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Puget Sound Parenting Calendar

This exhaustive and up-to-date Puget Sound Parenting Calendar is published by PSAS - their description follows ...

"A nonprofit educational organization founded in 1975, the Puget Sound Adlerian Society (PSAS) offers information, referrals, workshops, lectures, courses, and other resources and support to parents, parent educators, teachers, counselors, social workers, workplace managers, and other people who are inter­ested in mutually respectful, cooperative relationships—community-building—in families, classrooms, workplaces, and everywhere else. Parent education has been our primary focus. We help parents choose attitudes and actions of respect for their children and themselves—attitudes and actions that strengthen a child’s sense of belonging and strengthen the family. Kids don’t come with instructions: it is all too easy to put children, family relations, and marriages at risk when parents just need some new skills and attitudes.

... Choosing “kind and firm” attitudes and actions (kind = respecting the child, and firm = respecting the situation) is essential for parents, teachers, and others who live or work with children.

... Democratic parents are still authoritative and set clear limits in matters of safety, health, and morality.  For other matters, we work out guidelines, choices, and solutions, often together in family meetings.  We chose to encourage children and help them learn to solve problems rather than to order, reward, and punish them as in the authoritarian model.  Barbara Coloroso, author of Kids Are Worth It!, calls this “giving your child the gift of inner discipline,” or helping our children learn how to think, not what to think."