Set up a chore system in your home so you can retire from being the house servant while empowering your children. Young people will learn self-discipline, responsibility and teamwork when parents implement the strategies in Raising Able. Watch in amazement when children take the lead in family meetings and volunteer for jobs around the home. Parents can count on children to contribute while youngsters gain competence, confidence and learn to cooperate with others. Parents get a break from waiting on children. Stories from contributors across the country describe how childhood chores impacted their lives, along with colorful examples to illustrate how to have a harmonious home by using family meetings, chores and dinner, along with encouragement, natural and logical consequences, setting limits with kindness and firmness, and mutual respect. Raising Able is more than a handbook on children and chores. It lays the foundation for a positive family environment, healthy parent-child relationships, and the development of good decision making. It is the ultimate anti-entitlement guide because cleaning toilets and scooping up dog manure counteract entitlement. Parents will learn to influence tots-to-teens without bribery, begging, berating, belligerence or beating. Children will learn to contribute without getting paid by the chore. Parents, educators and day care providers will learn new strategies to old challenges that nurture the child s spirit, not stifle it, while learning responsibility. The sensible guide is written by the mother of four children whose goal was to teach children to make good decisions when they were young so when they became teens and were 60 miles away going 60 miles an hour. They chose to wear a seatbelt, drive sober and have good friends. Implementing a chore system is a key component to teaching good decision making skills, according to Susan Tordella, M.A., a parenting expert, former journalist, program director, full-time mother and homemaker. The whole family benefits from chores, which identify a place in the family for each child to belong, contribute and feel good about themselves. The author s survey to more than 500 people ages 11 to 90 affirmed that chores teach responsibility and create family unity. The bonus is that mothers and fathers can retire from being the family servant and set a team work environment where everyone benefits. The book is based on Adlerian Psychology, the works of Alfred Adler and Rudolf Dreikurs. Adler was a member of Freud's famous Wednesday Afternoon group that included Carl Jung. Both Jung and Adler broke away to form their own psychological theories. Adler's theory is based on the idea that people are motivated to belong to their social group. Belonging is fundamental to Adler's approach combined with natural and logical consequences, family meetings, chores, dinner, mutual respect and encouragement. Encouragement is one of the most important and powerful ways to raise children. It focuses on effort and not on accomplishment and how the accomplishment reflected on parents, like praise does. Raising Able shows parents how to involve children in chores so parents can retire as the house servant. They learn to do chores without pay or praise, using family meetings and encouragement. Children and teens learn to moderate family meetings, a cornerstone of setting up a long-term relationship, responsibility and mutual respect. Family meetings are fun and productive. Chores will change a child's attitude towards herself. It is impossible to feel entitled if you clean toilets, do dishes and take out the trash. The parenting approach in Raising Able will transform your family atmosphere, change your relationship with your children, and give them lifelong skills and a work ethic.
