Rule #6Treat Your Wife Extremely Well This is where your kids get their most important information about relationships between men and women. Make a great effort not to fight in front of kids. Remember to be kind more often than trying to be right.

Rule #7Actions Speak Louder Than Words Many parents spend time threatening their children when their kids aren’t cooperating. But if you don’t follow through on consequences, you can threaten till cows come home. Your children will learn to ignore threats. They’ll understand action. If certain privileges are taken away because of their lack of cooperation, they’ll learn very quickly that you mean business. Try your best to align consequences with action. ( If you don’t clean your room in time, you won’t have time for stories before bed.)

Rule #8Really Listen to Your Kids Don’t just hear their words, but learn to understand meaning behind what they say as well. I’m picking my own clothes! might mean that your child wants more responsibility or independence. Be able to reflect back what your child says to you. If you want your child to listen to you, you absolutely must listen to her/him.

Rule #9Give Your Kids Responsibility as They Grow Older When your kids are very young, maybe they just help make their beds in morning and keep their rooms clean. As they get older, add things to their list. Tell them that this is how a family works…everybody has certain things that they do. If you do it when they’re young it’s more likely they’ll do it when they’re older. Don’t reward them for things that should be expected of them.

Rule #10Tell Your Kids They’re Great All Time It is especially important to tell them this when they’re not at their best. It’s easy to tell them when things are going well. Make it a point to tell them specifically what you think is great about them. This will be more meaningful than generalized praise.

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

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.