What if we could step away from the power struggles, and have stronger, healthier relationships with our children? Shelley Malka is working to make this a reality
Sarah Trenyo, Shelley’s parenting mentor, bases her parenting approach on a technique by Bilha Shefer, who studied with Rudolf Dreykurs, a student of Alfred Adler. While Freud believed that behavior is driven by irrational inner forces, Adler believed that all behavior is essentially goal-oriented.
The Shefer Parenting Approach posits that children misbehave in order to elicit emotional reactions from their parents. When parents play into this, children gain the upper hand, and instead of the child needing to adapt to the adult world, the adults are busy adapting to the child’s every need. Besides the chronic guilt felt by the parents, there’s a breakdown in authority.
EmPowered Jewish Parenting is also based on the Adlerian concept that children’s behavior is goal oriented. However, Shelley puts a lot of emphasis on the parent’s emotional equilibrium, and she introduces many other tools into her approach — most notably EFT. “What I’ve brought to this approach is not just the tapping in EFT, but its whole philosophy, the principles.”
EFT engages the entire neurological system. The tapping points on the face exactly trace the trigeminal nerve, a major cranial nerve enervating the face. In addition, simultaneously tapping and tuning into a specific memory detail, body sensation, or limiting belief seriously challenges working memory (EMDR does something similar). Multiple systems are engaged simultaneously: the limbic (emotional), cognitive (prefrontal cortex), and nervous system. As such, issues are shifted or released from the mind and body at the same time, and the results are much faster than would be accomplished with just talking.
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