Parents As Mentors

To send a copy of the Parent-Mentor Workbook: 10 GOLDEN RULES That Guide Loving Families ($15 plus $4 for shipping, ISBN 1-930418-04-3) to a family member or a friend, send your name and mailing address to alexia@votelink.com .

Post the 10 COMMANDMENTS?

How about Posting These 10 Golden Rules?

The following is an editorial run in Colorado newspapers following an effort to post the 10 Commandments in public schools. The day after this editorial ran, the Senate decided to withdraw the legislation. This is a national, not a local issue.

Colorado's Sen. John Andrews (R-Englewood) calls Senate Bill 114, which
would require posting the Ten Commandments in every
classroom, "merely a history lesson." Here's another:

Fifty years ago, violations that could get children sent to the
principal's office included talking out of turn, chewing gum,
running in the halls, cutting in line, littering, making rude
noises and dress-code violations. In the 1990s, kids face a
different set of challenges. Would the Ten Commandments
protect today's teens from drug and alcohol abuse, guns and
assaults, security checks at the front door, surveillance
cameras in the hallways, or strip searches? Probably not. But
here's something that could: 10 Golden Rules, for parenting.

Most people are familiar with the original Golden Rule: "Do
unto others as you would have others do unto you." It has
served as a trusted guide for parents rising children in the 20th
Century.

In the 21st Century, parents need a new set of parenting skills
to help them deal with the new challenges they and their
children now face. They need conflict resolution skills,
acceptance skills, and mentoring. The following 10 Golden
Rules offer a perspective from which families and
schoolchildren can retreat from pressures and re-establish
priorities.

1. Know Thyself

2. Feed Your Soul With Spiritual Practice

3. Be A Good Role Model

4. Get to Know Your Children

5. Listen Without Judgment

6. Learn Conflict Resolution

7. Practice and Use Mentoring Techniques

8. Make Your Children Your Heroes

9. Build a Community of Support

10. Help Your Children Take Steps Toward Their Goals

In today's society, where there is low tolerance for teenagers,
the 10 Golden Rules may offer a more timely and relevant
checklist for students, parents, and teachers than the Bible's
Ten Commandments. Moreover, posting these Golden Rules in
public schools would not violate the First Amendment
prohibition of state support for any religion.

Posting the Golden Rules in schools would also remind
students of what they have a right to expect from their parents.

ALEXIA PARKS
*******************************
PARENT-MENTORS: 10 GOLDEN RULES THAT GUIDE LOVING FAMILIES

Are today’s teens acting up? Out of control? Is it teen rage? Teen violence? Or could it be early signs of latent leadership or hidden, emerging talents that need to be guided and directed by their parents toward success?

Parent-Mentor Training Programs, tested and evaluated at Boulder High School and Baseline Middle School in Boulder, Colorado, are now available to parents nationwide through participating school districts, high schools and middle schools (grades 5-12). In four, 2-hour sessions, parents learn how to become a mentor to their own teens. Using workbooks and group feedback, parents practice mentoring exercises that show them how their teen can learn to make positive choices that guide them through "at risk" years.

When parents mentor their own children -- with proven, well researched mentoring techniques -- their children respond with trust, honesty and confidence at home, at school, and in the community.

Alexia Parks and Steve Anderson, co-developers of the Parent-Mentor Training Programs are available to set up training programs for school districts. Their Parent-Mentors Guidebook includes homework assignments for parents to do with their teens.

Alexia Parks is also president of Votelink, "The Voice of the Net." She has been called "One of 50 people who matter most on the Internet," by Newsweek Magazine for her pioneering work in electronic democracy, and had a nationally syndicated column devoted to her work in 1998 by Washington Post Writers’ Group columnist Neal Peirce. Steve Anderson, trained as a Navy attack pilot during the Vietnam years, also spent 10 years practicing law on Park Avenue in New York City. He is also a licensed conflict resolution mediator. Together, Anderson and Parks have created a workbook and training program that has won rave reviews and gratitude from parents.

