Raising Children and Staying Sane 

Welcome back to Shrink It Down.  I am frequently asked about methods and strategies for parenting children as they progress through their developmental stages.  The best overall advice I can give is to stay consistent.  Your child is a master at finding loop holes, making you feel guilty, and making you second guess yourself.  How do children do this?  It is actually quite easy.  Your child is born and you fall madly in love with them and you want to protect them from every little hurt and you worry about them, and take care of all their needs.  Your child becomes the center of your universe.  One morning, your child realizes they are separate from you and they can say “no”,  they can not cooperate, they can even voice different opinions and tell you that your are mean, wrong, and no longer remember what it is like to be young.  In other words, they have the power to hurt you like no other and they have no idea the pain they deliver to you.  You, on the other hand, still have the agenda of never hurting them if you can help it.  So what is a parent to do?  Set consistent boundaries for your child and as they develop, reassess those boundaries and expand on them.  However, you must be consistent with your follow through at a very young age.  If your child learns that they have a chance of wearing you down so they can get their own way, they will do it and most likely, do it well.  When your child is very young, consequences should be brief, concrete and immediate or your child will forget why they are being punished and simply state to themselves and anyone who asks that you were just being mean.  When my twin sons were between the ages of 2 and 5, if they would fight over a toy and not share, I would put the offending toy in time out and tell them that if the toy makes them that unhappy, we would put it away.  

My friends used to laugh at that, but at that young age I found it much easier to put the offending object in time out than trying to keep them in time out.  Always do debriefing.  When I would give the toy back, we would talk about why the toy was in time out and what they needed to do to keep the toy out of time out.  Even when your child is older, about ages 5 through 10, and you put them in time out, when you go to retrieve them, debrief and discuss why they were in time out and what you expect them to do differently the next time.   As for older children, I do not believe in grounding because than the parent is grounded and the parent has not done anything wrong. I prefer to tell the child they have no privileges at all until they finish a short list of chores.  If I approve of their work, then privileges are restored.  In essence, they are grounded until the chores are completed, and this can take an hour or a month and it is their choice, giving them some control in the process.  That allows you to start the next day new.  When groundings are too long, children tend to forget their crime, and if they act out during grounding, you really have no where to go.  All that being said, look at your expectations for your child and decide if your expectations are realistic.  Children are not little adults and it is really not a priority for them to clean their room , take out the trash, or put their laundry away.  That is your priority.  If you accept that, you may find you do not get as angry, and you may even be able to laugh and play with them regarding their “not done” chores.  To help you achieve this mind set, think about how you would want an adult to deal with you at that age in that situation.  If you stay consistent throughout their childhood and parent them, you will have very little reason to parent them as they get older.  Parent now and have a friend later, be a friend  now and parent for the rest of your life. 

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