As a parent, you don't want to become overly preoccupied with the problems that you experience with your child's behavior. Problems are by definition negative — something the child is doing or not doing that is wrong in the eyes of the parent and needs to be corrected. Unfortunately, by focusing on what is going wrong, parents often lose sight of all that is going right.

Consider a parent who complains to a counselor that her child is completely out of control. “She refuses to get off the phone when I ask no matter how angry I get. I battle with her about this every night. She won't do anything I say! She's totally defiant!”

If the parent is correct, and the child is nothing but disobedient, the mother is indeed in a lot of trouble. But the parent is not right. She has just become fixated on an ongoing problem, allowing that fixation to take over her entire view of the child.

So in response to the parent's complaint, the counselor asks some clarifying questions. Does she get up all right in the morning for school? Does she come home at the hour you set? Does she do chores? Does she help out when you ask? Does she get her homework done without your supervision? Does she behave as you would like at school, at other people's homes, out in the world?

By answering yes to each question, the parent begins to see that in the big picture, her daughter is by no means out of control, that she is, in fact, giving her parent an enormous amount of consent. Keeping sight of the big picture keeps passing problems in perspective.