Since the release of his book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, Dr. John Gray has redefined the way people view relationships. With Children Are From Heaven, he moves into the domain of child raising, again bringing an alternative approach to something which has gone since there were humans living in caves, getting into relationships, and having children. What is happening is a transformation in the way we communicate and bond with our children. No longer are children seen and never heard. In the following interview, Dr Gray talks about this communication, and how things such as home schooling, the Internet, and violence in movies and TV effect the way we communicate with our children.

The greatest gift any parent gives to their child is love. Most parents love their children, but how they communicate that love effectively is the real challenge. One of the important steps towards this is that the mom and dad be able to communicate love in a similar way, meaning they have a similar style of parenting. When dad plays it tough and mom is the softy, it really gives confusing messages to the child. Or visa-versa, if mom is the tough one and dad's the softy, it causes problems because the child has a tendency to bond with the softy, and build up walls against the tough parent.

No, that traditional approach is not a good thing. As an alternative, I have come up with an approach, both tough and soft, that most parents can agree to follow because it allows a range of behavior that is very nurturing all the way through, yet is controlling and tough. From my workshops I have found that many parents feel that they don't want to parent their children the way their parents did. The example they have is that they know what not to do, but they don't know what to do.

Exactly, those key things, punishment, spanking, abusing, and yelling.

So much those abusive forms of parenting occur when parents are out of control, and they don't know what else to do. It's because what they are doing doesn't work. What works today is different than in any generation in the past because the world is a different place. Our children are over stimulated and bombarded with new choices, new freedoms, and the last thing they need is more permissive parenting. What they need is strong parents, tough parents, who are in control of their children, and yet don't have to use punishment, spanking, yelling, threats, and criticism as a way to control their children. That's what we want to be done with is these old, out-of-date ways to control kids.

Yes, it's a huge turnaround, and even Dr. Spock in his later years said he took back his advice on spanking children. Unfortunately we still live in a society where a lot of people hold fast to the principal, "spare the rod, spoil the child." It's important that people know where that phrase came from, in that it is a pre-Biblical statement that comes from the Roman era. This was the parenting tool of the time. Recently they found the bodies of over 100,000 teenage boys, who were beaten to death. They used to beat their children with sticks till they obeyed, and it was actually legal for parents to kill their children. Certainly in our era, we can't even think of these things, but that's what was done then. Through time things lightened up and instead of beating a child to death, you just beat them a little bit. You don't beat them with a stick, but instead use a switch or a hand and you spank them, and your punishments are not nearly so terrible. The statement, "spare the rod, spoil the child" should not be taken literally but is actually a metaphor, meaning you have to control your children, and for previous generations, this was the only way they knew how. Today, children are different, and parents are different. We have all kinds of new skills for communicating, and through good communication, you can learn to control your children. Also, through timeouts, one of the most important things a child has a chance to experience is the loss of freedom. What allows a child to come back and feel the need for the parents is to feel the loss. This is a way to bring the child back to their feeling self. Deep inside, children want to cooperate, and by supporting this with positive reinforcement, kids are naturally more cooperative.

I think that home schooling is wonderful. In particular, the two great things about it are one, your child gets more connection with you which is very vital and important because separation from the parent is one of the major problems today. Kids go to school all day and they aren't with their primary caretakers. They don't have the same connection with their parents. Because of this, if kids do go to school of which most do, you need to have super good communication. The communication can reconnect the child, helping the child feel connected to the parent again. If children go away to school and parents aren't in good communication, then the children experience a lot of unnecessary stress. If we look at history, home schooling is what we've done for centuries. Schooling for children is rather recent. In fact, my great grandfather was one of the proponents of sending kids to school by running around saying all children should have the opportunity for education. The reason I am saying this is because just two or three generations ago sending kids to school was not a common practice.

I'm not aware of all the programs available, but I like that the Net brings groups of people, such as those who home school, together into a community that can network together. Because of all the information available, it's changing the way children view the world. The down side of the Internet is that kids are exposed to negativity. There is a lot of negativity flying freely on the Internet when you go to different sites. A lot of opinions people express are done in a very disrespectful way of communicating things. Also, there are lots of places where people say things that are not grounded in any kind of healthiness, and a child can't discern the difference. The absorb everything, and particularly up to nine years of age; what ever goes in, comes out. So if the child sees something that says, "You're an idiot," then the child will begin to repeat it.

Absolutely, up to nine, anything a child sees goes in and comes right back out. Then they begin developing faculties up to puberty where they can start to discern things. When they see violence, not only does it come out immediately, but they also assume that it is going to happen to them. To them, it is very real, and it could happen at any time. When you are an adult, you develop a part of the brain that allows you to see something and react to it like it's real, but know it's not. That ability only starts in the brain at fourteen. Prior to that, a child does not have the ability to suspend disbelief. We go into a movie theatre, and happens is that we know what is in the movie is not real, but suspend that and pretend that it is real even though part of us knows it is not real. Children can not do that.

Exactly, they haven't developed the brain capacity to suspend disbelief so that within minutes after they have see a show, there are drawn in to it, and everything is real Some kids who watch a lot of violence become desensitized to it, and it becomes a way of life for them. They become hardened to it, and their reactions are going to be violence. They have lost their ability to empathize with loss and people's pain.

That's right, and to a certain extent out society has become that way with the huge over stimulation of news we get. It's everywhere. This desensitizes adults to a certain extent, but for children the effect is devastating.

That's why I like home schooling. When I was looking around for a school for my daughter, I wanted to meet the kids at that school, I wanted to meet the teachers at that school. I was very picky, and I remember a friend saying, "John, you're being overly protective of your children. The world is the way the world is. They have to experience reality someday, might as well prepare them for it now." And my response was, "I'll let them experience the rest of reality when their brain is capable of interpreting reality with full facilities. Part of this is being there when they need to process information. I remember when my daughter saw someone being hit for the first time. She had never been hit, and we were in an airport, and a mother is hitting her child, while yelling "Don't hit your brother." How is that child ever going to not be violent when the parent uses violence to say don't be violent.

A few, and from that I spent days explaining to my daughter why this could happen. It was big question because she couldn't understand it. What adult really understands violent behavior. We just accept that is what people do, but really it is dysfunctional behavior.

This is very true. By teaching our children a different way, we are changing the fabric of society. This reminds me of a story where a child is on roof top and his father says, "Jump, I will catch you." The boy responds by saying, "I'm scared. I don't want to jump." Again the father assures the son, "Jump, and I will catch you." After several times of doing this, this son finally jumps and the father moves out of way, letting his son fall to the ground. Pulling him up, the father says, "This is the greatest lesson I could ever give you, never trust anyone, even your own father." As we move into the future, we need to move beyond this type of thinking, and begin communicating with our children rather than building a wall of distrust.