Raising Able: How chores empower families - Softcover

Susan Tordella

9780982697306: Raising Able: How chores empower families

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0982697309 ISBN 13: 9780982697306

Publisher: Black Eyed Susan Publications, 2010

Set up a chore system in your home so you can retire from being the house servant while empowering your children. Young people will learn self-discipline, responsibility and teamwork when parents implement the strategies in Raising Able. Watch in amazement when children take the lead in family meetings and volunteer for jobs around the home. Parents can count on children to contribute while youngsters gain competence, confidence and learn to cooperate with others. Parents get a break from waiting on children. Stories from contributors across the country describe how childhood chores impacted their lives, along with colorful examples to illustrate how to have a harmonious home by using family meetings, chores and dinner, along with encouragement, natural and logical consequences, setting limits with kindness and firmness, and mutual respect. Raising Able is more than a handbook on children and chores. It lays the foundation for a positive family environment, healthy parent-child relationships, and the development of good decision making. It is the ultimate anti-entitlement guide because cleaning toilets and scooping up dog manure counteract entitlement. Parents will learn to influence tots-to-teens without bribery, begging, berating, belligerence or beating. Children will learn to contribute without getting paid by the chore. Parents, educators and day care providers will learn new strategies to old challenges that nurture the child s spirit, not stifle it, while learning responsibility. The sensible guide is written by the mother of four children whose goal was to teach children to make good decisions when they were young so when they became teens and were 60 miles away going 60 miles an hour. They chose to wear a seatbelt, drive sober and have good friends. Implementing a chore system is a key component to teaching good decision making skills, according to Susan Tordella, M.A., a parenting expert, former journalist, program director, full-time mother and homemaker. The whole family benefits from chores, which identify a place in the family for each child to belong, contribute and feel good about themselves. The author s survey to more than 500 people ages 11 to 90 affirmed that chores teach responsibility and create family unity. The bonus is that mothers and fathers can retire from being the family servant and set a team work environment where everyone benefits. The book is based on Adlerian Psychology, the works of Alfred Adler and Rudolf Dreikurs. Adler was a member of Freud's famous Wednesday Afternoon group that included Carl Jung. Both Jung and Adler broke away to form their own psychological theories. Adler's theory is based on the idea that people are motivated to belong to their social group. Belonging is fundamental to Adler's approach combined with natural and logical consequences, family meetings, chores, dinner, mutual respect and encouragement. Encouragement is one of the most important and powerful ways to raise children. It focuses on effort and not on accomplishment and how the accomplishment reflected on parents, like praise does. Raising Able shows parents how to involve children in chores so parents can retire as the house servant. They learn to do chores without pay or praise, using family meetings and encouragement. Children and teens learn to moderate family meetings, a cornerstone of setting up a long-term relationship, responsibility and mutual respect. Family meetings are fun and productive. Chores will change a child's attitude towards herself. It is impossible to feel entitled if you clean toilets, do dishes and take out the trash. The parenting approach in Raising Able will transform your family atmosphere, change your relationship with your children, and give them lifelong skills and a work ethic.

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About the Author:

Susan Tordella is a parenting expert who specializes in coaching parents to change their behavior to get new and improved results from children. Her goal is for parents to use the first dozen years to develop teenagers who will make good decisions when they re 60 miles away, going 60 miles an hour. Susan led parenting skills workshops for eight years for the Family Education Center in Wilmington, Delaware and at the Roudenbush Community Center in Westford, Mass. She said: I taught what I most needed to learn. My best teaching tool was showing people what I learned from my mistakes, and I made plenty, She taught parenting strategies to parents of tots-to-teenagers. The result is calmer and more harmonious homes and confident, capable children and teens. Susan was a domo-guru for 17 years, in charge of everything from toilet training to driver training. Susan is former journalist, having worked as a reporter then an editor of community newspapers for five years, while having a house full of teenagers at home. She is an award-winning writer, program director and speaker.

Review:

Local author teaching families the value of chores By Dina Samfield, Correspondent Posted: 05/21/2010 07:32:33 AM EDT AYER -- Susan Tordella, the author of the new book Raising Able: How Chores Cultivate Competent Confident Young People, says involving your family in household tasks not only gives parents more time to do other things, but also nurtures self-discipline in children. She offers her book, full of personal stories from parents, including herself, as a positive parenting plan that will help parents to "stop doing everything and have more fun." This is the author's first published book, but she is no stranger to writing. She was a journalist for five years, and in 2005, became program director for commuter services for two chambers of commerce and about 20 Fortune 500 companies. "I'm used to asking people to do something they really don't want to do," she says. Tordella has four children, none of whom seem to have suffered from having to do household chores. This despite her personal story in the book about how, during one of her family meetings, she decided that her children, then ages 9 to 16, should clean all of the windows and carpets. Apart from some close calls, Tordella says that the experience reinforced her family's values of having fun while working together and saving money. "Taking responsibility for chores overflowed into other areas of their lives almost immediately," she writes in her book. "The children had the self-discipline to manage their school work from elementary school onwards. They were in charge of practicing their instruments, keeping track of library books, and doing their laundry starting at age 10 or 12." Asked why she wrote the book, Tordella responded, "I just feel there is a need, because chores teach children so much. It is a really simple technique to teach children a variety of skills -- project management, self-discipline -- a way for a child to belong to their first social group: Their families." The author says that the book is based on the work of Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. "His basic idea is this: human beings want to belong-- to be a part of a group. Chores are a way to belong -- a really important human need," said Tordella. "When people depend on you, you feel connected and as if you're making a contribution." Raising Able took Tordella about 17 months to write. As part of the concept for the book, "A friend suggested I do a survey. I surveyed over 560 people ages 11 to 90." After receiving about 300 surveys, another friend suggested that she compare age groups, separating older respondents from people aged 11 to 18. The surveys were done online, and it was no easy task to get people to participate, she said. For example, "I went to the bus stop and spoke to a father at 6:45 a.m. and asked the kids to do it. ... I got some surveys on a long bike ride. I saw some kids playing basketball and asked them to take the survey. I also solicited friends and members of the Unitarian church in Littleton. Ray Glazier of Belmont helped me interpret the surveys later. "The most significant thing we found was that students who do chores are less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol in high school. Also, if you do chores, you're more likely to have family dinners, and the positive associations of family dinners are significant in terms of lower drug and alcohol use. "The time between 2 p.m. and midnight is when drug and alcohol use are most likely to occur, and family dinner comes right in the middle. It's like checking in with your conscience," she says. --The Ayer Public Spirit

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