Barbara Coloroso Speaking Topics

• Kids are Worth It! Parenting with Wit & Wisdom​

  A evening packed with solid practical advice for parents of children from toddlers to teenagers, that shows how to utilize the very stuff of family life—chores, mealtime, sibling rivalry, toilet training, bedtime, allowances and more—to create a home environment in which children can become self-disciplined, compassionate, responsible, resourceful, resilient human beings who can act in their own best interest, stand up for themselves and exercise their own rights while respecting the rights and legitimate needs of others. Barbara Coloroso will discuss the keys to good parenting: treating kids with respect; giving them a sense of positive power in their own lives; giving them opportunities to make decisions, take responsibility for their actions and learn from their successes and mistakes.

  Topics:

  • Positive home climate
  • Simple rules to help stop trouble before it starts
  • Power struggles—what, how, why and when not to engage
  • Six critical life messages
  • Discipline and punishment—why one works and the other only appears to work
  • RSVP—reasonable, simple, valuable, practical consequences
  • Mistakes, mischief and mayhem
  • Three kinds of families—brick wall, jellyfish and backbone
  • Keeping your cool without putting your feelings on ice
  • Buffering children from sexual promiscuity, drug abuse and suicide

• Parenting Through Crisis

  Parenting through Crisis: Helping Kids in Times of Loss, Grief and Change is about handling tough times and tough issues. Whether it be a small crisis or a major disaster, a minor malady or a life changing event, bullying in hallways or terror int he streets, this session looks at how we as parents can use our wit and wisdom to nurture and enrich ourselves and our children as we navigate through the minor and major chaos in our lives Parenting through Crisis takes us further on the journey of integration, healing, and connection begun in Parenting with Wit and Wisdom.

• Kids Are Worth It! Teaching With Wit & Wisdom

  Solid practical advice for educators on how to create a school climate in which students can become self-disciplined, compassionate, responsible, resourceful, resilient human beings who can act in their own best interest, stand up for themselves, and exercise their own rights while respecting the rights and legitimate needs of others. Barbara Coloroso will discuss the keys to good teaching; treating kids with respect; giving them a sense of positive power in their own lives; giving them opportunities to make decisions, take responsibility for their own actions, and learn from their successes and mistakes.

  Topics:

  • Positive school climate
  • Simple rules to help stop trouble before it starts
  • Power struggles—what, how, why and when not to engage
  • Six critical life messages
  • Discipline and punishment—why one works and the other only appears to work
  • RSVP—reasonable, simple, valuable, practical consequences
  • Mistakes, mischief and mayhem
  • Reconciliatory justice—a productive alternative to suspension
  • Three kinds of schools—brick wall, jellyfish and backbone
  • Keeping your cool without putting your feelings on ice
  • Buffering children from sexual promiscuity, drug abuse and suicide

• The Bully, the Bullied, and the Not-So-Innocent Bystander

  Breaking the cycle of violence in our homes, schools and communities involve more than merely identifying and stopping the bully. It requires that we examine the why and the how a child becomes a bully or the target of a bully (and sometimes both) as well as the role the bystanders play in perpetuating the cycle. A deadly combination is a bully who gets what he wants from his target, a bullied child who is afraid to tell, bystanders who either watch, participate in the bullying, or look away, and adults who see bullying as teasing, not tormenting, as ‘boys will be boys.’ not the predatory aggression that it is. If this combination of relationships is not radically transformed, we have enough incidences in our recent past to convince us that it is not only the bully who can terrorize our community. Some bullied children, whose cries went unheard, whose pains were ignored, whose oppression went unabated and unrelieved, have struck back with a vengeance and sorrow. Others, who reached what they felt was an utterly hopeless and irretrievable point, have killed themselves. Feeling they had no other way out of the pain and torture heaped on them by their tormentors, no one to turn to, no way to tell, they made a tragic and final exit.

  It is easy to point fingers; place blame; fortress our schools; push zero-tolerance plans; mandate a bully awareness week; stiffen penalties for bullying; or simply ignore the problem and hope it will go away. It is more difficult—and necessary—that we as individuals, families, and entire communities create safe harbor for all of our children. We must do what is necessary to take the weapons out of the hearts, minds, and hands of our kids. We need to give kids the tools to be able to stand up for their own rights while respecting the rights and legitimate needs of others; to handle conflicts nonviolently; to act with integrity when confronted with difficult situations such as peer pressure to cause harm; and to develop a personal code (inner moral code) that gives them the wherewithal to do what is right in spite of external consequences and never merely because of them. No easy task; no simple answers.

• Just Because It's Not Wrong, Doesn't Make It Right

  Teaching kids to think and act ethically

  A workshop packed with solid practical advice on how to use the stuff of everyday life to teach children to act with integrity, civility, and compassion. Beginning with the idea that it is in us to care, that we are born with an innate capacity for compassion, Barbara Coloroso shows professionals, educators, and parents how to nurture and guide children’s ethical lives from toddlerhood through the teen years using everyday situations at home, at school, in social settings, and in the world at large.

  • How to develop an ethic rooted in deep caring with principles, virtues, and values that are in the service to and at the service of that caring
  • The why and how to teach our children to think and act ethically
  • The possibilities and pitfalls of character education programs
  • Nurturing in children the three antidotes (care deeply, share generously, help willingly) to the virulent agents that are ripping apart the fabric of our human relationships (hating, hoarding, and harming ourselves and others)
  • How rigid moral absolutism and shifting moral relativism interfere with raising ethical human beings
  • Media: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Indifferent—how we can help children use these tools and not be used or consumed by them.
  • The difference between punishment and discipline—why one works and the other only appears to

  The story about our human nature in today’s social and cultural climate is part and parcel of our human nature and our social and cultural climate. Our story is also guided by our compassion and loving kindness, which recognizes that there is no I without Thou, no We without Community and no way to survive without honoring both our unique individuality and our common humanity.

• Extraordinary Evil: A Short Walk to Genocide

  Through an examination of three clearly defined genocides — the Armenian and Rwandan genocides, and the European Holocaust — Barbara Coloroso deconstructs the causes and consequences, both to its immediate victims and to the fabric of the world at large, and proposes the conditions that must exist in order to eradicate this evil from the world.

  Based on the Barbara's 30 years of ongoing research and travel, her theories on bullying are here exposed as having a terrifying link to the unspeakable crime of genocide. By linking the psychology of the bully to the motivation that leads a community to murder, she provides devastating and vital insight into why people kill their neighbors.

  By exploring the words and actions of those who not only did not succumb to the intoxicating madness around them but railed against it, and by studying conditions under which ordinary people commit extraordinary evil and attempting to comprehend that evil, it is possible to create conditions in our communities and in the world that will strengthen inhibitions against such violence and nurture those bonds that connect us, one to another.

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