Giving Your Children a Say

It seems that parents are always wondering whether they are doing as well as they could with their children. I hear parents asking if they discipline too much, or not enough. Do they have the “right” rules? Do they have the right balance between letting their children have fun and making sure they help around the house? Do they spend enough time listening to their children or too much? There are no easy answers to these questions. Parenting is a balancing act!! Most parents know that their relationship with their children is more important than any particular conflict. They also know that they need to demonstrate strong leadership and set clear limits and boundaries if they hope to raise responsible children and encourage good self-discipline.

Leading a family with the right balance of authority, sensitivity, humility, and discipline is more difficult than leading a company. Your emotions are more strongly engaged, for better or for worse. Ideally, you lead as partners with your spouse adding support, and also challenges. Your responsibility as a parent is clearer, and the consequences of bad choices more severe. More importantly, you can’t walk away from your mistakes and seek another job. It’s so easy to either fall into the patterns of your own parents, or react to them and turn the other way.

Every parent negotiates with their children, sometimes well and other times, not so well. Negotiations in your own home are challenging and important: getting the kids to bed without tears, persuading them to eat vegetables without endless whining, saying no and setting limits while also showing respect, balancing discipline with love. Parents and their children don’t see the world in the same way.

So, perhaps the most challenging part of parenting, particularly as it relates to conflict, is finding the right balance of authority, respect, leadership, and humility. Most parents expect to exert some authority over their children, yet few want to be distant authoritarians. You want your kids to listen to you, and not only because they fear punishment. You want them to follow the rules, and not only because they expect a reward. How do you help your children to learn to do the right thing without coercing them? How do you discipline them wisely?

You began your lives as parents with unlimited authority. You did everything for your infants when they could do little for themselves, including argue. During the early years of parenting, you have great power! Eventually, you run out of power. If you haven’t taught your children how to work with you when they are young, they won’t work with you when they are teenagers!

Children need limits and they need rules. And, you can work with your children when you set the rules. Suppose your son has been tracking mud into the kitchen and can’t seem to remember to take off his shoes. Pick a time when the conflict is past. Explain your concerns to your child and ask him about an appropriate rule, and an appropriate consequence. Children are more likely to remember and follow the rules if they have helped set them. Will you always agree with their ideas? Of course not, and they may be more reasonable than you might think. Just listening to their ideas will show that you respect their views. Later, they will be more likely to respect yours.

What happens when they break the rules? Separate punishment and discipline. Punishment is about retribution for the past, discipline teaches for the future. As an example, imagine that you see your daughter pushing another child in your yard. If you run out yelling and send her straight to her room for “time out,” she will spend her time thinking about how unfair you are, remembering that the other child pushed first, and imagining how she will get even. These thoughts will not help her behave better next time. On the other hand, if you take your daughter aside, ask her what happened, listen to her views, suggest three ways she might have handled the situation better, and than ask her to go spend five minutes alone thinking about how she will behave if the situation happens again, she is more likely to learn for the future. Both could be called “time outs.” The first is counterproductive punishment and the second is constructive discipline.

The kind of leadership and authority that build strong families combines listening with clear limits. Parenting is the most challenging and rewarding experience of your lives. Building strong families and strong characters in your children is a life’s work.