Dr. Ivey's Parenting Philosophy
CARL IVEY, MD
  Campbell River BC, Canada

"Healing families with healthy parenting and optimal nutrition."

You can be the loving, highly effective and successful parent you wish to be and your children and teens need you to be. But in order to do this, you must have certain basic information and be aware of certain principles or laws which directly affect parenting. To attempt to fly an airplane, scuba dive or perform open heart surgery without an awareness of  the basic facts and principles affecting these particular activities would be fool-hardy and invite certain disaster.

Hence, it is imperative that you become aware that, despite the infinite variety of inborn temperaments and genetic differences found in children, there are basic principles which underlie all healthy, effective parenting. Healthy
Copyright © 2006, Carl Ivey, MD, All Rights Reserved.
discipline is the cornerstone of healthy parenting. Healthy discipline, which involves no punishment nor any threat of punishment, is the parental tool you will use to create and maintain healthy, fulfilling relationships with your children. My mission is to share with you what I consider to be the basic principles of healthy discipline, without which truly healthy, effective parenting is not possible. Once you understand what healthy discipline is and begin to consistently apply it in the rearing of your children, you will become, not only a more empowered parent, but a healthier and happier parent as well. Likewise, your children will become more empowered, healthier and happier. You will create a "win-win" situation for yourself and your children and, ultimately, for our communites, towns, cities, nations and our planet.

Before proceeding any further, let me comment on punishment,what it is ,and what it does. Punishment is not to be confused with responsible, effective parenting which, at times, requires the parent to set age-appropriate limits and boundaries on the child, and also requires, at times, the withholding of certain privileges and freedoms, not because the child is "bad" but because the child is not yet mature/responsible enough for such privileges and freedoms. To allow an immature and/or irresponsible child/teen to engage in an activity for which he is not yet ready constitutes a form of child abuse/neglect. Punishment requires that the parent views the child as being "bad" and guilty of some misbehavior which warrants punishment. I am convinced that, since all parents make mistakes, all children make mistakes and all human beings make mistakes (as I recall, it is human to make mistakes!), parental threats, shame, harsh criticism and punishment have absolutely no place in healthy, responsible, effective parenting.

Punishment comes from the Latin word "punire",which means "to hurt". Punishment always hurts the child, whether the child is being hit or not being hit. Just as cyanide is, by its very nature, intrinsically poisonous, punishment is intrinsically hurtful. But not only is punishment hurtful to the child being punished, but is also hurtful and damaging to the punishing parent and to the parent/child relationship! There is no "safe" or "right" way to punish as there is no "safe" or "right" to hurt a child, a parent or any parent/child relationship.

Punishment is, ultimately, a form of violence which has been used by countless parents as a form of discipline for thousands of years. And it has wreaked havoc on the emotional/mental states of children and parents during that period of time, and continues to do so today. We cannot expect to raise truly healthy, responsible, peace-loving and non-violent children and teens using violent forms of discipline. The use by some parents of withholding love and affection from the child as punishment for being "bad" is perhaps the single most destructive way parents can interact with their kids. The most extreme form of punishment is war, an activity where one group, race or nation will punish another group, race or nation by waging war on them. Finally, some of the most devastating punishments I have personally witnessed
have occurred without the child ever being hit but by being verbally and emotionally abused by harsh parental criticsm, humiliation, belittling and shame.

There are many others who share Dr. Ivey's belief that fundamental change in how we raise our kids is needed.

Joe Paterno,the 82 year old football coach at Penn State University and winningest coach ever in Division I college football, was quoted recently:
"I think kids today, they are confused. They long for some kind of discipline. They want something bigger than themselves,something bigger to be a part of. We can still offer that here"  (at Penn State University). Sports Illustrated, October 26, 2009

During a newspaper interview in 1996, Oprah Winfrey was quoted,
"What I found is the reason we have the kind of society that we have is related to the way we have been parented. The way we stop the dysfunction...to save our world, to save our children...is to help parents understand what is wrong in our homes, our schools, our communities, and do something about it."

Confucius, the Chinese philosopher, appears to be echoing Oprah even though he wrote the following statement over two thousand years ago:
"To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right."

The problems of crime, violence, drug addiction, emotional illness, chronic depression, domestic violence and child abuse/neglect all, with few exceptions, ultimately have their causative roots in unhealthy, dysfunctional, abusive/neglectful parenting. How other people raise their kids is our business as these problems affect all of us, directly or indirectly, every moment of every day. Since everyone and everything are interconnected with everyone and everything in the universe, there are no "senseless crimes", but rather, because of the law of cause and effect (what goes around comes around), there are simply crimes committed against our children which then must be acted out in some form later.  Until every child grows up feeling safe, valued, respected and loved, none of us will ever be completely safe. Every criminal, rapist, child-molester, and murderer is somebody's child who obviously was not raised in healthy, loving ways. The African proverb,"The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people," hopefully will make us aware that the solutions to most of our nation's problems will be found in the homes of our people and the healing of these problems must begin in the homes of our people.
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