How do you think your kids experience you? Do they expect loving, positive attention and trust or criticism and judgement? Or no attention at all until they cause a problem? Watch yourself and see what they respond to.
Whenever you yell, threaten, punish, or use that blaming tone that turns your child “parent deaf”, you are teaching your children that they are a problem—because you see them as a problem. What you want is the problem to end, but what you are focusing on—what your child is doing wrong—makes the problem worse.
What you want to grow is your child’s capability.
So trust your child’s capability to overcome problems. This requires a mindset shift and understanding what trust really means. Your trust is needed 24/7, especially if your child is behaving in untrustworthy ways.
It’s not about trusting behavior or even your child’s current motivations. It’s about trusting who your child is and that he wants to do things right. The fact that things are going wrong can be corrected by your change in focus.
As far as I can tell, most parents want their children to reach launch-age fully capable of conducting their lives with responsibility and respect. When they leave the safety of their nests with self-confidence, feeling competent and resilient, with the drive to contribute positively to the world, they are ready to greet whatever comes at them. We want our children to go out into the world capable of finding success yet able to weather the bumps and storms with a strong sense of self.
Boundaries refer to the separation of responsibilities between me and my child. Limits refer to what behaviors I am ok with and what I am not. To have appropriate limits, it is essential to establish healthy boundaries.
Q. My eight-year-old daughter has taken to lying and I don’t know what to do. The other day I was driving her home from a friend’s house. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw her playing with legos that were not hers. Her friend has quite a collection. I asked her where she got them, and she told me that a friend at school had given them to her. I said that we had not brought them to her friend’s. She said she had put them in the car earlier to play with on the way home. Her brother told me later that she had taken them from her friend’s house. What is my next step?
As far as I can tell, most parents want to raise successful children to reach launch-age fully capable of conducting their lives with responsibility and respect. When they leave the safety of their nests feeling self-confident, competent, resilient, and have the drive to contribute positively to the world, they are ready to greet whatever comes at them. We want our children to go out into the world capable of finding success yet able to weather the bumps and storms with a strong sense of self. But, what are the secrets that make children successful?
Your goal for your children is to raise strong, self-confident, resilient, independent humans who contribute to society, right? This doesn’t just happen somewhere in the teen years. It starts from setting family values that begin with 
A. The Foundation: You, the parent. 
The family is a nurturing ground, not a training ground. When I hear parents say, “My job is to prepare him to deal with the real world. People out there aren’t going to care how he feels about what he has to do,” I hear a justification for traditional, authoritarian parenting, and I want to counter it to expose the moving parts.
It’s really easy to get down on yourself for behaving regretfully toward your child. What’s hard is forgiving yourself because you’re human and making amends. 
Vulnerability does not equal weakness. Vulnerability 