Wrote Diana Bartels, "The Columbine High massacre occurred between our second and third sessions. This tragedy is a wake-up call to parents everywhere to get in touch with their kids and value them. This is a big part of Alexia and Steve’s message...."

For information on how to set up a local program write to: Parent-Mentors Training Program, c/o The Education Exchange, Box K, Eldorado Springs, CO 80025. Or email: <alexia@votelink.com>

From the workbook:

Fifty years earlier, in the l940s, violations that could get teens sent to the principals office included talking out of turn, chewing gum, running in the halls, cutting in line, littering, making rude noises, and dress-code violations. In the l990s kids faced a different set of challenges as schools, concerned about drug abuse, alcohol abuse, as well as guns and assaults, added fences around the school yard, initiated security checks at the door of the school, placed surveillance cameras in the hallways, removed locks from lockers, and stopped students for strip searches. Security patrols were hired for some schools. Teens complained that it felt more like a prison or the military than school. Where they weren't required to wear uniforms, teen dress-code violations included tee shirts with offensive slogans, black nail polish, and dreadlocks. Free speech was threatened. Some articles for the school newspaper ran afoul of school censors. As tensions increased in neighborhood schools, teens were offered counseling on rape, pregnancy, and suicide.

How has American society responded to the problems of today’s teens? Here is a sign of the times: An agency in Colorado recently changed its name from Child Services to Youth Corrections. In the final decade of the 20^th Century, rehabilitation and prevention is out of political favor. Incarceration is "in."

Is there an alternative to repression of teens?

Yes. It’s called mentoring. It is based on understanding and respect.

And it works.

A Practical Alternative: Mentoring

Ellen was the teenager from Hell. Eating disorders. Taking drugs. In with the wrong crowd. Abusing her body with razors. It was difficult to be in a room with the mother and daughter at the same time. Then her mother reached out into the community and created a network of mentors to support her daughter's interests. The transformation that took place was a true miracle. Why? Because mentoring works.

Mentoring, the term used to describe the relationship between a caring adult and a "high risk" teen, is a rapidly growing American social movement.

For example, in 1996, California's Governor Pete Wilson made a decision to commit funds to train 250,000 mentors in four years to reach 1 million at-risk kids in the state. Wilson's year-old Academic Volunteer and Mentor Service program gives elementary schools funds to establish mentoring programs and to recruit and train adults to serve as mentors.

An initiative proposed by President Clinton for the 1997-98 school year targets 1 million adults ¾ including 100,000 college students ¾ to serve as volunteer mentors for elementary school students. About two-thirds of the volunteer work of Americorps's college students involves mentoring children and teens.

Lending his time and name to the cause, General Colin Powell has been crisscrossing the country representing an organization called America's Promise. Its goal is to reach 200,000 mentoring relationships by the year 2000. To achieve this goal, Powell travels the country promoting the idea and files a briefing paper, called The Dispatch, each month on the Internet <http://www.americaspromise.org>. It highlights talks he has given that month, and the number of companies and organizations who have made a pledge to enroll their employees or organization members in mentor relationships with "at risk" teens.

In the high-tech business world, a Virtual Mentor Network was pulled together "almost overnight" by Bob Graves and Dennis McKenna, of Government Technology.(X) The virtual network has enrolled the business support of leading high-tech corporations such as Compaq, Digital Equipment, Microsoft, MCI, Oracle, Cisco Systems and others. Hewlett-Packard has cast a worldwide net to match its employees to children requesting mentors. (X) <http://mentor.external.hp.com>

Almost invisible to the public eye, perhaps because it is emerging out of the juvenile justice system and focused on "at risk" teens, this growing civilian army of mentors is fueled by statistics that show that mentoring has more power to positively change the behavior of a child than any other method used to date. Better than time-out. Better than corporal punishment. Better than incarceration. Mobilized by success, and funded by government and corporate grants, the network of mentors for teens is growing at Internet speed.

