Even as a busy parent, I’m sure you’ve seen a poker show on TV or at least heard your friends or relatives talking about it. You might even be someone who’s caught up in the poker craze of the past two years, riding the wave of a steep learning curve. As an avid poker player and father of two, I realize more each day how my poker skills help me raise my kids. Want to know how? Here are four ways to turn your poker skills into parenting thrills:

Play the Hand You’re Dealt
No Limit Texas Hold Em is exciting to play because any hand can win. And that’s what separates a professional from an amateur — the ability to win pots with bad hands.

The same is true for fatherhood. The “hand we’re dealt” is the family environment we grew up in. Let’s face it — none of us grew up in an ideal environment, just as none of us gets dealt a pair of aces every hand. But the beauty of No Limit Texas Hold Em — and fatherhood — is that any hand can win; it all depends on how you play it.

Give Action to Get Action
In poker, you should occasionally play hands you wouldn’t normally play, in order to “give action” to other players. Then when you have a good hand and bet, those players are more likely to give the action back to you.

So what kind of action are you giving your kids? Do you play games they like to play, even if they seem silly? Do you regularly attend their school events? Are you there during difficult times? Even if you’re not interested in the activity, your involvement shows genuine interest in your children. They might not understand that message, but they will feel it, and that’s much more important.

Look for Diamonds in the Muck
We’re never quite prepared for the shocks and challenges that life deals us. Our daughter, Ashley, was only two when my wife and I discovered she had diabetes. Our lifestyle changed dramatically as we learned to control this disease.

What can parents do when experiencing a bad beat like this? Look for diamonds in the muck. In other words, look for the positive in a negative experience.

One of the positives of Ashley’s diabetes is learning to be disciplined and have self-control. She can’t simply follow her impulses to eat whatever she wants, whenever she wants. As a diabetic teenager someday, that discipline will help her when she is studying in high school.

The Thrill (and Chill) of Going All In
“I’m all in” — three words every poker player loves to say. It’s do-or-die when you commit all your chips. So what does going all in as a father mean? It means making an all-out commitment to your kids.

Dropping them off or picking them up from daycare or school. Eating some dinners together as a family each week. Helping them solve problems with their friends. What commitments do you make on a consistent basis?

Fatherhood brings lots of work and responsibility, so going all in can be chilling — a daunting task with little reward. If you think of all the little ways you’re building a relationship with your kids, going all in is thrilling — and many of the rewards come years later. But that kind of sums up parenting doesn’t it?

To learn more about relating poker to parenting, research on fatherhood, and fatherhood organizations, go to http://learninginterface.com/ and click on Tele-seminars. Treat yourself or a father you know to Mark’s tele-seminar on June 16, a unique Father’s Day gift.

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The growth of your baby’s language skills is an amazing process. In the short space of a year, she goes from crying to speaking intelligible words.

Can you do anything to help baby along? Apparently yes. There are ways to help the baby develop her language skills more easily and quickly.

Keep in mind that these are only general guidelines. All babies do not respond equally to these actions. In some cases, you might not notice any effect at all.

1. Talk to your baby. Babies can understand speech long before they can speak. Talking to your baby helps her become familiar with words. Speak slowly and clearly, using short sentences.

2. As early as two months of age, your baby will have a collection of coos and other sounds for communication. To encourage her to keep communicating, listen to her attentively, looking directly into her eyes.

3. Sing to your baby and read stories to her. The more you talk to her as well as listen to her, the faster she’ll develop her language. When you read, ask questions about the pictures in the book. That way, you can turn the session into an interactive one.

4. Respond to your baby’s sounds with your own voice tones and words. Have ‘chat times’ with baby and you can hold ‘conversations’ with her. When she gets one or two words right or almost right, repeat them back to her.

5. At times, your baby will tire of communication. She may turn her head away from you or cover her face. When this happens, don’t attempt to force her to talk to you.

6. Don’t talk to the baby continuously. Allow her space to respond in her own way. Let her complete sentences herself; don’t do it for her.

7. Identify objects by their names. When the baby shows curiosity about any object, use it as an opportunity to help expand her vocabulary. Name animals, trees, colors, objects and more.

8. Repetition helps the baby learn. Repeat object names, sentences and nursery rhymes.

9. Play games like peek-a-boo or pat a cake. While the baby can’t speak real words, she’ll respond with her own babbling language.

10. Some studies say that background noise like television can hinder a baby’s ability to pick up language. Adults who are hard of hearing may struggle to understand conversation at a noisy party. The situation is even worse for a baby who doesn’t even understand the language in the first place. So try to minimize such background noises.

