By Judy Bartkowiak
9781911383567 11.99gbp
To be honest I hadn’t heard of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and Bartkowiak’s book is a good introduction. Actually she wrote her first book on the subject back in 2010 and several workbooks later this is a recap of over a decade’s work and study.
Try a Google search and you will come up with the following ‘a psychological approach that involves analyzing strategies used by successful individuals and applying them to reach a personal goal. It relates thoughts, language, and patterns of behavior learned through experience to specific outcomes’. A bit of a long explanation but the core is that it is a method that came out of California (where else?) in the 70’s and has been developed ever since.
So why not break down those 3 words. Neuro being our brain’s processing and storing of information, with linguistic being how we express thoughts and programming being the way our patterns and behavior are run.
The emphasis on NLP is what happens before the behaviour. Here Bartkowiak stresses that the childs behaviour is the result of processing the information and stimulus and that we should not look at the behavior so much as helping them change it by understanding the process that resulted in it and getting the child to analyse this and then get them to change it by themself. Enter the concept of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) or ‘tapping’ to you and me. This is referred to as an emotional form of acupuncture and is supposed to rebalance the energy flow in the body.
In the first section you will find out how EFT tapping works and apply this to parenting. She suggests trying things out on a partner first (hopefully one who volunteered). Different ages, baby, toddler, children and even daily wellness habits are covered. At one point there are sections where you can write in things such as generalisations that are exchanged between you and your child.
As for the tapping this starts with preparation – a glass of water and chossing a medium stress level event and then learning how to tune in. The actual tapping is described with various tapping rounds, tapping points and when to tap.
The second section looks at 9 common issues and several of them should be of interest to each parent such as sleep issues, anger, fears and phobias etc.
The chapters are not too long or too dense and there are a fair number of diagrams.
It is designed to give parents the skills to guide their children into finding their own solutions to problems that life throws up.