What Else is Unique About Family Effectiveness Training?

How the Marital Relationship Affects Children

This training program is unique in emphasizing the profound effect on children of the quality of their parents' marriage relationship. The way husbands and wives relate to each other becomes perhaps the strongest model for the behavior of their children.

Unless parents learn how to build a loving, stable, and peaceful relationship with each other, they are unlikely to build such a relationship with their children.

This training will provide family members with an easy-to-use step-by-step procedure they can quickly learn to peacefully resolve their conflicts. Recent research evidence shows that marital conflicts are inevitable, but they are less likely to lead to unhappiness or divorce when the partners have good conflict-resolution skills, good listening skills and good self-disclosure skills.

Parenting Made Much Easier

You'll find, as many other parents have, that parenting need not be as complex, difficult, exasperating and time-consuming as so many other books and parent education programs make it seem.

When you learn and use the skills in the Gordon Model for effective parenting, here are some of the things you'll discover:

• You won't have to be "an all-knowing super-parent" with answers to each of the countless problems every child experiences. Why? Because you will learn a single communication skill that will influence your children to come up with their own best solutions. We call that "empowering your child" of "fostering independence and self-confidence."

• You won't have to spend your valuable time reminding and nagging your child (or your spouse) to do what they said they would do. Why? Because you will learn a procedure that greatly increases peoples' motivation to keep their promises and commitments.

• You won't have to experience the pain and frustration of arguments that never get settled or serious conflicts that lead to anger and tears. Why? Because you will learn a communication skill that effectively prevents a lot of conflicts. And then you'll learn that certain conflicts are still inevitable in marriages, but there is a procedure you can use to resolve those conflicts peacefully--so nobody loses, both win.

Skills Not Solutions

This training is unique in deliberately refraining from giving family members solutions to their innumerable and various problems. Now you are probably thinking, "What in the world do we get in this training we can't use your expertise to give us good solutions?" The answer is that Family Effectiveness Training will teach a few learnable skills and procedures that will then enable family members to find their own unique solutions to their unique problems. It will empower you and other family members to be problem-solvers. You may have heard the following principle that describes empowerment:

"Give people a fish and you'll feed them for one day; teach them how to fish and you feed them for a lifetime."

That is what the Gordon Training skills will do.

Besides that, because families and their members are so very different there is seldom one best solution for the same problem in every family. So don't expect advice about how to handle money, relate with in-laws, spend more time together or any of the hundreds of problems families experience.

Is Your Primary Relationship With Your Spouse?

Is your primary relationship with your spouse? Take a look at the following excerpt from P.E.T. to see why putting your spouse first can be important for your children:

"Many American parents look to their children for their primary relationship, rather than to their spouse. Mothers, particularly, rely heavily on their children to give them satisfactions and pleasure that more appropriately should come from the marriage relationship. Frequently this leads to “putting the children first,” “sacrificing for the children,” or counting heavily on the children “turning out well,” because of the parents’ heavy investment in the parent-child relationship. Their children’s behavior means far too much to these parents. How the kids behave is too crucial. These parents feel that children must be constantly watched, directed, guided, monitored, judged, evaluated. It is very difficult for such parents to allow their children to make mistakes or stumble in their lives. They feel their children must be protected against failure experiences, shielded against all possible danger.

Effective parents are able to have a more casual relationship with their children. Their marriage relationship is primary. Their children have a significant place in their lives, but it is almost a secondary place—if not secondary, at least no more important than the place of the spouse. Such parents seem to allow their children much more freedom and independence. These parents enjoy being with their children but only for limited times; they also like to spend time alone with their marriage partner. Their investment is not solely in their children; it is also in their marriage. How their children behave or how much they achieve, therefore, is not so critical to them. They are more apt to feel that the children have their own lives to live and should be given more freedom to shape themselves. Such parents seem to correct their children less frequently and monitor their activities less intensely. They can be there when the children need them, but they do not feel strong needs to intervene or push into the lives of the children without being asked. They generally do not neglect their children. They certainly are concerned about them but not anxious. They are interested, but not smothering. “Children are children” is their attitude, so they can be more accepting of what they are—children. Effective parents more often feel amused at their children’s immaturity or their foibles, rather than devastated.

The parents in this latter group obviously are inclined to be much more accepting—fewer behaviors will upset them. They will have less need to control, limit, direct, restrict, admonish, preach. They can allow their children more freedom—more separateness. Parents in the first group are inclined to be less accepting. They need to control, limit, direct, restrict, and so on. Because their relationship with the children is the primary one, these parents have strong needs to monitor their behavior and program their lives.

I have come to see more clearly why parents who have an unsatisfactory relationship with their spouse find it so difficult to be accepting of their children: They are too needful of their children bringing them the joys and satisfactions that are missing in the marital relationship."