Being a person of my word is HUGELY important to me in parenting. It means my kids can trust me to do what I say- protect them from harm, love them forever, and discipline them when they need it. If I am not following through with what I’ve said when it comes to discipline, I have become an untrustworthy person. How can they know I will love them forever or protect them from harm if I can’t be counted on to keep my word?
The vast majority of the time, if I give a direction I am going to follow through. I said put your laundry away before we watch a movie? I am not starting that movie before laundry is put away. I said bring me your plate and I will give you dessert? There is no dessert until the plate gets to me. I said we don’t play with sidewalk chalk in the house? We throw away the sidewalk chalk you used on the basement floor. I said we don’t wear that skirt without leggings underneath? We are not leaving the house until you put the leggings on. I said, “No.” I meant, “No.”
You might imagine this makes me a really cold or harsh parent. You might think all I do all day is bark orders at my kids. What I want to emphasize to you is actually the opposite.
Because it is SO important to me to be a parent who follows through, I really limit the rules/directives/consequences I give my kids. I am not going to yell, “No!” unless I actually mean “No” and I’m willing to stop whatever it is I’m doing to make that behavior stop. I have learned to let go of some of the areas I used to want desperately to control because I’ve learned that they aren’t that important and I want to save my “no” for what matters. (All of this “no” talk is referring to dealing with negative behavior, not answering questions or responding to requests for privileges.) I’m not going to ask my kids to do something unless I am willing to make sure it gets done.
I see parents do way too much talking and not nearly enough following through. If we’re at the grocery store I might find a parent who sees her child squishing the loaves of bread on the shelf. She says, “No no. Stop doing that. We don’t squish bread.” and keeps shopping while her child keeps doing it. Listen, if you don’t actually care about your kid squishing bread then just don’t say anything. To waste your “no” on something you don’t actually care about makes it that much less effective when it comes to the things you do care about. Don’t say, “No, we don’t throw sand on someone’s head” while at the park, unless you’re actually going to do something if your child does it again. Obviously I’d rather your kid didn’t squish my bread or throw sand on my child, but you see my point.
If my 18 month-old is dumping all the potholders out of the drawer, I have a choice to make: to say “no” and follow through or let it go. I don’t especially like cleaning up after him, but this isn’t unsafe and isn’t really a big deal in the long run. So I don’t say anything. I just don’t like hearing parents say “No! Stop doing that!” and then never get out of their chair to actually correct the behavior. I’d rather you just let them do it than essentially teach your child to ignore you when you say “no”.
This means that I don’t yell “no” from the other room (unless there is a safety issue) because I need to be close enough to the situation to be sure I can see if I need to follow through. I don’t yell “no” while feeding a baby unless I’m willing to stop feeding that baby to follow through if the child doesn’t respond to my “no”. Ideally, I don’t say “no” more than once about the same behavior (at one time). I don’t yell “no” while I’m in the bathroom to what I imagine is happening outside the bathroom. When I’m deciding if I should tell a child not to do something or to do something specific, I am always evaluating if I am willing to back-up what I’ve said. Is it that important to me? If it’s not, then I need to reconsider.
This is most important when dealing with your little bitty ones. My goal is to be able to communicate “no” with just the right look to my to my school aged child who is misbehaving across a crowded church sanctuary and have them respond appropriately, so I start that process by being a person my child knows means business from their earliest ages. When they trust you to follow through, you find that you don’t always have to. Right now that means being 100% consistent with my toddlers. I have also gone through this when adding older children to our “family” during our group home work. It took many months of consistency to teach them they could trust me. But once we got there, they knew the behavioral expectations and I could trust them. Totally worth it.
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