Development
8 Fundamental Parenting Rules
Feeling a little unsure of your parenting skills? Here are eight basic rules to help you navigate the most fulfilling, and challenging, job you'll ever tackle.
Parenting sure would be a piece of cake if kids waltzed out of the womb knowing how to behave. But since we're not that lucky, teaching them the rules of civility is our cross to bear. The tricky part: making sure they don't counterattack us in the process, which means we need to find ways to get our kids to use their own internal dialogue to follow the clear and reasonable rules of behavior that we establish. In other words, we need to get them to think their way to good behavior by getting them to comply with the rules we establish because they know it's the right thing to do, instead of following them because they're afraid we'll go ballistic and ground them until their grandchildren are potty trained.
There are several prerequisites to our discipline program that can help us accomplish this goal without too much blood, sweat and tears. If we follow them, we're sure to encourage self-direction instead of external direction in our kids:
1. Comprehension
If we want our children to decide, inwardly, to comply with a rule, it needs to be one they agree with. If they don't understand a rule or agree with its purpose and meaning, they won't follow it because it's the proper thing to do. If they do follow it, it's because they're afraid of being hounded, reprimanded, criticized or punished.
2. Respect
We should treat our children with respect. Treating them as inferior puts us in the position of being something they need to react to through aggression or surrender. If we want them to trust their ability to make the right decisions on their own, we have to show them that we respect their ability to do so.
3. Consistency
Our discipline needs to be consistently enforced. When we're inconsistent, it sends mixed messages, making it impossible for our kids to be consistent while assessing their own behavior. (Is this the time it matters that I'm good, or not? They end up using external cues to make that decision.)
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