Numerous studies of high risk children and teens underscore the remarkable success of mentoring.

For example, Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America’s 1995 Impact Study showed that young people with mentors were:

46% less likely to begin using illegal drugs.

27% less likely to begin using alcohol.

53% less likely to skip school.

37% less likely to skip a class.

A 1989 Louis Harris Poll showed:

73% of mentored students said their mentors helped raise their goals and expectations.

59% of mentored students improved their grades.

In a 1996 study of older mentors (65 years and older) from the Center for Intergenerational Learning at Temple University, young people who participated in Across Ages, an intergenerational mentoring project for high-risk middle school students in Philadelphia, exhibited:

Less negative disruptive classroom behavior.

Better school attendance.

Improved relationships with adults and peers.

Positive changes in their knowledge, attitudes and behaviors concerning substance use and related life skills.

In the business world, research has shown that a mentoring relationship contributes significantly to career development. Mentoring in business has been shown to facilitate access to positions of leadership, authority and power.

Mentoring works. How much more of a head start in life might children get if their "rites of passage" through their teen years, and their need to establish their own identity, were centered on exploring and expanding their unique talents. What if teen rebellion was discovered to be nothing more than a child's soul reacting against a detour on the road to life? When a teen's right to a separate identity is ignored or denied, when a teen’s (perhaps unstated or undefined) goals are not supported, the teen’s frustration may turn into self-defeating rebellion.

How much time and money can be saved, then, if a parent simply supports the direction their child wants to grow. A parent, acting as mentor, can help his or her child map out a life-course, based on the child's own interests and inner strengths and talents.

-- Mentoring By Parents

Parents do have alternatives to sending teens to lock-up schools. Mentoring has demonstrated its effectiveness. Now this highly successful method of working with teens can be extended to parenting. Parents can become mentors of their children. As mentors, parents can give their kids an inside track to successful lives.

Parents, of course, understand that it is their responsibility to teach moral values and socially acceptable standards to their children. They must raise them to be socially responsible adults. All this is true. Up to a point.

Gradually, between the ages of nine and seventeen, as the child's unique identity begins to emerge, the parent needs to step to the side and play a different role in the life of their child. Successful parents who intuitively understand this become mentors to their own children.

Mentoring, by the way, is not a "tough love approach" to parenting.. Some self-help parent support groups may start out well-intentioned but end up building barriers between a parent and a child. All too often, they strengthen the parent's position by diminishing the child’s authenticity, or by creating a barrier between the child and society. Fortified by a hard-line, autocratic style, the parents may find themselves surrounded by new "friends" who encourage them to do the unthinkable: to place their child in a lock-up boarding school, or high-security mental facility, "for the child's own good."

Parents who choose to be mentors to their own children, choose to love them through times of pain, or anger, or fear.

Child-centered parents may also invite other family members and friends, or experts and those serving as role-models, to share mentoring at different stages of their child's teen years. Sometimes these mentors are called Godmother or Godfather. They may already be familiar to the child and may already be playing an active role in the life of the child. The keyword here is "active," for mentoring is not passive.

Successful mentors apply the Golden Rule, "do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Parents who are open to the self-transforming process that can also happen to them when they become mentors to their own children, understand that with personal risk comes reward.

The following list of guidelines for successful mentoring is from Susan G. Weinberger's The Mentor Handbook. The guidelines have been adapted here for parents. It provides a starting point, and reminds parents that, first and foremost, they are the most important role models their child has.

A mentor can never take the place of a parent. The parent offers bedrock security. The child must know that his or her parent will always be there, no matter what. A parent has to be much more than a mentor.

But the parent who adapts successful techniques of mentoring can give the child not only security, but increasing freedom to become a unique and powerful self.

The list of guidelines for successful parent mentoring includes:

Offer positive attention to your child

Be non-judgmental

React well to stressful situations

Tolerate frustrating situations

Avoid alcohol or drug abuse

Listen well

Communicate on a level that your child can understand

Provide leadership

Respect alternate lifestyles

Be a positive role model

Show up on time for activities with your child

Nurture and respect your child's dignity

Accept responsibilities

Reinforce your child's successes

Do not impose adult responsibilities too soon.

