timelymatters

Bad Parenting Skill #2: Be lazy: let your child sink (a little)

November 20th, 2007

I was at my son’s school the other day, and a mother had rushed into the office because her child had forgotten her water bottle. When I heard how the school secretary had to deal with her, I thought I wished I could muster that much energy to care whether my son forgot a water bottle, but I’m too lazy!

When my older children were growing up, I read a lot of parenting books. Our bookshelf was full of the series Your Two Year Old, Your Four Year Old, Your Six Year Old, etc. (We had trouble in the even aged years.) I read How to Talk to Your Kids…series and many others. If I picked one piece of advice from a book and made it an inherent core to my parenting, I felt it was a good, useful book. One local author stands out in my mind. Stephen Sasso a teacher at a local high school wrote a series on raising responsible children. I took a lot of his advice to heart. It made sense to me. One piece of advice that he gave was avoid rescuing your child. This of course does not mean you don’t rescue your child from a life threatening situation, but rather, let your child suffer the natural consequences of his/her actions. By doing this, your child learns the impact of his actions or inaction rather than the consequences being cushioned by the parents’ rescuing.

A classic example is the forgotten lunch. You get home from dropping the kids off at school, and there is the brown bag that should have been tucked into the backpack. Do you A. Get back into the car, race to the school, and bring the lunch to your child or B. Sit tight (be lazy), get on with your day and let the lunch sit on the counter. I think for most parents, it is harder to do B. You would think about your poor, hungry child sitting at the lunch table with no food. But realistically, how much would your child suffer missing one meal? If he/she were really hungry, wouldn’t it be more of an impact that he/she needs to have all the stuff together in the morning and be responsible? That would be the bigger lesson learned here.

I have wrestled with this parenting skill many times. I think it is inherent to being a mother or mothering that we want our children to feel good and be happy. How can that be when your child is hungry or upset about not getting something done for school? Don’t we just naturally want to pick up the slack and help our child out so they don’t have to suffer? But, if we step back from our mothering role, the bigger picture is that we are parents. And, one of those jobs as a parent, is to help your child become a responsible, independent and contributing person. It really isn’t part of our job to make our child happy; that is his/her job.

As I’ve said, this ability to sit back and watch our child suffer through is a hard one to follow. I have failed many times. More to follow…

More on this to follow…I’ve blown this many a time.

Entry Filed under: Daily Routines for Kids