Chapter 1 Becoming the Encourager Welcome to The Encouraging Parent-a book designed to encourage parents in every kind of family. I want to help you become better parents. And I'm in a position to help because my five children have reached the state of blessedness-they're grown and gone. Encouragement is the most basic parenting inclination. We start out as encouragers. To encourage means to build up, to seek good, to put courage in a child's heart, to be positive, to motivate, to persuade, to inspire, to enlighten, and to help. Because I seek to be an "encourager" in the lives of my children, I think of my parenting in personal, relationship-building ways. Parents today don't need more guilt or stress.

They need strength. With encouragement, we can build hope in the hearts of our children. Parents need to know that encouragement has far more potential to help develop emotionally healthy children than punitive measures like spanking. Each year I speak to more than 30,000 parents. They share their dreams and their frustrations with me. I do 150 to 200 workshops for parents every year all across the United States. What I have learned from thousands of interviews, conversations, question and answer sessions, and surveys is that there is no "typical" American family. But behind the different kinds of families there remains the parental longing to raise children in safety, security, and wholeness.

I spend the majority of my time helping parents solve the very real and practical problems of raising children. My academic background is in communication and I have a Ph.D. in speech communication. The Encouraging Parent is designed to combine the communication theory I've learned and researched in the anecdotal experiences of parenting drawn from my own family and what I've learned from families in my workshops. An Expanded Definition of Family There is no one particular definition of family that every family has to fit. While proponents of "the traditional family" insist that there is only one acceptable way to raise children, I don't concur. In my experience as the parent of five children it isn't whether Mom stays home with them or works that's the deciding factor.

What matter are the quality and consistency of care that our children receive. Contemporary families often bear little resemblance to traditional definitions. There are a variety of viable family paradigms in our culture. The world has changed and the family paradigm of the 1940s has shifted. Single parents and dual-career families aren't going to suddenly disappear. After all, the mom-at-home model is an isolated trend in parenting, not the historical norm. We need a broader and more acceptable definition of family-a definition that doesn't imply guilt and shame for people living in nontraditional families. I will define family as an organized group of people living together, sharing together, and building relationships together over an extended period of time.

Whether your family is a "traditional family" or not has little bearing on the matter. I have written this book to encourage single parents, dual-career parents, divorced parents, stepfamily parents, and grandparents raising their grandchildren. It's how you parent, not the composition of your family, that counts. A Word of Encouragement for Nontraditional Families While a number of parenting experts insist that Mom stay home with the children, this isn't necessarily right for everyone. The appeal to religious authority in this matter doesn't prove that women have to stay home rather than engage in meaningful careers. The options are multiple. The issue is one of personal choice, not particular mandate. Parenting is hard enough and exhausting enough without the attempts of sincere, well-meaning people heaping more guilt on dual-career families.

I dissent from the popular view that families do best with a stay-at-home mom.