Do not impose adult responsibilities too late.

Being a mentor to their own child does not mean that the parent becomes a tutor in academic subjects in order to improve their child's grades. Nor does a parent-mentor try to provide solutions to all the issues facing their teen. Instead, the parent-mentor builds up an unbreakable trust so that their child knows that someone is watching out for them and cares about their success. Parent-mentoring is based on unconditional love, which is the essential foundation for a teen's growth and progress through life.

In today's high-tech world, a "village" of caring adults ¾ together with the parent ¾ can help raise a teen, even if they don't live together in the same village. The "villagers" can even act as mentors by e-mail. E-mail operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and its messages is delivered around the clock. It provides a private, one-to-one communication with a teen. It makes reaching out to touch the life of a "Connected Child" easy. In a few years, most American teens will be connected to the Internet, and many can then be connected to their mentors and parent-mentors by e-mail.

Parent-mentoring is a natural, child-centered, state of parenting. It is also a new concept in terms of socially accepted parenting styles. It is also easily transported to the world of business. Today, knowledge workers, parents who have access to a computer at work, are a growing segment of the workforce. In California, for example, thirty percent of the workforce is classified as "knowledge workers." Mentoring by these Connected Parents can occur by e-mail, during school and work hours. Parents who stay connected to their child, even for a few minutes, while engaged in office work, can reduce parental anxieties that often undermine the work-style of even the highest performing employees, and reduce the anxieties of their children.

Until recently, the use of the term mentoring has been applied to mentor programs set up by well-know organizations such as Big Brothers/Big Sisters, America's Promise, or the California Mentor Initiative. These programs match a non-judgmental adult with an at-risk child or teen. The great success of these programs, however, means that all too often children who request a mentor through these organizations must wait 12-18 months for a match to be made for them. There are more "at-risk" children on waiting lists than mentors ready to act as a trusted friend.

The truth is, every child needs a mentor, whether in the immediate family circle or beyond. And, conversely, every adult could benefit from a mentor who listens to their concerns, suggests possible options, then steps back. Ever present, yet not imposing their own will, the mentor lets "the other," "the mentee" choose their own path forward.

When mentoring is applied to "at risk" children or teens, it is called "risk prevention." But parents can begin the mentoring process long before teens move into the high risk zone. Parent mentoring that starts in the home or circle of family and friends is the next step in the evolving development of child-rearing.

Parent mentoring is child-centered and future-oriented. It is an enlightened, loving form of parenting far removed from thousands of years of violence and sexual abuse of children in society. In terms of the evolution of human consciousness, it is light-years beyond child-rearing styles that included child sacrifice, daily beatings, abandonment, confinement, and sexual use.

As an evolved form of caring, parents as mentors recognize that their children have a separate will and self-identity. Parents who mentor their children raise sons and daughters who may take on leadership roles in society. These children leave home with faith and confidence in their own coping skills. They have a desire instilled within them to succeed in the pursuit of whatever goals they choose. Their parents are not "stage parents" who live their lives through their children. Rather, their parents are mentors, who honor the path their child has chosen and help affirm his or her success.

When a parent moves from a controlling to a mentoring style of child-rearing, the initial results may be disappointing. In fact, the child’s behavior may get worse.

This should not be surprising. A child who has adapted to a controlling parent will have developed defense mechanisms that give some measure of protection against the parent’s power. These defenses may take the form of withdrawal, verbal abuse, school failure, drugs... even pregnancy or crime. These defenses are self-defeating. But it is hard for the teen to give them up. Because they have served an important need of the teen. The purpose of the defenses is to preserve some kind of self in spite of parental control.

When the parent starts to give up control, the teen will not immediately give up his or her defenses. They have played too important a role. The defenses have been built up at the cost of great pain. To let go of these defenses can be frightening to the child.

