Welcome
You have now successfully enrolled and are almost ready to begin your first step in an exciting and practical learning process. This course will provide you with effective tools to use in your life.
This course is laid out in a step-by-step manner, with a sequence of study and exercises for you to do. And since the entire course is self-contained from within your personal logon, you can simply log in at any time to progress through your assignments to full completion.
Important Note
In doing this course, be very certain you never go past a word you do not fully understand. The only reason a person gives up a study or becomes confused or unable to learn is because he has gone past a word he did not understand.
Important Note
In doing this course, be very certain you never go past a word you do not fully understand. The only reason a person gives up a study or becomes confused or unable to learn is because he has gone past a word he did not understand.
The confusion or inability to understand or learn comes AFTER a word you did not know the meaning of. It might not only be the new and unusual words that you did not understand.
One of the most important facts in the whole subject of study is that you must never go past a word that you do not understand.
In every subject that you took up and then left incomplete, you will find that there were words that you read but you did not know what they meant.
So while doing this course be very, very certain you never go past a word you do not fully understand.
If what you are studying becomes confusing or you can’t seem to understand it, there will be a WORD just earlier that you have not understood.
Don’t go any further, but go back to BEFORE you got into trouble and find the word you did not fully understand. Wherever you see a word that is underlined, you can click on it and it will immediately give you the meaning of that word.
As you go through the course, you can also click on the menu at the top of each course page where it says “Glossary” (which is a list of words and what they mean) and it will take you to a list of words used in the course and give you the meaning of each.
If you cannot find the word you are looking for listed in the glossary, get a simple dictionary and look up its meaning there.
In today’s world, most parents are not given any education on how to raise their children. They do not know how to care for them, how to help them when they are injured, how to comfort them when they are upset and crying or even how to best get a child’s cooperation.
As a result, today’s children are often brought up in the way their parents were brought up; and that, in many cases, was not a pleasant or successful experience.
The way in which you care for and bring up a child has a very strong influence on his future. For example, if a child receives a lot of love and communication from his parents, he will most likely want to give back that love and communication to his family. But if he is always being given orders, continuously being stopped from doing what he wants to do and getting into arguments and fights with his parents, he cannot wait to get away from home. Often, when he does leave home like this, he can make friends with the wrong people and start doing things that can get him into trouble.
L. Ron Hubbard developed many ways to bring out the best in a child—to help him get his feet on the ground and give him a happy childhood where he grows up as a contributing member of the family. While just a portion of what L. Ron Hubbard has written on handling children has been included here, this chapter gives you invaluable tools and teaches you ways to help your child that will be found nowhere else.
The information on this course will help you bring up your children with love and communication and give them what they need to make them happy, loving and productive members of your family—children who will grow up to become valuable members of our future society.
In doing this course, be very certain you never go past a word you do not fully understand. The only reason a person gives up a study or becomes confused or unable to learn is because he has gone past a word he did not understand.
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How to Live With Children
Parents often ask themselves, “How can I best raise my children? ”
A good, stable parent with love and tolerance (willingness to accept something that isn’t perfect) in his heart is about the best thing a child can have.
How Much Control?
The first and most important thing to know about raising your children is how to train them without breaking them (harming them emotionally so they lose hope or confidence). You want to raise your child in such a way that he can take care of himself and you don’t have to constantly control him. His good behavior, his health and his happiness depend on you doing this correctly.
Children are not dogs. They can’t be trained like dogs are trained. A child is not a special kind of animal different from Man. A child is a man or a woman who has not attained full growth.
How would you like to be pulled around forcefully and ordered about and kept back from doing what you wanted to do? You would feel angry and upset if someone did that to you. So does a child, but because he is small, he is afraid to say or do anything to show that he does not like what is happening to him. But that is the way an average child gets treated. A child doesn’t fight back because he isn’t big enough and he knows it. So instead he does things such as getting your floor muddy, interrupting your nap and destroying the peace in your home. This is usual child behavior. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The sweetness and love of a child will continue as long as he can have his own
One reason you might have to interrupt a child’s right to decide for himself could be when there is some possible danger in the area around him. In this case, you as his parent should make the area in which he is living or playing free of things that could harm him. For example, you could fence in your yard so your child can’t run into the street.
Some people were raised so poorly as a child that they think control is the most important thing in raising a child. But if you forcefully control a child, you will make him go into apathy, which is a mental emotion where he does not care about anything anymore. He will be obedient and do what you tell him, but he will have lost his
So, in raising your child, you must avoid “training” him this way. Your child really begins his life being friendly and agreeable toward other people. He will also naturally act in a calm way and earn respect. But in a relatively short period of time, if he is not treated correctly, the child will revolt (go against authority). This revolt could get so bad that he might cause a lot of trouble. He might make a lot of noise and do things that show he does not care about other people. He can be careless with his possessions or get himself filthy and not wash. He will do anything he can to annoy you.
