As a very experienced IMPACT instructor, and a very inexperienced parent of two young children, I find myself naturally gravitating towards my IMPACT background when I look at parenting dilemmas. The big dilemma (obviously, at least to me) is when is it time to teach my children the physical tools of self-defense? The only answer I have so far is not yet.
For other self-defense tools, we’ve already started. Martha [Note: Martha Thompson, IMPACT Instructor] gave us a wonderful book entitled Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems. The pigeon tries to convince the reader to allow him to drive the bus. We found reading this book with our son to be a great way to get him to start saying “No!” to things. Of course, children learn to say “No!” pretty quickly anyhow, and we’ve found that when we encourage our children to say “No” they say it to us a lot, and that can be really frustrating. My wife recently came upon this wonderful article that explains why we need to support our children’s “No!”
I read the article and was so impressed I shared it on my Facebook page (I rarely do that). Now I just need to work on remembering its importance when my son tells me “No!” when I ask him to put on his pants…
Mark Nessel, IMPACT Suited Instructor
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