What is especially frightening is the hope that it will be possible to let go of defenses, the hope that this time the parent really is replacing control with respect. For the child to begin to believe that is scary… because renewed disappointment would hurt so much.

So the child may test the reality of the parents’ giving up control. How can that be tested? By confronting the parent with precisely the behavior that most upsets the parent, the behavior most likely to trigger the parent’s need to control.

But a parent who understands, a parent willing to let go of his or her own defenses and risk trusting the child, will sooner or later be rewarded by change in the child. The timing of the change will be chosen by the child, not forced on the child. The character of the change will be chosen by the child, not forced on the child.

But whatever the child chooses, the experience of choosing will free the child from self-defeating defense mechanisms against parental control. Freed of self-defeating defenses, the child will be free to feel, and to show, their love for their parent.

That will be the parent’s greatest reward for shifting from controlling to mentoring.

-- Some Practical Questions about Parent Mentoring

Q: What are some disadvantages that parents face, that mentors, who are not the child's parent, do not face?

A: Children begin with an absolute dependency on their parents that they do not experience with mentors. That dependency must gradually be broken over time. The development of self-identity and growth toward independence is part of the "Rites of passage" of teen years and are as essential as the crawling stage for an infant. Mentors can help in that separation from parents, but parents are the ones who must first hang on and then let go.

Unlike mentors, parents also have a legal responsibility for caring for their children and, up until a certain age, cannot leave them unattended. In some states, parents are also held responsible for violations of civil law, or crimes committed by their children.

Then too, the day-in-day-out presence of the parent in the life of the child means that well-established patterns of dependency, co-dependency, authority, or control, may be difficult to break. For this reason, the sooner parents expand into the mentoring role, the better the outcome for their child. When the child begins to spend full days at school encountering new social situations, might be a good a time to begin, rather than wait until the child reaches his or her teen years.

Q: What is the difference between a mentoring-parent and a non-mentoring parent.

A: A non-mentoring parent feels a duty to shape the child’s character to fit the parent’s pre-ordained model. A mentoring parent is alert to the child’s own emerging character and supports the child’s efforts to become a unique self.

In order to help the child become his or her self, rather than a puppet of the parent, the mentoring parent does not isolate the child but takes advantage of readily available learning resources or community support that might benefit their child.

While the non-mentoring parent clings to control of their child, a mentoring-parent reaches out and builds a support network for their child, then cheers from the sidelines, as coach.

According to Mark Glover, a successful parent of two teenage boys, vice president of the Innovations Group, and performance coach to 450 innovative city managers, a team-approach to child-rearing is a good idea. That team of supporters of the child can dovetail with the child’s own experience of participation in a team.

"Kids, boys and girls alike, need sports (or something similar) in order to learn team work and what it takes to win at something important to them. It also teaches them what a coach can mean in helping them reach their goals. Parents who learn how to mentor their own children will find it hard to contain themselves when their kids are playing in a game, playing hard, contributing, and helping their team win.

"It doesn't matter whether it's a sports team or a "thinking" team, such as Odyssey of the Mind, which uses creative problem solving, a team approach, and competition on an international basis. There is an unmatched thrill in seeing your own kids win or just do their best in a team process. A lot of growth and learning goes on there. It also builds a strong bond between the parent and the teen when the parent cares enough to simply show up and cheer them on."

Q: How must non-parent mentoring be modified for use by parents?

A: Fundamental to the process of mentoring is the ability for the parent to respect the child's experimentation, and combine it with limits that give teens security and the safety of structure. While mentors can provide room for experimentation, it is the parents who provide the security and safety net. And only the parent on whom the child has been dependent can yield to the child’s independence.

One of the chief functions of mentors is to aid the child in transition from a dependence on his or her parents to life skills and social opportunities that may not be familiar to the parent. The fact that the mentor is not the parent may be critical for some areas of personal growth, when that growth breaks free of belief systems that do not reflect the rapidly changing real world the child now lives in. So, at times, a parent must reach into the community and link their teen to other adult mentors. Finding mentors, and encouraging their child to find mentors, is part of a parent’s responsibility.

