Summary: My guest this week is Sharon Silver of Proactive Parenting. The transcript of this interview appears below, and I really encourage you to listen or read all the way through because Sharon has some real gems to share! Sharon is a mom and educator and has 17 years of experience counseling parents both in person and through her audio downloads on her website. Carrie: You are back with Carrie at Natural Moms Talk Radio. I have with me Sharon Silver of ProactiveParenting.net. Hello, Sharon. Sharon: Hi, Carrie. Carrie: I’m excited to talk with you. I’ve been looking at your web site and listening to a bit of the audio you have there. I think that what you’re doing is great and very much needed. Tell us a little, briefly, about what proactive parenting is all about. Sharon: Proactive Parenting is a site that grew out of 17 years of teaching parenting, and really trying to help parents deal with things so they don’t have to end up going straight to punishment. I’m sure that what you listened to on my site was where I talked about the fact that every parent has a reaction, and so many parents think the only resource that they have is time outs. photo credit: nyki_m But the truth is that there’s a tremendous amount of information that lives in the middle between your reaction and sending a child to time out. And that’s what Proactive Parenting is about, ways to do this without going “Get your little fanny to time out right now.” C: That’s interesting that you say that, because my audience is mostly people who believe in attachment parenting and gentle discipline tools. But it’s very true that even a so called gentle discipline technique can cross that line, and time out can be very laid back, “Okay, I think that we need a minute to calm down here, so let’s have a time out.” Or this can be picking up the child and slamming them in the corner. It’s not necessarily what you do so much as how you do it. S: That’s very true. One of the top things on my web site are two completely different versions of time out. Because I have worked with a lot of attachment parenting parents, and parents that live on the fringes of that, and out of that grew my awareness, and also for my own children, that time out wasn’t accomplishing what I wanted It to accomplish. If I was already angry when I did it, then it could be one of those close to really angry “Get your little fanny in there,” or it could be what time out was originally intended to be, which was “Let’s both take a moment and come back and talk about it.” But there’s also a couple other things. For my preschoolers, which is seminar number two, because I’ve had to split them up, one for toddlers and one for preschoolers, the preschool one is very loving and really, it is “sweetheart, you need to do this.” So how I’m going to use time outs now is “have a seat for one minute, so you can get yourself internally ready to do what Mommy needs you to do. If you still need help with your emotions I’m right here.” Now, a toddler can’t handle that. A toddler needs the same loving support, but a toddler is still verbally not there yet. So a toddler needs to have actions included in this. The one that I do for toddlers is stop them, and you do this in 10 seconds. It gives you the perfect words to say that are very loving and scaled down to size so they can understand you, and then have the child, while they’re still emotional, dealing with the new information they were just passed so they can pull the whole thing together. And that’s my understanding of time outs in this day and age. I think it’s time that time out has an upgrade. C: To me, it’s more of a pattern interrupt than a punishment. S: That it is. But it can be a pattern interrupt with teaching. That’s where I am. I’m all about solutions, and I’m all about folding teaching, which is really what discipline is, into whatever method I use. Any moment that you have an opportunity to say “We need an interrupt,” it’s be[...]
