This will help your child to feel better about themselves and to make and keep friends!

The Nurtured Heart Approach
Howard Glasser
Executive Director, Children’s Success Foundation

• The approach is about how to therapeutically shift intense children to use their intensity in wonderful ways.
• And it is about making any moment an opportunity to create success.

The Nurtured Heart Approach:
Three basic aspects:

1. Super-energizing experiences of success.
2. Refusing to energize or accidentally reward negativity.
3. While still providing a perfect level of limit setting and consequences.

Whatever we pay attention to; we get more of that behavior.

How do we as parents do this?

• Watch your children, describe and document what you see out loud…as if for a blind companion.
• Help intense difficult children feel the moment and what you say for good things not negative.  Build a relationship with them around the good things.  We want to build a new relationship.  We want to build on strengths. 
• Say what you see is right.  Verbalize to them.  This is instrumental in creating a new success for them and for your relationship.
• There is always an underlying effort when rules are not being broken.  Offer consequences not negative attention and responses when rules are broken.
• Establish the house rules and consequences first, when things are calm.  Then your child will know exactly what happens when rules are broken.

Be nurturing, loving and consistent.  Children need consistency and to be able to predict what will be in their lives.  Talk with your child.  Share how you feel with them and ask them how they feel.  Identifying feelings is important.  This will help them to identify how they feel.  This will help them to predict how others feel and how they make others feel.

Howard Glassars seminar and Transforming the Difficult Child book was the inspiration for this newsletter.  www.DifficultChild.com

Susan Stern, LCSW is the founder of The Social Skills Place, Inc.