To their kids, dads are often bigger than life.  They are influential in ways they might not be aware of… the following is a letter from a 10 year-old to his dad.

“Dear Dad,

I haven’t been acting to good the last couple of weeks.  I have been talking smart and having a bad attitude toward some things but I think you should not fly off the handle and start to yell at me.  You should listen to what I have to say.  example.  Yesterday you said nobody did anything in the way of helping around the house and you started to yell and I was about to say Jerry and I worked for an hour.  You didn’t let me say anything and got mad.  You always say I get mad and be a bad sport (no offence) but you also get mad and pouty and on sundays you are so edgy and say things about mom and swear.  You say not to say dirty words and stuff when I do it yet you do it.  I tell you about it but you say I make you mad and that’s true but have you ever thought that we do it because were mad.  It doesn’t only apply to children.  You end up punishing us without punishment.  I will try to do better and I would like it if you did to.  Love, your son Bobby.”

Making the covert overt is a major parenting responsibility.  If I have an angry kid at home who deals with every disappointment, every occasion of not getting his way, every failed challenge, with anger and rage then how am I going to teach him to change?

The standard approach would be to talk with him after the blowup about how he could have handled things better.  He says he’ll try.  And this will be totally ineffective.

I could enroll him in an “anger management” group where he can be around other angry kids and learn to mask what is going on.  Talking a good game, mastering psychobabble and doing role plays will surely solve the problem.  Until, he encounters a real life situation that doesn’t go his way and out comes the rage again.

Or I could wait for the rage to happen because my boy runs into the unpredictability of life without entitlement  and recognize that I must fearlessly teach him the skills he needs to convert rage to something else that is more useful - right then, right there.  I must teach him the skills he will need while he is raging so the next time he is raging and I am not there, he will know what to do.

parentwarriors teach in the midst of chaos, confusion, rage and bedlam.  They are smart enough to know that the best time for their children to learn the lessons is when the volcano is erupting.

1) When your emotions are driving the car and your brains are in the backseat, you are halfway there.  Kids love family situations where parents are easily swayed by emotional impulses and the gray matter is missing in action.  It is fertile ground for manipulation, seduction, diversion and distraction.  The problem is that when the kids are out in the world, needing to make critical decisions, they end up on the short end or worse because mommy and daddy have not taught them how to think.  Then when something bad happens, M & D are upset.

2) When someone outside the family offers an honest appraisal about the nonsense going on at home that passes for family norms, and the family defense system clicks in and shoots the messenger from the sky.  Burning up your allies is the other half of a dsyfunctional existence.  It ends up with mutual assured destruction where family members get no feedback and suffocate on their own recycled patterns of behavior.  Clinging to the piece of wood in the middle of the ocean seems like a good idea (maybe the only idea) at the time.  But at some point, when you’re not paying attention, the waterlogged salvation becomes the anchor that carries you to the bottom.

We love to compare our present performance to what we did in the past.  “I’m doing better than I did last year.”  It stinks.  And it is a lousy comparison.  It allows us to dumb ourselves down and then that becomes the baseline.

The measuring stick needs to be: what am I capable of doing at my very best (my potential) and how far away am I.

What if the best ways to parent haven’t been invented yet?

You walk into a technology company and announce that everything we know about technology is known and nothing new will ever be invented.  They laugh at you, have you escorted out and call you nuts.

But we do that with parenting all the time.  We act as if everything is known and all we have to do is buy the right book, find the definitive research or duplicate the efforts of others.  It is ridiculous.

I saw this ad for a parenting summit.  You were supposed to leave your ego at the door, not be adversarial and the end result would be a unified approach to parenting.  Huh?  Effective parenting requires a damn strong ego and is adversarial by nature.  Kids are going to push back (hopefully) during the process of being taught how to be useful and effective human beings.  And powerful parents are going to push back against a bizarre culture that tells their kids that they are entitled to whatever they want at no cost to them.

Ten years from now we will look back at how people were doing counseling” with families - closed door sessions, 45 minute increments, focused on pathology and diagnoses, reliant on adult medications that were down-sized for kids, never holding kids or parents accountable - and we will laugh.  We will shake our heads at how much we had forsaken personal responsibility and innovation and creativity.  How much we relied on the experts to tell us what to do.  How, despite what we said, we believed everything about parenting was known and nothing new would come from us.

