You will meet The 4 Emotional Needs by practicing the dad-skills taught in the Mini-Lessons and the Blog.

Both are located in the top menu.

All the Dad-Skills you will learn from this website will help you meet the 4 Emotional Needs.

Remember, when you meet the emotional needs, you will achieve the 4 objectives naturally and automatically.

The Dad-Skills are organized into three categories:

1. Dad-Skills related to building Relationships
2. Dad-Skills related to Teaching
3. Dad-Skills related to Correcting behavior

The following illustration shows how they relate to each other.

Notice the order.

Correcting

“Correcting” is at the top, meaning, skillfully correcting your children when their behavior is displeasing.

Correcting is how you enforce rules and requests.

The key to effective correcting is effective teaching.

If you are finding that your children don’t respond well when you try to correct their misbehavior, rather than intensifying your effort by threatening, punishing, and lecturing, focus on the level below correcting: Teaching.

Teaching

Teaching is the foundation of correcting. Before you can correct behavior, you must teach the kind of behavior you expect.

Teaching desirable behavior is how you set rules and expectations. You will also teach life-skills and good values.

Effective teaching depends on building a strong relationship with each child.

You must be working on building a strong relationship before teaching can be effective.

If you are finding that your teaching is falling on deaf ears, or that your child doesn’t seem to care about what you teach, rather than teaching louder and longer trying to get your child to listen and learn, focus on the level below teaching: Relationship with Children.

Relationship with Children

Relationship is the foundation of Teaching and Correcting. If you have a strong relationship with your children, they will be more willing to listen and remember what you teach, and be more inclined to obey a rule or request.

Helping Things Go Right

Correcting is what we do when things go wrong – when a child disobeys a rule or ignores a request. It’s what we do to “discipline” a child.

The two levels below Correcting are all about helping things go right. They are preventative measures and work to prevent things from going wrong. They are the foundation of Correcting.

Now, read these next two paragraphs carefully and let them sink in, because they are so important.

If we try to correct our child without having worked on the other two levels (Teaching and building Relationships), correcting will not be effective. Correcting will seem futile. It will not matter how sophisticated our correcting methods are supposed to be. We will pull our hair out trying to control our child.

Teaching and building Relationships are vital to effective Correcting.

This website will address Correcting (when things go wrong), however, because prevention is such a vital component of being a great dad, you will also learn the dad-skills needed for teaching and building a strong relationship (helping make things go right).

You must work on all three levels: 1) Relationship building, 2) Teaching and 3) Correcting.

The next post will tell you where to go from here.