Peter Andrews is a successful author and has written extensively on parenting. His articles cover tips for parenting, baby care ideas, help with parenting and more.

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Compassionate Parenting provides a secure emotional base from which children carry out their genetic programs to explore and interact with their environments in safety and protection. At the same time, parents develop the protective, nurturing, and compassionate skills that empower them in all areas of life, including work and health. We simply function at our best when we have emotional connections with our children that are strong, flexible, and enjoyable.

Compassion most definitely does not mean letting children get away with bad or selfish behavior. It does not mean that parents should go along with whatever children want. Nor does it mean overindulgence, generosity, or magnanimity. Compassionate parents are able to see beneath the surface of their children’s behavior to get at the deeper motivations. They empower children to control their own behavior by teaching them to regulate their motivations.

Compassionate Parenting is certainly not perfect parenting. The best parents in the world do not go a single day without making some error in what they do or say to their children. Fortunately, kids are extremely resilient when it comes to parental mistakes. A major tenet of the Compassionate Parenting program is that whatever parents say and do matters far less than their emotional motivation. Unless a child is deep into a destructive mode, almost anything a parent says or does in apositive mode will succeed. In fact, experiments show that children perceive even highly critical statements done with positive motivation as caring and encouraging.

Regardless of what mode the child is in, almost nothing the parent says or does in the negative or destructive modes will work. Parents must not match the negative and destructive motivations of their children in kind. Doing so only reinforces them and teaches kids the dangerous lesson that the one with the most power to be negative and destructive wins.

General Skills of Compassionate Parenting
• Listen to your children. Research shows that children in all stages of development complain that their parents yell too much and listen too little.

• As much as possible, let solutions to problems come from the children. As they mature, your job is less to give answers and more and more to ask the questions that lead them to solutions.

• Choose toys that have something beneath the surface to help deepen their interest. Young children cannot sustain interest for long, but they can develop a beginning awareness that interest works better when it runs deeper than the surface.

• Understand that change stimulates emotion. You and your children will have emotional response to change, regardless of the content.

• Take care to respond to positive emotions as well as negative. Otherwise, you set up the habit of using trouble to get attention. Compassionate attention to expressions of interest and enjoyment are opportunities to develop positive emotional response in children and adults.

• Express affection to your children and to other adults in the family.

General Rules of Effective Discipline

Like all human beings, children need discipline to help them function at their best. They actually want discipline. Children who receive little discipline tend to feel unloved, isolated, and unprotected. Many adolescents from undisciplined homes lie to their peers and make up limits that they attribute to neglectful parents.

Children view it as the job of parents to set limits and as their job to oppose them. Compassionate Parents set firm limits about important issues of safety, health, learning, education, and morality and encourage cooperation with the rest.

Many discipline problems rise from some physical discomfort, such as hunger or sleep deprivation. Take care that the child’s physical needs and your own are met. Emotional discomfort caused by nervous energy, anxiety, and disappointment accounts for most the rest. Of course, discipline that increases anxiety, such as yelling or shaming, will only make emotional discomfort worse and produce more of the undesired behavior, at least in the long run.

• Discipline must be implemented with positive parental motivation to protect, nurture, encourage, influence, guide, or cooperate.

• Discipline is a long-term project. Except around safety issues, discipline is never for a single behavior. Rather, it is to give direction for a stream of behaviors over time.

• Stress safety, health, learning, education, and morality as goals that produce pride and empowerment.

• Whenever possible, point out how the long-term best interests of the child are served by cooperation.

• Focus on what you want, not what you don’t want. Give short, clear instructions. Don’t yell.

• Keep the focus on the behavior, not your emotional state. Never discipline in anger.

• Ask questions whenever possible to help children come up with their own motivation to cooperate. The regulation for behavior must be established in the child, not in you as policeman.

• Help children to understand that their behavior is a choice. They always have the power to choose better behavior.

• Help children think through the consequences of their behavior choices, especially the response that their behavior invokes in other people.

http://compassionpower.com

Dr. Steven Stosny’s most recent books is, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore: Turn Your Resentful, Angry, or Emotionally Abusive Relationship into a Compassionate, Loving One. He has appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “CBS Sunday Morning,” and CNN’s “Talkback Live” and “Anderson Cooper 360″ and has been the subject of articles in, The New York Times, The Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, O, Psychology Today, AP, Reuters, and USA Today.

http://compassionpower.com

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