1. What is Faith Parenting?
We believe that children are designed to naturally learn from their mistakes. Children learn through exploration and experiential knowledge. When you constantly worry about your child, you send a negative message that something could go wrong. When you don’t trust, you send a message that your child is not trustworthy. When you judge or label your child, they become imprisoned by your negative projections. Faith parenting can prevent those mistakes because positive messages are sent instead of negative ones.

Parents do need to give consequences for bad behavior. The child does not get to be the boss. However, faith parented children get to jump on beds, play in the dirt, climb up the down side of the slide and stand on the coffee table for a while.

Faith parented children are safer because they have not been taught to indiscriminately honor all adults, so they are less likely to be abducted or sexually abused. They learn to trust their instincts. Faith parenting leads to greatness because it fosters initiative, curiosity, creativity, insight and self-awareness.

2. What does TIPP think children need to be healed from most?
Children need to be healed from repressed reactions to trauma, whether it is the result of trauma from a broken attachment, physical abuse, sexual abuse, chronic neglect or sibling abuse. It is not the trauma itself that is damaging to the child so much, but the repression of the emotion about the trauma, which inhibits healing.

Many parents do not know how important it is for them to allow their children to express their true feelings when something upsetting or bad happens. Often parents believe that their child will feel better if she or he stops crying. Some parents think it is disrespectful for a child to show anger or that they will spoil their child if they indulge their child’s expression of feelings. If the feelings about what just happened are not expressed then they are repressed and stored in the body. This results in the child acting out or displaying behavioral problems. The unexpressed feelings need to come out in order for the child to heal.

3. How does TIPP define discipline?
Our childrearing goal is for parents to raise moral children who see life as a wondrous adventure. We discipline our children in order to give them guidance and to teach them personal responsibility. We want our children to have self-discipline, self-control, empathy, and values. The most efficient way to these character traits is for parents to model them as a family lifestyle and ethic.

TIPP’s philosophy on discipline is generally based upon honoring the child, as we would have the child honor us. We ask for no more regard from a child than we would expect from or offer an adult. Neither do we ask a child to hold us in esteem for behaviors that don’t merit respect.

We acknowledge that a natural consequence is the best teacher. So, if a child becomes frightened from sticking her hand in between the closing elevator doors, there is no value in further chastising the child.

Since we believe behavior is a reflection of parenting, we hope our parents will self-reflect before disciplining whenever possible. Our child’s behavior is a mirror to us, showing us how we are doing.

We also hold that parents should not discipline in anger. Nevertheless, when a child behaves unethically, it may be appropriate to let the child see anything from disappointment to outrage in the mirror of the parent’s face. So, a child who stole from another child needs to see deep disappointment in the parent’s demeanor. A child who hit another child or an animal needs to hear outrage in the parent’s voice. Of course, the parent is not to lose control, just insure that the child receives social disapproval for anti-social acts as a natural consequence for their behavior.

Children are not stupid. They usually know what they have done, and they are anticipating the results of their actions, like an experiment. Nagging and scolding turn them off, and they may come to tune you out. Results or natural consequences for their actions have more long-term value and meaning.

We also discourage numerous warnings, because nature usually offers no warnings, per se. If you are late for supper, you can eat it cold or you can re-heat it yourself. If you get bad grades, you don’t get to have the privileges which come with accomplishment, like a trip to Disneyland. We believe in acknowledging and rewarding children for endeavoring to do well, mostly through recognition. There is almost no reward for a child like the joy or pleasure in their parents’ eyes when they do well and make good choices.

Children also learn best from experience. They don’t learn well from parents who practice over-control, dominating or shaming behavior. This only creates self-consciousness and low-self-worth.

As adults, our children will be rewarded for a job well-done, so we establish such an environment in the home. Yet, we encourage parents to allow for the simple personal rewards and enjoyment that come from discovery and achievement. Parents might enjoy asking their child how they liked the process they just experienced. Ultimately, experience is the best teacher. Our job is mostly to insure that discovery is relatively safe.

We understand that to implement these values for the first time it makes sense for parents to plan what would be a good and somewhat natural consequence for any given behavior. If parents are caught by surprise and have to take time to think, they can send the child somewhere to wait, while they decide what could be the most obvious natural result for the child’s action.

Parents should not hold long grudges. Sometimes what is appropriate is a 30-second scolding, and then move on. Children learn resilience when they make mistakes, learn, and get to rebound in dignity.

4. What is bonding/attachment?
Bonding and attachment are inborn systems between caregiver and baby that work to insure the baby’s survival. In its simplest terms, bonding is the mother and baby falling in love; attachment is staying in love. Mother and baby begin to bond at the moment of birth. If mom or the primary caretaker is consistently present for the baby to provide nurturing, protection, and to create a place for the baby’s feelings during times of distress, the baby begins to form a secure attachment. The baby learns to trust. This attachment forms the child’s core. It will become the template for how the infant will perceive and operate in the world and into adulthood.

Children need to have a continuous attachment with one primary caregiver in the first few years of life in order to feel secure, especially in the first year. If mom leaves, even for a little while, the baby notices. If mom leaves for too long, then the child’s heart is broken. He can no longer trust. The attachment is damaged or broken. This broken attachment shows up later in the child’s behavior.

5. How do you know if a baby or small child is securely attached?
You can tell a well-bonded infant. They make great and lasting eye contact with their primary caregiver. Even in the arms of a visitor, they make great eye contact. Actually, a well-bonded infant will have eyes like an old soul. However, be careful not to pass your baby around too much. Look for signs that your child is feeling unsettled in the hands of strangers. He will reach out to you, and you will then take him back into your arms, refraining from passing him around again for awhile.

Many parents actually believe that if you want an independent child, you can’t spoil them as a baby. You have to get them used to being on their own. The opposite is true. The more secure they are as an infant, the more pioneering they will be as adults.

Infants assume that they are safe until you break their hearts. Once their trust is broken, they become afraid to give their heart away again. So, an unattached infant, or an infant whose attachment has been broken, will refuse to make intimate eye contact with an adult, especially the parent. As a baby, they will arch their back to push away from a parent who is getting too close. As a toddler, they will “change the subject,” by pointing indiscriminately at other things if parents get too close. Parents often assume wrongly that their deflecting child is just so intelligent that she has to always show them things when they get close. Some parents check the child’s eye contact at a bit of a distance and become deceived. A child who is afraid to bond up close will make eye contact from the arms of another person, perhaps the other parent, but this will change, if the parent is holding her.

As an older toddler, an unattached child will brazenly approach strangers like friends of the family, as if to say, “Are you my mother?” Little children who act particularly mature and even tough have suffered attachment breaks and are likely to become adults who don’t need anyone. On the other hand, children less injured, but who have suffered separation trauma, evidence separation anxiety. They actually appear less healthy than the overly-independent child, but may be easier to heal. These children fear separation and appear clingy. They will grow to be adults who could cling, stalk, or stay in an abusive relationship because they so fear separation or abandonment. Often, they appear so needy, they drive away their mate.

These attachments can be repaired with the help of an attachment therapist. TIPP offers seminars to graduates on how parents can repair the attachment themselves. However, it is essential you don’t repair the attachment and then break their trust again, because if you do, you will make a person who is jaded for life. One re-bonding technique is described by author Marsha Welch, MD, in her book, Holding Time.

For parents who live out of state, TIPP sells the parenting series on video, complete with a parenting manual. We also have a condensed audio series and other products available from an e-zine, which is dedicated to The Causal Theory, MasterParenting.com. See Parenting Newsletter on this web site for a sample of this magazine.