Are You Being Consistent with Your Kids?
Parents in my Happy, Relaxed Parenting classes frequently express the same lament: Follow-through is one of their biggest challenges, and more often than not, kids pick up on that.
My sister, for example, was inconsistent with following through on her decisions and much to her dismay, she knew it. Her work schedule changed so often, it meant that each day was also different for her kids. One morning, as she was driving the kids to school, her personal “pinch point” manifested itself as she overheard her kids whispering in the backseat. her five-year-old, who had seen the iPod in his seven-year-old brother’s backpack, said quietly, “You’ll get into trouble -Mom grounded you from your iPod until tomorrow!”
Their nine-year-old sister joined the conversation a bit more loudly. “Don’t worry,” she said, “Mom always forgets about the grounding by the next day.” Funny, but true for so many parents… and it made my sister realize she needed to be more consistent with the consequences she doled out.
Our children know our strengths and weaknesses just as well as we know theirs. If we don’t follow through on our word, they’ll learn exactly when and how to work around us. Following through and being consistent with our guidelines and groundings sends a clear message about consequences, just as we send a message about reliability when we promise something to our kids and we live up to it. In both cases, knowing that we will live up to our word builds trust between parent and child.
Parenting is a directorship, not a dictatorship. Our job is to direct our children toward right and wrong, not to dictate every action. If we direct them, we practice Honorable Parenting and Approachable Parenting, which will surely earn us their respect and their trust. However, if we dictate rules, we are doing a disservice to them and to ourselves. We are wasting our time and theirs by keeping them from being independent, and we will still carry the heavy baggage of guilt, doubt, fear, and worry. Most of all, we will drift further away from our larger goal of building a good relationship with them.
With our parenting world in constant flux, follow-through and consistency are among the most challenging tasks we encounter as parents. But our job is to do the best that we can, as often as we can – leaving room for mistakes and for growth from mistakes. There’s no reason to feel guilty about a mistake; guilt is unnecessary anger directed at ourselves, and it prevents us from learning. Reminding ourselves of that can help put it in perspective. Instead, take a deep breath and ask yourself the same thing you ask your kids: “What have I learned from this?”
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