Raise happy, successful kids with 10 minutes a day of "good parenting" moments.
No matter how busy you are with dinner, dishes, laundry, homework,
and extracurricular activities, you can parent like a PRO, without reading a single book.
This is a totally DIFFERENT,
and surprisingly SIMPLE,
approach to parenting and work/life balance.
We all want our children to grow into responsible, resilient, positive, empathetic, kind, and hardworking adults. But most parents have no idea how to make that happen in the little time they have at the end of the day. We're too busy to read parenting books, so most of us just struggle through each day, hoping, with fingers crossed, that the kids will turn out OK.
10-Minute Parent takes hoping, guessing, AND reading, out of the equation. We develop simple tools that help parents create loving connections, build strong family ties, and raise good kids - in just 10 minutes a day. These tools actually do the work for you and help create the "good parenting" moments that get lost in the shuffle of busy, over-scheduled days...the moments that make us feel like good parents. You learn how to parent like an expert, not by reading, but by interacting with your children in relaxed, fun, and meaningful ways.
What is
10 Minute Parent?
After three DECADES of help and advice, parents feel as overwhelmed, STRESSED,
and exhausted as ever.
Employers have tried all kinds of programs to help busy parents.
Decades of effort and billions of dollars have gone into work/life balance programs, perks and experts, but working parents feel as overwhelmed, stressed, and guilty as ever. 70% of women with children are now in the workforce. The most obvious problem is that parents are struggling to squeeze the 40 hours of family care - that mom used to do at home while dad was working - into evenings and weekends.
Businesses are doing an extraordinary job trying to help with great programs that are very much appreciated, but they don’t change the math. There are only 24 hours in the day and parents have no idea how to be great parents in the limited time they have.
Over the last three decades parents have heard the advice of thousands of parenting and work/life balance experts who offer tips on how to manage our time, devices, distractions, interruptions, meetings and email overload – all in the name of efficiency. They tell us to get organized, prioritize our to-do lists, make time for ourselves and let go of guilt. Parents have tried everything yet still feel overwhelmed, stressed, and guilty.
Parents have given up on sleep, exercise, sex, hobbies and fun.
There's nothing left but WORK and KIDS.
Many parents have given up on the idea of finding balance. They think it’s a myth, or worse, they accept their stressful lives as normal. They’ve started giving it other names like work/life integration. But it doesn’t matter what you call it. All that matters is how we feel. Parents don’t feel good. Stress, anxiety, and guilt, on a daily basis, doesn’t feel good.
We're "bad parents" if we take anything off the kids' to-do list.
How can you prioritize your TO-DO list when you’ve already eliminated sleep, exercise, romance, sex, fun, and hobbies? There is nothing left on that list but work and kids. And how do you make time for yourself if it means NOT doing something on the kid list that then makes you feel like a bad parent?
We can’t solve the
problem, because no
one is TALKING about the REAL problem.
The REAL problem is that parents have been brainwashed.
We haven’t come close to solving the problem, because no one is talking about the real problem. We keep dancing around it with all kinds of superficial strategies and temporary tactics.
That’s because our children are at the heart of the problem. We can’t take anything off the kid list because EVERYTHING on that list is what we BELIEVE we need to be doing to be a good parent.
The REAL problem is that we have been brainwashed by parenting experts and educators who want parents to believe that:
It's our job to GIVE our children self-esteem,
It's our job to MAKE our children happy, and
It's our job to CREATE success for them.
We've been told that
if we GIVE our children
enough trophies, enough A's, and enough praise, they
will think like WINNERS.
It's an impossible job.
So, we neglect our own health and happiness, and we drive ourselves crazy trying to do everything with and for our children: helping with home work, driving them to all their extracurricular activities, entertaining them, praising them constantly, and stepping in to rescue them or fix their problems - so that they never feel frustrated, disappointed, embarrassed, or sad.
It’s no wonder parents feel overwhelmed and stressed most of the time. This is an impossible job and parents are exhausting themselves trying to do it.
We are so EMOTIONALLY
attached to helping our children succeed, that we CAN'T take anything off the kids to-do list.
It’s also the once-a-week practices, the forms we fill out, parent meetings, equipment we have to buy and maintain, uniforms we need to find and wash each week, fundraisers, game snacks, end-of-season team parties, and gifts for coaches and team moms. Multiply that times two or three activities, for two or three kids, and you now have 25 to 30 hours a week of extra work.
It's not just the Saturday games we have to deal with.
We drive ourselves crazy trying to be the PERFECT parent, create the PERFECT childhood, and lay the ground work for the PERFECT college application.
Parenting has become a competitive sport.
We work hard to make life perfect for our children, free from rejection, disappointment, or frustration, and full of every opportunity that might possibly enhance their future. This never-ending race to perfection is exhausting and stressful for both parents and kids, but we can't stop. We want desperately to be good parents and we want our children to succeed in life and be happy.
Expectations are out of control and we are constantly judged by other parents who have jumped on the bandwagon and need to justify everything they do. We feel peer pressure to keep up. Birthday parties have become elaborate events that require months of advance planning, where the end goal is not about everyone having fun, but the photo we have to post on Instagram to show what a great parent we are.
75% of referees are QUITTING youth sports within two years...
...because of rude, disrespectful, OUT-OF-CONTROL parents.
