My son is 7 years old and he has a funny habit of filling up the living room with a lot of clutter items, toys, books of all types, notepads, art items, scissors and more. With his gentle ever smiling nature, you would hardly even notice how and when he would quietly bring them all out from the room in trickles. Before you blink, the whole living room is filled up. Thank God for mummy who always watches over us, she directs the decluttering – EVERY TIME!
I’m 2 months short of 10 years being a parent and it has been both exciting and challenging. As with my last post on this subject matter, I still believe no one is an expert on parenting, but we can all learn from one another.
So in the bid to ensure we have a decent living room, my wife leaves instructions on a daily basis as to what the standards are and it helps to keep them under check.
In parenting, I believe there has to be a balance between prevention and correction.
Every family needs to have standards and preventive measures. I believe every parent needs a significant dosage of intelligence to properly raise balanced children. This intelligence helps you to act and set standards, many times before the children act out negative impulses.
In my opinion, curiosity is one of the root causes of naughtiness but it is an integral part of humanity especially at early childhood that helps children develop knowledge of the world. Many times, our parenting robs them of this good trait because we go too hard trying to curb naughtiness.
My biggest grouse with parenting is the over-emphasis on correction than instruction. Intelligent parenting is about preempting bad behaviour and giving adequate age-appropriate instruction in an atmosphere of love, acceptance and visible preference.
You can’t abandon your children for many hours on a daily basis and then return home to give them massive beating because they’ve turned the house upside down. People who spend all the time with their children are not even sure of the result, how much more those without any guidance all day, all year round.
Don’t live in the illusion that your job is to wait for your children to misbehave so that you can beat them without mercy. You’ll likely be finding things out when it is too late to change them.
I have three tips I think you should try out and see if it works out well:
1. Give specific instructions on life, morality, home keeping, hygiene and spirituality.
2. Monitor compliance consistently (according to what is age-appropriate)
3. Specify consequences for non-compliance and follow through. Be careful to indicate consequences because children will push your limit to see if you will follow through. You will lose authority when your word is flouted repeatedly without any consequence. That’s how people who don’t regard authority figures are raised. This was a major issue I had to sort our with my wife much earlier in our marriage. I’d say, “don’t threaten what you will not do”. I’d insist, “If you make the threat, I will enforce it”.
I have done this repeatedly. Her word is now reverred because we have a law enforcement agent in me.
May we get it right!
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