“Delight in your child! Your child learns to see themselves through your eyes.” – Sarah Rosensweet
We all want our children to make good decisions. And of course we need to overrule them if they try to ‘decide’ not to wear a seatbelt or a helmet or another health or safety issue.
But…
What if they want to wear ballet slippers on a snowy day?
What if they don’t want to practice their violin even though they want to learn how to play?
What if they want to spend all their birthday money on trinkets at the dollar store?
What if they wait til the day before a test to start studying?
In all of these situations we COULD step in and prevent a bad outcome.
“Wear your boots or your feet will get wet.”
“It’s time to practice.”
“Save your money for something bigger or you’ll be sad later.”
“Shouldn’t you start studying now? You have a test next week.”
We have 18 years (or so!) to prepare our child to go out on their own. Guess how kids learn to make good decisions? By making decisions. NOW, when the stakes are small and they still have us as a safety net, is the time for practicing decision making.
It’s not our job to prevent our children from making bad decisions. It’s our job to be there for them when they do. We need to step back and let them learn.
To be able to step back, we need to manage our own anxiety. Yes, they might suffer a little now. But what if they leave the safety of our nests without enough practice making decisions? We’re here for them while they are learning and the stakes are low.
“Oh my goodness! Your feet are cold? Come, let’s warm them up!” Your child will wear the boots next time.
“Your teacher was upset you hadn’t practiced? Wow, that sounds tough.” If they care about their music, they will practice.
“Aw, all your money is gone now. I’m sorry, sweetie.” The pain of having nothing of value to show for their birthday money will help them save it next time.
“You got a D on the test? Oh no. What do you think happened?” The night before was clearly not enough time to study.
If we give them our empathy, not our “I told you so,” we make room for our child to learn to make good decisions because they’ve had the space to learn from their bad ones.
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Sarah Rosensweet is a certified peaceful parenting coach, speaker, and educator. She lives in Toronto with her husband and three big kids (ages 15, 18, and 21). Peaceful parenting is a non-punitive, connection-based approach that uses firm limits with lots of empathy. Sarah works one-on-one virtually with parents all over the world to help them go from frustrated and overwhelmed to, “We’ve got this!”
Read more at: www.sarahrosensweet.com
![As parents, we all face challenges, but what happens when traditional parenting approaches don’t work?
That’s why my client during this call, Samantha, is actively transitioning to a Peaceful Parenting approach.
We’re talking through how those challenges can feel even more intense when your child is more sensitive and needs additional attention and understanding.
Join us to discover major tips for a more peaceful parenting journey.
Go to https://link.chtbl.com/Z_YOP4jb to listen to this episode now, and share it with a friend you know needs to hear it too.
[ID: Photo of child and parent arguing on a blue background. Audiogram reads, “Yeah. The fact that he brought it up again tells me that he’s got some shame around it and feeling bad about it. So we don’t need to bring it up in a corrective way. I’m going to exaggerate for the purposes here, but, you know, yesterday when you bit me, biting is not okay. We don’t bite in our house. We don’t want to do any of that. He already knows that, right? There’s no information gap where he thinks biting is okay. So the healing that has to happen is around he needs to feel like, back to the beginning when we started talking, he needs to feel like you still think he’s a good person and that’s why he brought it up, because he feels bad about it. So you can say to him and he says, oh, what did he say again? Remember yesterday when I bit you? Yeah. And he said, I’m a bad boy. So you can say there’s no such thing as bad boys. Mhmm, that is, yeah. They’re only boys who sometimes are having a hard time.”]
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