How far will parents go to help their kids succeed?
Parents are so desperate to help their children succeed and protect them from negative emotions and consequences that they are doing all kinds of crazy things. They blame teachers for their child's behavior, threaten to get them fired, and then trash them on Facebook. They get into arguments (and fights) with coaches and referees at sports games, embarrassing themselves and their families. In fact, referees and officials are quitting at record rates because parents have become incredibly unruly, disrespectful, and in some cases violent. Parents throw respect and fairness out the window, expecting special treatment from teachers and administrators for a child who has misbehaved.
As you can see, parents are frantic to do everything in their power to help their children succeed - which just makes everyone more stressed. A professor of Psychiatry at Cornell Medical School said that the average mother today is as frazzled and anxious as the average psychiatric patient was in the 1950’s. And the scary part is that we all think this is normal.
Sometimes it feels like parents are doing all the WORK and kids are having all
the FUN!
It’s no surprise that parents are overwhelmed and have lost hope of finding any kind of balance. And since our children are “too busy” with all their activities, parents are now doing chores that kids used to help with 30 years ago: laundry, dishes, housecleaning, mowing the lawn, emptying the trash. We’re doing all the work and kids are having all the fun.
There is no substitute for real self-esteem.
If we used common sense, we would never have gotten into this mess. What made us believe that telling a child they are great all the time, protecting them from negative emotions, and giving them trophies for just showing up - in order to build up their self-esteem - was going to prepare them for life? Self-esteem means seeing yourself as a worthy or valuable person. You feel valuable because you add value to the world in some way. Confidence comes from being competent: learning new skills, taking on challenges, overcoming adversity, and handling difficult emotions. There is no substitute for the real thing. This is what makes us strong and resilient. We feel competent and confident that we can handle whatever comes our way because we’ve done it before, and we know we can do it again. That’s real self-esteem.
The SELF-ESTEEM movement has been the biggest DISASTER in the history
of parenting.
The self-esteem fiasco.
One of the biggest fiascos in the history of child-rearing practices has been the infamous self-esteem movement, which began in the late 1960s with a book by Nathaniel Branden called The Psychology of Self-Esteem. He wrote many books on the topic and inspired thousands of scholarly articles between 1970 and 2000.
In 1987, California instituted a State Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Schools were encouraged to praise and reward students constantly as well as eliminate things like honor rolls that might make some students feel bad. Correcting with red ink became a no-no. Sports organizations stopped keeping score for young children and began systematically giving trophies to everyone on the team — just for showing up.
NOT ONE STUDY showed any kind of correlation between the self-esteem we are supposedly creating with trophies and praise - and SUCCESS itself.
We're creating the opposite of what we want for our children.
In 2003, Roy Beaumeister, a previous supporter of the self-esteem movement, began to question the theory and conducted a review of the 2000+ studies this theory was based on.
It turns out that NOT ONE STUDY showed any kind of real correlation between the self-esteem we were supposedly creating with trophies and praise - and success itself. Self-esteem, based on feeling good all of the time, doesn’t appear to lead to better grades, getting into a better college, having a more successful career, or even happiness. It doesn’t seem to deliver any of the benefits we were told it would.
In fact, what they are now discovering is that the whole self-esteem theory has backfired. A new study divided college students, who had done poorly on their midterm exams, into two groups.
One group was encouraged to take responsibility and study harder, and the other was told to keep their heads up and feel good about themselves. Naturally, the second group, the self-esteem group who did not buckle down and prepare, did significantly worse on the final exam.
When we step in 24/7 to SNOWPLOW a smooth path for our children, we PREVENT them from learning and growing into self-sufficient adults. We are actually STEALING from them opportunities to build self-esteem.
We are handicapping, not helping, our children.
It’s important to remember that it’s not the parent’s fault. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon, including teachers, administrators, therapists and parenting experts. Even lawmakers. No parent wants to see their children hurt, sad, disappointed, frustrated or humiliated. So, when the experts tell us that it’s our job to help them avoid all those unpleasant emotions and that it will actually help them be more successful, then of course we are going to do our best to follow that advice.
But the truth is: when we step in to help, protect, rescue, coddle, or solve their problems, we are not helping our children. We are handicapping them. Every child needs a dose of rescuing or protecting from time to time. But when we do it 24/7 to clear the path for our children - this is called snow-plow parenting, by the way - we rob them of real life experiences that teach them how to be strong, resilient, grateful, hardworking, and compassionate.
More than HALF of our college students are SUFFERING from the negative impact of the
self-esteem movement.
-
84% felt overwhelmed
-
60% felt very sad
-
57% felt very lonely
-
51% felt extremely anxious
-
46% felt hopeless
-
31% felt so depressed that they could not function
It's happening to the smartest kids with the smartest parents.
The American College Health Association surveyed 100,000 students in 153 different university and college campuses across the country. They asked these students how they felt (emotionally) over the previous 12 months.
Think about what that means.
Most of you are assuming that this is going to happen to someone else’s children, not yours. But it’s happening to the smartest kids with the smartest parents who work very hard - following the advice of experts - to help them succeed. More than half of the children that belong to the parents reading this right now will be anxious, sad, lonely and overwhelmed unless parents STOP doing everything for and with their children.
The SELF-ESTEEM movement has left us with a nation of
young adults who are
totally UNPREPARED
for real life.
