The child must pay for his decisions himself, learning from his own mistakes. If the undesirable behavior of the child is considered to be erroneous behavior, to be considered a mistake, then the closer the relationship between the undesirable behavior and the negative consequences that the child receives for it, the better. The child is given the opportunity to learn from the consequences of his own behavior. On my own mistakes. In doing so, he learns responsibility.
If the child has not eaten, no one will feed him later, he will remain hungry.
If your child is not doing what is right, there is often only one natural consequence: You have to force him or her to «help» with some kind of physical force. When a seven-month-old baby turns around while putting on a diaper, you hold him. When a two-year-old approaches a dangerous place, you pick it up and carry it away. Refuses three-year-old to go up the stairs in the direction of the bedroom? It can be pushed in the right direction, pulled or carried. Refuses to put on coat when you are in a hurry? You have no choice but to «help by force.»
In our family, the question is “voluntarily or by force?” became a proverb. The way in which force was used apparently was not very scary for our children, otherwise my six-year-old daughter would not have asked so often: “Mommy, I behaved well today. Could you force me to bed?» Sometimes this «help» is not so easy. Often associated with the screaming and crying of our children. We get the feeling that we are using violence and imposing our will. In such situations, it is especially difficult to remain calm and not lose control of yourself. But this is precisely what is decisive.
The following table shows typical behavior and possible logical consequences:
All logical consequences are effective only under one condition: «Let your actions speak for you, but not words.»
It is fine to push the child, calmly and confidently, towards the door, while you are silent or only briefly notify: «I will help you get to the bath.» The desire to yell well at the same time is very great: “Every evening the same thing! I’m already fed up! Can you walk to the bathroom on your own for once? It got on my nerves.» Do you notice how easily such phrases fall from our lips? Have you noticed that wordless actions are much more effective?
As long as you accompany your parenting activities with curses or reproaches, you will not succeed.
Some more examples of similar commonly used but redundant comments:
In these examples, silence is golden. But the comments turn the logical consequence into a punishment. All the shortcomings of typical parental mistakes appear here. It’s hard to keep silent, but you can’t even pull a fish out of the pond without difficulty.
It often makes more sense to let the logical consequences of bad behavior occur than to warn about them in advance.
Imagine, Sabrina’s mother at the beginning of the game says: «If you start crying again, I will stop playing with you.» Or Thomas’s father, setting the table: «If you spill milk again today, you will clean up yourself.» Or Carola’s mother announces in advance: «If you don’t eat anything now, you won’t get anything else until dinner.» Parents emphasize unwanted behavior even before it occurs. Silence is much better here. If you say anything at all, then remember the following rule:
Emphasize the logical consequences of good behavior. Focus on the positive.
“If you calm down, you can choose your own hairstyle.” “If you hurry now, you will have time to get to school on time.” «If you play calmly, we can play to the end.» «If you get to the toilet in time, you won’t have to change as often, and you’ll be wearing dry clothes all day long.»
Correct punishment should be for the child a logical consequence of his own behavior. The best, most humane and effective method of punishment is natural (it is also called the method of “natural consequences”, and it was first described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau).
Natural punishment works by itself: if you refuse to wear mittens, your hands freeze. True, a two-year-old baby is not yet able to establish a connection between the reluctance to wear mittens and the fact that the fingers on the street hurt from the cold. Nevertheless, already at an early age, the child faces some unpleasant consequences of his actions. In such cases, you can simply draw the attention of the baby to this fact, that is, connect cause and effect for him. In this case, of course, there is no need to punish the child additionally. For example, if he suffers from the fact that he cannot find his favorite car in the general «game» dump, do not rush to rush to search. If before that you have repeatedly tried to involve him in cleaning toys, now you can rightfully say: “You see, it’s a pity that the machine is not there. Now, if in the evening you bring all your cars to the garage (that is, to a toy box or other place intended for a “car park”), it will be clearly visible where which one is, and they will not be lost.
At first, do not count on unconditional understanding. After one episode, the desired ideal order will not come in the nursery. However, this course of action is much better than the typical one: first — swearing and scandal on the topic “You always lose everything! I won’t buy you any more toys! And in general, now I’ll collect everything and throw it in the trash!”, And then, without transition: “Here’s your car for you! He threw it himself, and look for mom! ”, And in the end — you still crawl on all fours and collect toys, accumulating anger and irritation in your soul.
