Do you feel like you spend too much time lecturing your children? Is what you are doing not working? I had the chance to review Taming the Lecture Bug and Getting Your Kids to Think by Joey and Carla Link of Parenting Made Practical. This is a video of their live presentation to parents and is recommended for parents of children ages 8-college. To give you some background, Joey Link has served as a youth and families minister as well as the director of a non-profit parenting ministry. Carla has a degree in social work. They have three adult children and four grandchildren. While certainly not a Hollywood quality production, I did find that this video was well done. It was clear, easy to follow, and had excellent sound quality.
Their first major point was that disobedience is a sin and should be dealt with as such. Instead of reminding, lecturing, etc parents should handle the disobedience from a sin standpoint. They also brought up making sure that children understood the direction and had been trained to carry out the task. One of their main strategies was that instead of lecturing our children we should be asking them questions. These questions help them to think about what they have done and what they should have done instead of us just lecturing them and telling them what they did wrong. This series of questioning helps them to begin thinking for themselves.
In our family, I am working to incorporate more questions to help the children begin to think for themselves and take more responsibility for their actions. Due to my son’s ADHD, we personally don’t feel like it is prudent to take away reminders but we do want to help him to take responsibility for his actions and think about the decisions that he is making. He needs frequent reminders from us as well as things like lists and visual cues to remember tasks and rules.
While this video was not a great fit for our family due to my son’s ADHD, I can see how for children who are choosing not to do what they are asked it could be a good fit. If you have children that are not following through on instructions because they know that there will be lots of reminders or because there are no consequences, this might be a good tool for your family.
In addition to the video presentation, Taming the Lecture Bug, the Link’s have a book by the same title. They also have a DVD titled, Navigating the Rapids of Parenting. This DVD is recommended for parents of children ages 2 to college. It talks about the different phases and stages of parenting and help your child through the bumpy times. Another product which I might need in a few years is, Dating, Courting & Choosing a Mate… What Works? (Video) (for parents of kids ages 9-college). While I do have children that are older than nine, I’m not quite ready to tackle those areas. These other products were reviewed by other Crew members so click on the link below to get more information and reviews of those products as well as additional reviews from families that used Taming the Lecture Bug.
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