Unison
Parenting
What is Unison Parenting?
Unison Parenting combines proven parenting techniques in a Christian context with a unique foundation of unison parenting strategies designed to identify and avoid pitfalls that disrupt parents from staying on the same page.
In Unison
A composer chooses unison singing, in which the choir is singing the same note in the same rhythm at the same time, when the composer wants to emphasize the text. Similarly, to emphasize the message that parents want to send, they need to parent in unison.
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This collaboration extends across parenting partners. Today's families are structured in many combinations that include parenting partners inside the home or spread across households. They may include people who are not technically parents but members of the extended family or even friends. Unison Parenting addresses all combinations.
The book proposes that when parenting partners collaborate well, they can extend the collaboration to the child to bring them to full maturity as a good decision-maker. This collaborative atmosphere produces a unison family.
​Each chapter in the book contains proven parenting advice with an underpinning of unison parenting principles. The chapter summary shows both the general parenting principles and the unison parenting foundation underlying those principles.​
Book Chapters
Proactive Parenting
The idea of Proactive Parenting is planning a structured policy for how you are going to parent, then implementing it. You are attempting to govern the behavior of all family members, parents and children, with consistency.
Proactive Parenting is how the parents agree on the family’s core values, a framework for behavior, and policies which implement, monitor, and reward or assign consequences for child behaviors. These represent a "steady state” of parenting.
Reactive Parenting
Reactive Parenting is not knee-jerk parenting. Life always throws something new at you, especially when it comes to children’s behavior and the situations in which they find themselves. You can’t plan for everything. Reactive Parenting sets up a model for how parents can stay unified when dealing with the unexpected and the confusing.
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This chapter contains examples for proper Reactive Parenting of young children as well as teens.
Adaptive Parenting
Adaptive Parenting is about how to apply these fundamentals across the changes that come as the child ages. Clearly, you cannot manage a 5-year-old, 8-year-old, 11-year-old, and 14-year-old in the same way. You want to understand the person your child is at every age and adapt the details of your parenting as you experience the new challenges of each age.
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This chapter contains a structured approach to developing a child’s decision-making capabilities as they grow.
Supportive Parenting
Supportive Parenting causes us to dig deep within ourselves to be good parents. This chapter explains a classic model of the four parenting styles. By learning this about your parents, about your own style, and about the style of your parenting partner(s), you can establish a “code of conduct” for parenting to approach the ideal parent model.
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Often, we start from our own parents’ styles as the starting point (or conversely, try to do the opposite of our parents). It’s best to examine ourselves to evaluate our style, consider its flaws and strengths, and work toward the ideal of a parent who balances love and limits. What’s really key about this chapter is for parents to help identify tendencies in their parenting partners and bring them back into alignment with the ideal model, for the sake of the child.
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The impact of parenting style is profound. Each parenting style is analyzed for what it is and what long-term effect it has on the children. The Loving and Firm style creates the most opportunities for best results.
Collective Parenting
Collective Parenting recognizes that in today’s world, families are defined in many different ways, yet good parenting is still required. There are single parents, divorced and remarried parents, and same-sex parents. Extended family parenting partners (such as grandparents) may play a regular parenting role in the child’s life. You may need to either provide or receive co-parenting with a neighbor. Other adults will be involved in your child’s life. This chapter provides thoughts on all these listed situations.
Collaborative Parenting
The next four chapters comprise the section on parenting teens. This section reflects how your parenting must evolve for the “home stretch” of parenting, the final years when your goal is to produce an adult. The heart of the teen section, from which other sections stem, is the Collaborative model for parenting.
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It’s often assumed that parents and teens have to be foes for several years, but this doesn’t have to be true. Parents can point children toward their common goal of helping the teen become an adult, reframing the controversies of teen years into a collaboration to achieve the goal. This chapter proposes a Collaborative Parenting model for viewing the teen years as a collaboration between parent and child. This model is briefly discussed in the introduction to the Parenting Teens section, then revealed more fully in this chapter.
Formative Parenting
While parents have been attending to the child’s religious education and spiritual development all along, spiritual formation becomes more important as the child reaches their teen years and becomes capable of owning their faith. Teens will not only wrestle with the details of becoming a consistent disciple, but with the big questions of life and what religion has to say about them. The chapter on Formative Parenting gives you a structure, using the metaphor of driver training, for how to approach this era.​
Preventative Parenting
We must address the most worrisome part of the teen years: How to deal with the child’s growing freedom. Where before you had tight control of their activities and their comings and goings, your control will naturally loosen, especially when they begin driving. This chapter and the next address this issue.
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Preventative Parenting updates the framework used to govern behavior when the child was younger, now incorporating the complexity of the teen’s life. This chapter aligns with parenting techniques advocated in the “Parents: The Anti-Drug” campaign but is updated to consider current dangers to our teens.
Attentive Parenting
This chapter tells how you implement the Preventative Parenting framework and attentively monitor your teen’s behavior – an important step that often gets overlooked by parents of teens, believe it or not. To be clear, this is not “helicopter” parenting. Instead, it addresses the oddity that parents are very cautious about who is around their child at young ages but are either careless or unsure how to address who is influencing their child in the teen years.
