How is the quality of your relationships with your children and spouse? Is it where you want it to be? How pure is your way of being? Are you correcting your children with or without teaching?
The Parenting Pyramid (The Arbinger Company, 1998) is an ideal way of evaluating your relationships, and how to get optimal relationships with your loved ones. Quantity isn't quality, let's learn about quality.
The Parenting Pyramid has 5 tiers. The base tier is the foundation to get you to the top which is where you begin.
Correct & Teaching
You can choose to correct your children by your attitude. You can embrace and love when you are upset or turn a situation into a negative one. How do you want your children to remember how you acted when upset?
Let's say, your children decide they want to go to a skate park that is near your house, you have seen older kids doing drugs and cursing at the skate park. Your wife lets your adolescent children go to the skate park and you are upset. You can choose to yell and demand they go home immediately, or be an example and have them experience the negative environment for themselves and decide for themselves on if they should be there. Forcing anyone to do something they don't want to do will cause anger, regret, and possibly rebellion.
You decide not to go the anger route and instead put a smile on your face and spend quality time with your children at the skate park. You tell them you want to join them each week to spend time with them. After three weeks of going to the skate park and having them see the drugs and cursing you ask your children if they want to go bowling instead. They exclaim yes! After bowling, on the way home you ask your children how they liked bowling and if they want to do bowling or skating next week. One of your children says they want to go bowling, the other child agrees saying the environment felt better. You guided your children and helped them see the difference in the environment. You are looking at your personal way of being and deciding to be an example of positivity instead of an example of negativity. This lesson was a way of teaching your children by using a positive way of correcting behavior.
Parent/Child Relationship
You can spend all the time in the world with your child, you can be a stay at home parent devoting all of your time and energy into your children. A question to ask yourself is, what is the quality of my relationship with my child? Your child won't learn anything from you if he doesn't like you. Bonds of affection have to be established so children are receptive to learning from you, then correction will be much easier. The Parenting Pyramid says, "the effectiveness of our correction will depend on the quality of our teaching, and the quality of our teaching will depend on the quality of our relationship".
Husband/Wife Relationship
The relationship with your children largely depend on the the relationship with your spouse. How your children sees the other parent will greatly determine how they treat your spouse. If there is difficulty between your relationship with your spouse, your children will easily be sucked into the turmoil. The article The Parenting Pyramid says, "the marital relationship is the central relationship in the family; in significant ways it colors all the others". The most important thing the husband can do for the children is love their mother.
Your Way of Being
The bottom of the pyramid is Your Way of Being, this is the foundation of your pyramid, it is fundamental. Who you are includes your deepest attitudes and being sensitive to others. You cannot go through the motions of the pyramid you have to put in true effort for the parenting pyramid to work. The way of being is the purity of your heart. Children can tell how you think of them by how your way of being is.
When you are working on your pyramid the top layers of the pyramid is how you are helping others. You have to help yourself before you can help others. It is so important to work on having a pure heart, so your quality of love shown is pure and not negative. If you try to correct your children and the elements of this pyramid are not in place you will fail. If you look at your pyramid and find a problem in one of the levels, look at the level below and correct that first as that is your solution. Lastly, The Parenting Pyramid suggests you should always be working on the 3 deepest levels of the pyramid immediately and simultaneously.
I know there are many ways of learning, so I wanted to add this great video by Dr. Dave Schramm from the University of Missouri. Dr. Dave shares his explanation of The Parenting Pyramid.
https://youtu.be/ckrxYl8HEEE?si=RDy8AjwWvsIMRzlB
The Arbington Company. (1998). The Parenting Pyramid. p 1-8.
Parenting Pyramid - University of Missouri thrive in five. YouTube. (2020, December 15). https://youtu.be/ckrxYl8HEEE?si=O7ZtPxcMNrv8HRva
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