Gradually, the child himself learns to establish causal relationships between his actions and their results. He can carry a cup full of juice around the table as much as he wants and ignore parental remarks like: “Be careful! Spill it!” At best, he will phlegmatically answer you: “I won’t spill it.” And this will continue until he is finally covered from head to toe with cold, sticky juice. What should you do in this case?
Your actions may be as follows:
— Grab the baby under the arm, carry it to the bathroom, change clothes, wash, wipe. This procedure is accompanied, depending on your personal addictions, habits and the state of the nervous system, with a scream, a slap, reproaches or a monotonous lecture on the topic: “After all, I told you! And you didn’t listen to your mother!” etc. In conclusion, most likely, you will put the delinquent shrew in a corner, deprive him of sweets, and in the evening, instead of juice, give him boiled milk. In the future, whenever chubby playful hands reach for that very cup, you will shout: “Well, don’t you dare touch it! Already played last time! Enough! I won’t let you do it again!»
— «Did you get wet? Take, please, a rag and wipe the floor as soon as possible before the juice dries — then it will be difficult to wash. No, sorry, I can’t change you yet — I’m very busy!” All. The curtain.
Excuse me, you say, but where is the punishment here ?!
And you imagine yourself in wet, cold, clothes sticky from juice. Nicely? Not really. Here is the punishment for you — quite, by the way, commensurate with the “crime”. And most importantly, naturally and logically connected with it, simply following directly from it. If a child stays like this for half an hour, experiencing tangible discomfort, this will not harm his health. But it will bring some benefit, enriching experience. Most likely, not the first time, but he will quickly learn why it makes sense to handle cups, plates and their contents carefully.
For you, this course of action is also much preferable. You will protect yourself from the feeling of guilt that invariably appears after we make a scandal to children, because you don’t have to scream, spank, or torture the tender child’s soul with long moralizing. Of course, in reality, such a reaction is not carried out as easily as it is described in the article. After all, the child will certainly not endure silently: he will whine, whimper, complain or express his feelings in a more energetic way. For example, he will insistently demand that he be changed and be sure to regret it. Therefore, it is necessary to withstand the character, be patient and survive these noisy half an hour. In addition, if you behave in the same reasonable, calm and consistent manner in all other similar situations when the baby happens to be guilty, his reaction, most likely, will not be too violent. Children have a good sense of justice.
Just do not need to accompany an act of pedagogical courage with a repeatedly repeated saying: “I told you!” This can be said once, and not as a reproach, not to confirm one’s own innocence, but simply as a reminder and consolidation of the information received. The next time the child wants to have fun with a cup of juice, it’s not a sin to remind him of the «wet business». But not to reproach him and make him feel guilty, but only to remind him of the possible unpleasant consequences of pranks with dishes.
Instructions for use
- Of course, the use of this method is permissible only in cases where the consequences are completely safe for the life and health of the child. Possible injuries, fires, floods cannot be considered as beneficial consequences of children’s misdeeds.
- When using this approach, do not forget to take into account the age of the child. A two-year-old kid is already able to draw the necessary conclusions from the juice story, but is not yet ready to correctly assess the consequences of his refusal to eat tasty and healthy food, so you can explain to him that people who eat only Chupa-Chups get sick as a result. True, you should not expect that he will quickly take note of this information, give up sweets and begin to monitor his balanced diet himself. However, such a situation would be a violation of the first point, about security.
- The “natural consequence” must occur as soon as possible after the “wrongful” act has been committed. This indicator directly depends on age: a small child must see and evaluate the results of his misconduct immediately, otherwise the whole story will lose its meaning and he will not draw any useful conclusions. If he tried to grab a hot iron and got burned, the connection is obvious enough for you, but do not forget to explain everything about hot irons to the baby. As the child grows older, the interval between «crime» and «punishment» may increase.
- Minimize your role. Punishment for that and natural that is «organized» by the very nature of things, and not by you. If you take too active part in such an event (telling in detail why it should not have been done that way, emphasizing that you warned a hundred times, promising some kind of trouble for the future, etc.), you risk nullifying all the value such an «educational» situation. The attention of the child will again be focused not on the real event and the experience that can be learned from here, but on you — and, most likely, very soon the misconduct will be repeated again.
- Finally, by all means make sure that the child actually could not do what he did. The punishment must be fair. If the same juice is poured out of awkwardness, because it was really difficult for the baby to hold a heavy mug in his hands, then there is no “corpus delicti” here. In this case, there is no one to punish and there is nothing to punish, and you can dress the child in dry clothes with a pure soul.