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Jerald
Forster, Professor Emeritus, College of Education, University
of Washington, collaborated with Bernard Haldane in 1987
to establish the Dependable Strengths Project at the University
of Washington. He, along with Bernard Haldane, Jean Haldane,
and Allen Boivin-Brown, later developed and implemented
5-day DSP Workshops designed to prepare professionals
to help others articulate and use their Dependable Strengths.
Jerald was one of the founding members of the Board of
Directors for the Center for Dependable Strengths. |
I am in the process of writing a book that will help parents
create a strengths-focused home. The writing is going slowly
and I sometimes reflect on the reasons for this slowness.
My immediate excuse is that I simply have too many other activities
that seem to have a higher priority. Yet, as I reflect more
deeply, I get in touch with the complexity and the difficulty
of changing the ways a parent interacts with others in her
or his family. Interaction patterns develop over the years,
and the basic flavor of these patterns is difficult to change.
For example, most parents feel that they must keep their children
from harming themselves, others or the possessions of others.
It doesn’t even matter that much whether the child’s
action might be accidental or intended, the parent must prevent
the harmful outcome if she, or he, can. This parental responsibility
to prevent harmful activities may cause a parent to focus
on negative possibilities. This focus on the negative can
easily become the primary pattern of the interactions between
a parent and a child. When this pattern becomes dominant,
both the parent and the child develop negative expectancies.
The negativity causes more negativity, and the pattern becomes
more fixed. I guess this is why much of parent education is
remedial, focusing on methods of overcoming negative patterns
that have developed. It seems apparent that parent education
needs to start very early, before these negative patterns
have developed.
Before I go too far in my theme that negative parenting patterns
develop early and stay fixed, let me recognize that I have
been taking a pessimistic approach to my analysis of why I
have not finished the book by now. I am well aware of the
optimist’s advantage which tells me I will almost
always benefit if I can be optimistic when I approach a task.
So let me change my tack and write a little about how parents
could create a strengths-focused home.
The first principle of a strengths-focused home is that the
relationships between all members of the home should be strengths-focused.
A strengths-focused relationship is one where both members
of a relationship are paying a lot of attention to the strengths
of the other person in the relationship. Usually, a newly
established home starts out with a relationship between the
two people who set up the home. If the two people have a strengths-focused
relationship, each person is looking for and acknowledging
strengths in the other. Instead of looking for faults or weaknesses,
they are looking for positive attributes, skills and qualities.
Of course it is unrealistic to expect that all interactions
will be positive. But, each participant in a relationship
can try to focus on strengths most of the time. Optimistic
people who are usually positive will find it fairly easy to
interact in this way, but people who have a history of being
critical will find it difficult to be positive most of the
time. However, it will really pay off if all members of a
family make a concerted effort to be positive most of the
time. Research demonstrates that positive, or strengths-focused,
relationships are characterized by better coping outcomes.
Similarly, research demonstrates that teams and organizational
units focusing on strengths are more likely to achieve goals
and have higher morale. People are more effective and better
able to adapt when they have positive motivation. It is unfortunate
that so many people seem to be unaware of that basic principle
of motivation.
It is really apparent to me that a book which encourages
parents to create a strengths-focused home needs to be written.
I can also see that the book needs to be aimed at young parents
who have not yet developed negative patterns of relating with
each other and with their children. Now what I need to do
is buckle down and finish that book.
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