So if you try to just train and control a child, you will lose his love. And if you keep on controlling and training your child, you could end up losing the child forever.
Here is a test you can do: Let your child sit on your lap. He will sit there, quite happily. Now put your arms around him and hold him to make him stay there and keep sitting there. Do this even though he wasn’t even trying to leave. Instantly, he will squirm. He will fight to get away from you. He will get angry. He will cry. But remember, he was happy before you started to hold him and make him sit there.
It is your efforts to “train” and control your child that will cause him to protest and to act exactly like he does when you try to hold him on your lap.
If you have already trained, controlled, ordered around and stopped your child from having his own possessions and things like that for some time, you can have some difficulty when you then begin to allow him to do something. If, after controlling him, you try to give him freedom, he may be suspicious and have a hard time trying to adjust to this.
Say he was always being stopped by you from riding a bicycle because he “might get injured.” Then you suddenly give him a bike and tell him to ride it. It would take some time for him to get over the earlier forced control and be able to just ride the bike.
If you let your child have
It is far easier and much, much better for the child when you do not give him constant orders and directions, but help him develop a strong
A Child’s Possessions
Another thing to remember is that when you give a child something, it’s his. It is not still yours. It belongs to him now. This includes his clothes, toys and his room. What he has been given must remain only under his own control. He may end up tearing up his shirt, wrecking his bed or breaking his toy fire engine, but what he does with his possessions is none of your business.
How would you like to have somebody give you a Christmas present and then tell you, day after day afterwards, what you are supposed to do with it and even punish you if you failed to care for it the way the person who gave it to you thinks it should be cared for? You would wreck that present.
So when you interfere with a child’s possessions, what he will start to do is wreck your nerves. That is his revenge. He will cry. He will pester you. He will break your things. He will “accidentally” spill his milk. And he will also, on purpose, wreck whatever it is that you have given to him and then warned him to take care of and not do this or that with. Why? He is fighting for his own
So when you give your child something, know that it is now his possession.
A Child’s Right to Contribute
You must give your child the right to contribute.
Any human being feels he is quite able to do things, and do them well, just as long as he is allowed to do things for others as much as or more than has been done for him.
You, as a parent, naturally contribute more to your child than he contributes back. You give him food, a house to live in, clothes, books, toys, money and your love. While still a child, he cannot give you back as much as you give him.
As soon as your child sees he is receiving more than he is giving back, he can become unhappy. He will try to contribute more. But if he is not allowed to, he will get angry at you and may even start to dislike you.
Not realizing what is happening, you may try to handle your child’s revolt (reaction against authority) by contributing more to him. But what can happen then, because he is now even more unable to contribute as much to you as you are giving him, is that your child will revolt even more. If this cycle continues, your child could end up in apathy. So you have to let your child contribute to you.
But you can’t order him to contribute. You can’t order him to mow the grass and call that his contribution. He has to figure out on his own what his contribution is and then give it. If he is made to do something to contribute, he has not selected it himself and it is not his. Being told what to do to contribute is seen by him as just more control from you.
Even a baby contributes by trying to make you smile. A baby will show off. When he is a little older, he will dance for you. He will bring you small gifts like some sticks he found on the ground or a stone or a leaf. He will try to repeat the motions you make with your hands or your body to help you when you work. For example, he will try to help you push the vacuum cleaner along or stir the mixture in a bowl when you are making a cake.
If you don’t accept the contributions from the baby or child, like the smiles, those dances, those sticks, those work motions, you will have begun to stop your child’s contribution. And if you stop his contributions, he will start to get anxious. He will do strange things to your possessions to try to make them “better” for you. For example, he might decide the carpet would look better with some ink on it or the wall would look prettier with a crayon drawing on it. But if you yell at him or punish him doing that, it is the worst thing you could do.
Just simply let your child contribute and all will go much better.
Understanding How the Family Works
How can a child know what to contribute if he has no idea how your household actually works?
While you can do nothing more than accept the smiles, dances and small “gifts” when your child is very young, as soon as he can understand, he should be given the whole story of how the family works and how a household is put together.
You could explain to him that a family is a small group that works together to help the survival of each of its members and help each other get ahead and do better in life. You can explain to him where his allowance comes from. You could tell him what happens to make it possible for there to be food on the table for everyone to eat, where his clothes come from, what you have to do to make a clean house and how the family has a car and can keep it going.
You would tell him that Daddy works. Daddy spends hours using his hands and his thinking to work hard and for this he gets money. That money is used to buy the food you all eat. The car is looked after, because it costs a lot of money to replace a car. You can explain to the child that a calm house and taking care of Daddy means Daddy works better, and that means food and clothes and cars.
In other words, give your child a full explanation of everything about the household, work and play in a way he will understand.
If your child has been revolting, he may keep revolting for a while. But if he is educated on the family and knows what you are all trying to achieve as a group, he will eventually understand and become part of the family and work with you to help make the whole family do even better.