Family Life Can Wreak Havoc

by Kristyne McDaniel

I have a family, you have a family. None of us were hatched from a Petri dish with genetically engineered parents -- at least not that I know of. We have problems with them sometimes.

Positive Parenting was one of the big fads some years back. Permissiveness seemed to be what people thought it meant, but in reality, that was not at all what was going on. The reality is that people respond better to kind words than to anger, and to praise than to criticism. You can't even get a dog to respond well to being yelled at continually... what ever gave a parent the idea a child would respond to it!

Steve raised four children that are now productive and reasonably happy adults. I raised one child who is also a reasonably productive and happy adult. None of them are perfect, and none of them are in jail. What else could we ask for? Well, maybe one or two things, but we are trying to be reasonable. The youngest of the 5 is 29 years old and frankly, they are all on their own now.

We'll be going into this more as time goes by. Right now, I just wanted to get the topic started... more later!

_{This page was last updated on Wednesday, August 30, 2006}