Parenting!

 Parenting! What a hard, but extremely fulfilling thing! I learned so much about parenting this entire semester here at BYUI from talking a parenting class and from being in family classes. I learned something new this week that I absolutely love and want to share with you all. 

Discipling is always something I wondered how I would handle it. What do I want to do and not do? I always assumed that rewarding and discipling were good ways of raising children. I have learned this week that it is actually pretty disrespectful. I found this shocking and maybe some of you will too. It’s not that parents mean to be disrespectful, it’s just how a lot of us parent or assume it’s how we will parent. To pat a kid on the head, give them a treat and say “good job” for doing what we wanted them to do is disrespectful because it really is just manipulating them to do what we want. When our parenting tactics are to reward and punish, we are really manipulating what behavior we want and don’t. Its rather manipulative and disrespectful. Crazy right! I had never thought of it this way before. There is another downside to rewarding and punishing and that is they will always expect some sort of reward. They won’t want to do anything without a reward. It can create selfish children. Discipling can create children who are scared of us and don’t learn how to self-regulate themselves, which is what we want to teach our children to be able to do. We won’t always be able to punish them and they won’t know how to regulate themselves as well as they would if they learned from the natural consequences. 

What are natural consequences. It’s really just the consequences that come from our actions that happen naturally. Not mom and dad or someone else punishing, just what naturally comes. For example, if you leave your bike outside in the rain it will get rusty. We should let our children learn from the natural consequences as much as possible because they will be learning from their mistakes and seeing how their choice created this consequence instead of mom and dad punishing them and then they don’t see how their choice did anything, but get them in trouble with mom and dad. They don’t learn how it could affect them and it doesn’t teach them as effectively as learning form their own choices by natural consequence. 

There are times though when we shouldn’t let them learn from the natural consequences. There are really 3 exceptions. The first is when it's dangerous. Letting your child see how fast they can go down a steep road that enters a highway might not be smart as the probability of them getting hit by a car is pretty high. The second is it's too far in the future to be a good teacher. There were parents who let their child drop out in 8th grade thinking it would teach him that no one would want to marry him, he wouldn’t find a good job, etc. They didn’t think how their child wouldn’t care till he got older and it ruined the child’s life. They wanted him to learn from natural consequences, but in cases where the consequences will be too far in the future its best to not let them learn from them. The last is when it harms others such as shoplifting. A lot of situations in a child’s life however could very well be things that they could learn and grow from just from the natural consequences.

So moral of the story, except for those three exceptions let your child learn from the natural consequences. They will be better teachers than punishments. Let your children make mistakes and grow and learn. It’s how they will learn to self-regulate. You won’t need to reward them to behave, but they will learn as the grow. This shows your child a lot of respect and trust and will teach them to respect you more than if they are scared of you because of punishments or they only want to be rewarded. Respect is earned. I hope this helped some of you! It certainly was new and fascinating for me!