The book was even going to have exercises in it so the parents could practice the skills until they became natural.

Then it dawned on me that most parents would probably not seriously read such a book—primarily because it would be too long. AND, all parents would not need to know the same things. We don’t want to know what problems other parents are having—we just want to know what to do about our own children’s problems. We parents are already too busy and over-whelmed and we do not want even one more thing to do—UNTIL it is actually deadline time for doing it.

What that means is that too many times we will wait until a crisis is occurring to start to look for a solution. And, even then, we want a quick and easy solution for THAT PARTICULAR PROBLEM THAT IS HAPPENING-- RIGHT NOW. And, we don’t want to have to wade through a whole book to find the right solution for the immediate problem. And, we don’t want a lot of theory or talk.