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How to Use Rules as Good Tools With Your Child
[Week 3 of 52 Weeks to a Better Relationship With Your Child]
Do children like rules?
What is it about rules that many children dislike? Are children naturally rebellious and need to be put in their places? Do they just need things explained to them? While there may be some element of those and other things involved to different degrees in different situations, I think that children really like rules.
I have observed many a belligerent child relax and respond happily to the rules in my household, including a variety of extended family and friends. I’m not claiming to have special powers or that I could replace their parents. I am simply saying that I have seen what I am going to talk about in action in both the long and the short term.
If children start their own private clubs out under a tree or in a corner of the garage, they make rules. They have an inherent understanding that rules help people get along. Children feel secure and cared for is they have a sense of the right sort of rules and boundaries. So what are the right sort?
The right sort of rules
The right sort of rules can be described as:
These descriptions may overlap somewhat, in the same way loving and kind overlap. Still, I think it is helpful to examine them each separately. Before we do that, let’s consider what the goals are.
The overarching goal in raising children is to prepare them for adulthood. On balance, most people spend far more of their time in adulthood than childhood. It is wonderful and even beneficial to let children enjoy their childhoods, but this should always be done with pending adulthood appropriately acknowledged.
A young child (shall we estimate from birth to 6 years) has a limited capacity to understand most rules. He also lacks the long term perspective that might help him be motivated to apply them. An older child (approximately age 7 years to 13 years), is probably more interested in understanding the rules, but will place high value on the overall tone of how rules are decided on and applied.
In our home, we treated older teenagers more as adults, even though while they still lived with us, theywere expected to abide by our rules. It is only because of government interference that they are not allowed more freedom. Since they understood the balancing we had to do, we never dealt with what seems to be expected as parent-teenager conflict.
The four descriptors above are partly important because they are necessary for trust. Rules imposed by someone who is not trusted are suspect on many levels. This is likely to lead to disregard of the rules.
Moral versus non-moral rules
Before discussing those four words, it will be helpful to distinguish between rules another way.
Moral rules deal with
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By Laura Blodgett[Week 3 of 52 Weeks to a Better Relationship With Your Child]
Do children like rules?
What is it about rules that many children dislike? Are children naturally rebellious and need to be put in their places? Do they just need things explained to them? While there may be some element of those and other things involved to different degrees in different situations, I think that children really like rules.
I have observed many a belligerent child relax and respond happily to the rules in my household, including a variety of extended family and friends. I’m not claiming to have special powers or that I could replace their parents. I am simply saying that I have seen what I am going to talk about in action in both the long and the short term.
If children start their own private clubs out under a tree or in a corner of the garage, they make rules. They have an inherent understanding that rules help people get along. Children feel secure and cared for is they have a sense of the right sort of rules and boundaries. So what are the right sort?
The right sort of rules
The right sort of rules can be described as:
These descriptions may overlap somewhat, in the same way loving and kind overlap. Still, I think it is helpful to examine them each separately. Before we do that, let’s consider what the goals are.
The overarching goal in raising children is to prepare them for adulthood. On balance, most people spend far more of their time in adulthood than childhood. It is wonderful and even beneficial to let children enjoy their childhoods, but this should always be done with pending adulthood appropriately acknowledged.
A young child (shall we estimate from birth to 6 years) has a limited capacity to understand most rules. He also lacks the long term perspective that might help him be motivated to apply them. An older child (approximately age 7 years to 13 years), is probably more interested in understanding the rules, but will place high value on the overall tone of how rules are decided on and applied.
In our home, we treated older teenagers more as adults, even though while they still lived with us, theywere expected to abide by our rules. It is only because of government interference that they are not allowed more freedom. Since they understood the balancing we had to do, we never dealt with what seems to be expected as parent-teenager conflict.
The four descriptors above are partly important because they are necessary for trust. Rules imposed by someone who is not trusted are suspect on many levels. This is likely to lead to disregard of the rules.
Moral versus non-moral rules
Before discussing those four words, it will be helpful to distinguish between rules another way.
Moral rules deal with