Here’s a thought: the best ways to parent our kids have not been invented yet.  They will be discovered, some day, by parents who are courageously experimenting with change, risking the uncharted territories of human behavior and believing with all their hearts and souls that there has to be a better way.

You are not powerless to change your behavior.  I talk to parents every day who tell me the 7 year-old or the 11 year-old or the 15 year-old is running the family.  My first question is: If they are running the family, what’s your job?  It is not sarcasm.  It’s confrontation with the ridiculous notion that kids can actually run the family without accomplices.

So here’s a resolution: stop engaging in or aiding and abetting this kind of dysfunctional behavior.  Happy New Year!

All the gas pedal can do is more or less. You push down and you let up. You get trapped into that either-or mindset. It is predictable. One of the things that keeps a lousy situation going at home is the same old, same old parental behavior. Usually verbal and repetitive.

Time to shift gears. Move to a different level of interaction. Connect those neurons in new ways. Go a little wild. Use all five senses to communicate with the kids. There are a thousand ways to inspire, praise, enchant and invigorate that can be done in multi-color, surround sound with new tastes, textures and smells. A cornucopia of opportunity. It might work better.

A stock trader friend of mine was telling me about a crazy thing that happened to him the other day. Normally, like all good traders, he puts a stop loss on each trade. The stock will be automatically sold if it drops to that price. It is a safeguard in case the stock drops quickly and it protects the trader from the sometimes fantastical idea that a falling stock will magically rebound.

On this particular day, he bought a stock and did not put on a stop loss. As he told the story, he had this blank, empty look on his face. He had no explanation for violating his own rules and going against his instincts. The stock began to drop. He did nothing. It dropped further. As he tells it, not only did he do nothing but he started to believe that it would rebound. It continued to drop. All he had to do was push a button but instead it was like he was in suspended animation and he did not act. Needless to say, it was a bad decision.

As he told the story, I thought about the blank, shell-shocked look on his face. I have seen that look hundreds of times before on the face of parents who couldn’t believe that they had allowed the family situation to get so out of control. The look of helplessness, paralysis as they stand idly by allowing things to happen in the family that they know instinctively will lead to a bad outcome. Sometimes they do not know what to do but mostly they are in disbelief about their own inaction and then compound it with the belief that it will get better on its own. With a host of explanations, they convince themselves that the downward trend cannot last. It will magically turnaround.

They need a stop loss. They need to decide on a point beyond which they will not allow the family to fall. Here are a couple of stop loss points: 1) when parents allow their kids to act irresponsibly and instead of intervening they do nothing to avoid conflict. 2) when kids are taught that they are special but then are allowed to use this as a weapon to punish those who love them and are working in their best interest.

Hopefully, you will take action before it gets to this point. But there has to be a point beyond which you will not go. Decide now where that is. And then, push the button.

It was an encounter that changed my life. A couple of decades ago I was driving a well known family therapist to Chicago’s O’Hare airport. About halfway on the drive, he turned to me and said, “That Mike is a son-of-a-gun. He never listens to anyone.” Mike was his good friend and my supervisor and mentor.

From everything I had learned in my life up until then, I expected his next statement to be, “I wish he would listen better.” Instead he said, “I will be coming back in a month to do a second training. By the time I return, I will have figured out a way to get Mike to listen to me.”

It took me a minute to process what he said. In essence it was this: I am 100% responsible for my communications. The other person has no responsibility to get it. I cannot blame them. If I want someone to listen to me, I have to make it happen by using my own creativity, imagination and assertiveness. It’s up to me.

Think of the implications for relationships, family interactions, work situations. Each of us taking full responsibility for our communications. Never again blaming anyone for not understanding us. Welcome to a changed world.

Parents aspire to it. Then inspire your children. No nonsense like “not everyone can be great”. Yes they can. For some kids, graduating high school is the beginning of their quest. For others, it will be Harvard. For some kids, being the best welder is their mission while for others it is something else. Greatness is not about bragging or thinking you are better than someone else. It is about discovery and taking our gifts and talents to the max. It is about looking out into the future and being pumped about what can be. It is about the rousing of potential. It is one of the ultimate parental missions. And if you need a reason, try this: positive aspirations for the future are one of the most powerful protective factors for kids. Find greatness within yourself and then infect your children.