Parenting class leader Ann Magalhaes understands difficult children. She was one.
By Dolores Eyler
Parenting class leader Ann Magalhaes understands difficult children. She was one.
“My father took me to China on a business trip when I was a teen,” she recalled. “I refused to eat rice! My father was mortified.”
But of course, no child is perfect. And neither are parents, as Magalhaes stresses in The Parent Practice courses. “Parenting is not easy. It’s a process. It takes lots of practice. That’s why I like the name.”
The Parent Practice is a British program, focusing on bringing out the best in every child. Living in London with her husband, a banker, and daughter, Sophie, Magalhaes noticed and admired two mothers at her child’s gym class that were parenting in a very positive manner. “It turns out they had both taken the course,” she recalled.
After extensive training, Magalhaes herself became a Parent Practice facilitator, and brought the course to Rye when her family moved here almost three years ago.
Magalhaes, 48, finds her clients in Rye and London are very similar. “They are well educated with big expectations. Those are not bad things, but we have to understand we live in a bubble. There is an ambient noise of pressure to succeed. We choose to raise our children here, but we have to understand what comes with it, which can be anxiety and stress.”
The Parent Practice offers a five-week skills-based course stressing descriptive praise, reflective listening, setting up for success, family rules and rewards, and positive discipline. The more common ten-week course applies those skills in different parenting contexts. The courses are given in Magalhaes’ home, overlooking the Rye Golf Club course, or in a participant’s home, with a class size ranging from six to ten.
“We talk about choosing to respond or react, and shifting from should to could. We focus on solving specific problems. We want our kids to be problem solvers. We should be, too. Kids are not puppets. We can only control ourselves and how we respond to every situation.”
It is acknowledged that children are programmed to seek their parents’ attention. It is instinctive, yet parents often unwittingly give attention to negative behavior. It might seem curious to a parent that a child would want negative attention, but sometimes any attention is better than nothing. Noticing what children do right and praising that is a cornerstone of the program.
Positive discipline stresses the difference between punishment and consequences. Punishment is often intended to make the child feel bad and delivered in a spirit of anger and with criticism, while consequences are designed to train the child to behave differently, to learn something from the episode without loss of self-esteem.
Magalhaes said the most common issues brought to class deal with sibling interactions, keeping calm as a parent, and bringing out the best in our children.
She asks class participants what are the qualities and characteristics they want for their children. “Not once does the word success come up,” she said.
Magalhaes said she is actually seeing a parental shift from so much pressure on kids. “But maybe that is because my class participants seem to be more on the positive spectrum of allowing their children to be their best selves in an individual way. Inherent in that is making sure one’s expectations are appropriate for the child one has, and not the child one sometimes wishes one had.
The class stresses that parents can and should always go back and clean up what they didn’t get right. “Acknowledge it, make amends, and alter our own behavior, and do it without anger,” she said.
“Do I always get it right? Of course not. I just press my pause button,” she said, pointing to an imaginary spot on her hand, “take a deep breath, and count to 10. That helps me choose to respond rather than just react.” She jokingly added that she should probably get the “button” tattooed on.
With Sophie, 12, being an only child, Magalhaes is often told how easy she has it. “But it has its own challenges, too,” she said. “It would be so easy to do everything for her.”
Class members are frequently surprised when Magalhaes shares a treasured note from her daughter which reads: “I hate you!”
“That was from her much earlier melt-down period, and she wrote it out, rather than hitting out or scratching,” Magalhaes said. “She was learning to manage her anger.”
Besides teaching and writing a blog for the Parent Practice, Magalhaes co-chairs “Heard in Rye,” a community speaker series. British born, but raised in Canada to British parents, she met her Brazilian-born husband in graduate school there, but considers herself a Brit. “I feel at home in London,” she said. But the family has no plans to leave Rye. “Everyone is so friendly here, and my daughter is very, very happy,” she said.
For information on The Parent Practice, contact Ann Magalhaes at ann@theparentpractice.com.
