Do you know how to build trust? Not just with your children, but with anyone? There's a lot to unpack there, but one of the biggest components is Keeping Your Word. When we make promises, we're creating an opportunity to earn someone else's trust. When we break that promise, that trust erodes. If we consistently break promises, that trust vanishes altogether.
Do you know how to evaluate your promises? Do you know whether or not you're truly building trust? Join us for our concluding episode on discipline to find out!

Today we continue our series on Discipline. To recap what we've already learned: the first and most important discipline for a father-leader to have is Personal Consistency. Without the ability to be consistent, especially under pressure, you'll have significant challenges teaching your children anything, let along teaching them discipline. Next is Projecting Discipline, which is also called "enforcing the rules." If you are exceptionally consistent in creating rules and living by your values but don't have a plan for when the rules are broken, your leadership will fail. If you can put the guardrails in place but fail to get the vehicle back on the road when it jumps them, you're in for a wild ride with you kids. So in this episode, we'll tackle the next tenet of discipline as we continue to build toward an effective, loving father-leader: assertiveness.

Hurricane Ian is one of the most prolific storms ever recorded in Florida history. It's impact on Ft. Myers and the surrounding communities is absolutely heart-wrenching. We (the Anti Reactive Parenting staff) are grateful for our good fortune, and we fully understand that we could have lost everything. In this special LYFE Episode, Dave talks about how they leaned on their values, and what that meant for their children.

The people of Southwest Florida who've been forever changed by Hurricane Ian need our help (all of us!). The Anti Reactive Parenting crew have done some research, and we would like to recommend the Florida Disaster Fund to each of you. The FDF has done a great deal to ensure that 100% of donations reach the impacted communities (actually 100% ...not even credit card fees are taken out!). The website is:

https://www.volunteerflorida.org/donatefdf/

There are many tenets to Discipline. This week, we'll talk about Projecting Discipline, also known as...enforcing the rules!
Enforcing the rules starts with making the rules, but even before that, you have to have a set of consistent values.
Right along with making and enforcing the rules: punishment for breaking the rules. We discuss this in light detail this week.

Discipline is a complex and highly misunderstood thing. It's not the actions you take--it's the values that drive your actions. Discipline is derived from principles, which are built upon your values. The actions you take are, quite simply, asserting your values.

Emotions...you probably remember how hard it was for your toddler to control their emotions...if you still have a toddler, trust us, it gets better. Even though it gets better, there will always be times when we as fathers have to reign in some strong emotions to help our children grow and mature.

In this episode, we talk about strong emotions and how we as fathers should and should not act...or react...to our kids.

It can be frustrating when your kids aren't moving as fast as you'd like them to. Every once in a while, this might happen. If it happens way more often, then you may have one or more low energy kids. That may seem like a detrimental or even offensive label, but it's not. When you view your family as a team by understanding their strengths, you gain a better understanding of how each of you fills in the gaps and creates an effective and happy family. Low Energy kids are a piece of the puzzle; they're a member of the team with unique and valuable skills.

Depending upon when you got married and/or had kids, you might have had quite a few years out on your own to settle into a pattern of speech, a way of thinking, and a general pattern of behavior that probably isn't the best for kids to emulate.
It can be really difficult to understand what's appropriate and what's not when you've spent a long time on your own. The dark black areas, well, they're obvious, and the bright white ones are too, but what about those shades of gray in the middle?

Life is tough. Raising kids in an Anti Reactive environment means addressing the tough stuff early and often. And in true Anti Reactive fashion, that means being intentional! In today’s crossover episode with the Anti Reactive Parenting Podcast we’ll go into what it means to intentionally address hard topics, whether your kids hear about it on the news, from another adult, or from other kids whose family or social situations bring them into more contact with these subjects.