As parents, we have a lot of damage control to manage. We expect that our children will be teased so we try to give them un-teasable names. We imagine they’ll be injured by the coffee table so we choose to have a round coffee table. We see the food struggle coming and so we make their meal choices simple so they’ll eat. But for all our parental controlling, do we consider the benefits of seeing the disasters and circumstances through to their not so perfect endings? Because there’s a lot to be learned by this practice occasionally.
I remember reading in one of my parenting help books that if you have a problem with a kid who whines for the candy at the check out line in the grocery store, you need to set up a sting operation. Knowing they’ll behave this way, you say to them ahead of time as your headed to the store in need of pretend items, “we will leave if you pull this behavior stunt”. Then you go into the store grabbing this pretended needed item and when they act like they were told not to, you ask the cashier to please put the item back and you leave immediately and calmly. You are hedging bets for your future reliability. You are letting that child know he/she is not in charge. This is a very good example of how to reestablish your authority but sometimes you need to go all out the other way and let it go.
I spoke with a woman who was fretting about her son’s dental hygiene. She said he refused to take care of his teeth. And someone said, just wait until he wants to have a girlfriend. He’ll change that tune really quickly because no one wants to kiss someone with a skanky funk mouth. He was probably suffering a little from “if you tell me to do it then I don’t wanna”but there’s a point when, as a mother, you have to let lessons be learned. There’s always the free dental services at the Dental School when he has future dental health problems. Sadly, the only person he’s punking out against is himself.
l took my daughter into the bathroom last night and she refused to go to the potty when I asked her. The old “I don’t have to” but “I really don’t want to be told what to do” trick. And sure enough, there was a wet bed four hours later. I knew what the circumstances were going to be but we have been pull-up free for a week and I know she has to go all the way out and feel the discomfort to learn. Sometimes we have to see our way through to the real worse case scenario, the “what if” so that the lesson can be learned the “hard way”. Because life is a better teacher than we can ever be.
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