For Families

Are you searching for the knowledge of to how to create a caring and safe surrounding for your family and children? Or guidance and insights on child behavioural challenges? Or are you navigating a (big) change as a family? Based on your needs, we will tailor our consultation(s) with you and share our experience and knowledge. Trainings are also available to small groups of families. A few examples of topics:

• The benefits of positive parenting and “how-to” examples.
• Recognise the five stress-release patterns and how to react to your child.
• The Choices System: Increasing your child’s sense of responsibility.
• The importance of nutrition and wellbeing.
• Bullying, self-esteem issues or aggressive, withdrawn, hypersensitive behaviours displayed by a child.
• How to support the challenges and maximise the benefits of an internationally mobile lifestyle.
• And so much more…

Over two decades ago, Robbie developed a unique guidance system with a positive and child-centred approach, offering children a fun and playful environment in which they learn the vital link between actions and its consequences.

Children equipped with Social-Emotional Skills
One of the measures of the quality of life is the degree to which we have choices. When children are allowed to participate in the decision-making processes (the opportunity to choose), this directly and positively affects their lives; realising that their ideas have value and are respected, children’s self-esteem and social-emotional skills will grow. Social emotional skills include: listening and paying attention, self-control, expressing feelings with words, making friendships, positive self-image and awareness of feelings of others. From an early stage in life, children make many choices each day whilst they are discovering the world around them, playing and socialising. Helping children to develop and refine their decision-making abilities will become increasingly important as they grow towards adulthood.

Through a personal consultation or small group training, we can teach your family how to implement the Choices system in the home environment.

What we aim to achieve with the Choices System is for children – from toddlers to teenagers – to feel positive about themselves, their abilities and the people around them. In practical terms, Choices helps demonstrate to children that every choice they make has consequences. In a family setting, the realisation of Choices can look like this:

Scenario:

James (4 years old) never cleans up after playing. One day, he spontaneously puts away the toy he just played with in the designated box. At this point, it’s important that you kneel next to him and tell him how proud you are. ‘Wow, James! How wonderful that you cleaned up your toy, and I didn’t even need to ask you! You just gained a Choice for that.’ Here, the Choice has to be spent immediately; James needs to see the relationship between his action and the reward in order to understand the impact of his action. A Choice is something a child can spend on something they like or like to do: It can be an extra bedtime story or a small item or toy – anything you know your child likes and will view as a reward.

Since teenagers have a greater ability to understand the link between action and consequence, Choices become more a process of mutual understanding and collaboration between parent/caregiver and child.

More information about the Choices System, including how it has been slowly customised according to age group, from toddlers right up to teenagers, can be found in Robbie Zein’s book: ‘Choices – A Calm and Punishment Free Way to Raise Happy and Confident Children’.