It is not being suggested that you should never have any negative thoughts about your family. These kinds of thoughts will come and go. What’s important to remember is that blaming your kids isn’t just ineffective, it’s destructive!

So why do it?

What will work is to find ways to be more aware of how you’re pointing fingers and to take on responsibility of lessening impact when you’re doing it.

The most important way you can do this is to love your kids unconditionally. You can see them as wonderful, resourceful, loving people that they are and not as their flaws.

It’s also helpful to realize that your ego will often manipulate things so that you can’t always see best in your kids. This effectively prevents you from having to consider your own contribution to problem. Accepting this as a permanent condition for yourself will allow you to be more aware of problem when it does surface.

So what can you do when you begin to see your kids or your family as “the problem” and your relationships begin to suffer?

•Be committed to staying aware of this tendency and to get accountability from your wife or others around staying away from it.

•Know behavioral signs when you are judging others as problem-- you feel irritated, angry, argumentative, etc.

•Don’t try to change your kids; they’ll know what you’re up to and will resist you.

•Always look at what you can do to change--this takes a lot of courage.

•Get support; for a long time fathers have believed that they should be able to do it all on their own. Enlist other fathers or a coach or mentor to help you to be as effective as possible.

•Find a way that you can “practice” skill of loving your children unconditionally—being loving and supportive when they’re not at their best is one way to do this.

Since any of us can remember, we have tended to look at others in our family and believed that they are “cause” of problems we have.

There is another way to look that demands more courage and is much more effective.

Have courage to honestly face fact that you are often “problem” in your family.

Your loving relationship with your kids may depend on it.

These are some ideas for fathers who are committed to helping create kids who can learn from their mistakes, and who are not afraid of making a few:

Absolutely accept notion that your kids are doing their best, and that they’ll learn faster about their mistakes if they are in an environment that accepts mistakes.

Understand that your difficulty with your kids’ mistakes is in fact a reflection of your difficulty dealing with your own mistakes; be aware of this and deal with your own issues first.

Know shaming messages that we can all give so easily to our kids--messages that can do a lot of damage to them and help them to feel unworthy. Here’s a few of them: -How could you have done that? -You don’t listen to me! -You can do better than that! -What’s matter with you?

Keep providing your kids with learning experiences, but at same time structure their environment so they can’t make too many mistakes (having expensive glassware around house where children might break it is not their fault).

Provide a great model for your children by way you react to making mistakes: do you get defensive and stretch truth, or do you own mistake and learn something from it? Create a culture that’s based on learning from mistakes.

We only have one chance to show our kids patience and discipline necessary to allow them to learn from mistakes that we’ve all made. Your opportunity to improve just started now; give your kids room that they need and deserve.

Mark Brandenburg MA, CPCC, is the author of 25 Secrets of Emotionally Intelligent Fathers (http://www.markbrandenburg.com/e_book.htm#secrets. For more great tips and action steps for fathers, sign up for his FREE bi-weekly newsletter, Dads, Don’t Fix Your Kids, at http://www.markbrandenburg.com