Flexibility and adaptability are key skills for today's teens. A parent who reaches outside of the home for a mentor for their teen realizes that their own belief system may be too parochial and limit the growth of their child. The parent who can accept the fact that their child will outgrow their own belief systems, or "reinvent" them to match the times, is a wise parent.

Most parents grew up in a world where the clocks were set on traditional time, not realtime NET speed, where things change at the speed of thought. Today, a thought can be turned into a fact almost immediately. The multiple jobs today's teens will work at over a lifetime don't even exist yet. There is no job description for most of the innovative new workstyles of the 21st century's knowledge workers. Teens intuitively know this. Mentoring parents must recognize that the only bedrock stability in their children’s lives is the unconditional love of a parent. In a world where everything changes rapidly, the unchanging love of a parent is more necessary than ever.

The parent who mentors their child is one who practices enlightened child rearing. Enlightened parents have existed throughout time. What is different now, is that in a world of accelerating change, mentoring offers one of the best success strategies for guiding teens through their high-risk years. The statistics on the benefits of mentoring to the child, the family and society, make it the number one choice for 21st Century child-rearing. The combination of mentors and mentoring parents can turn today’s problems with teens into tomorrow’s creative society.

Q: How can parents deal with the rage and fear of teenagers that comes from their experience of today's society?

A: Today's parents can respond to a teen's fear with love. Listening to a teen from a state of unconditional love, being the coach and non-judgmental, can open doors to communication that would be impossible otherwise. Love builds trust. So does a willingness to listen and offer judgment-free suggestions. A parent holds a map of the world. They've been there. Done that. While their memories are out-of-date and perhaps suited to a much different time and very different society, there are fundamental truths that can help guide their child.

What are some of these truths?

That change is constant. Everything must grow or die.

Dreams can come true. If it can be imagined, it can manifest in the world.

Love and fear are opposites. Letting go of fear opens the heart to love. Love gives a "heads up" to life.

-- If Katie’s Mother Had Chosen Mentoring

Parents who learn mentoring techniques to successfully guide their child through the "rites of passage" of teen years will not be seduced by the sophisticated marketing techniques of behavior-changing programs.

Had Katie's mother chosen mentoring, over lock-up, she would have saved her daughter psychic trauma of having her behavior forcibly changed, far from the protection and sanctuary of her family, 3,000 miles from home. Katie, loved by many, had a "village" of caring adults who would have created the sacred space for her to shape and grow her own personal vision of her Self.

Her junior high school teacher wrote a testimonial for her describing her as "a joy to be around." The headmaster and his wife, who co-directed the private academy for gifted and talented children where she had gone to school prior to her one semester's experience in public school, said she was the best student they had had in 30 years.

Like a group of tribal elders, Katie’s mentors would have listened to her, then helped her identify the path her soul wanted to follow. But, instead, her mother, driven by fear and a need for control, chose private imprisonment for her "rebellious" child.

In the Fall of ’97 ¾ with Katie still in lock-up ¾ I tried to imagined what it would be like if Katie wrote a letter to a champion of mentoring. I wrote:

Please, pray for me.

In his book, How to Argue and Win Every Time, author and lawyer Gerry Spence, writes:

"Why argue with your child? Why would one wish to argue with a child? Indeed, children are most often right. I have learned to rely on both the wisdom and the example of children. They more often know what they need and what is good for them than we, their parents.... They know when they are being wrongfully repressed. They know right from wrong and they have a nearly perfect sense of justice."

To send a copy of the Parent-Mentor Workbook: 10 GOLDEN RULES That Guide Loving Families ($11 plus $4 for shipping, 2-4 copies $9.95 each, ISBN 1-930418-04-3) to a family member or a friend, send your name and mailing address to alexia@votelink.com .

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