Lazy Children
Do you ever wonder what you have done wrong when your child does something wrong? Well, this morning I couldn’t get my daughter motivated to get ready for school. She just stayed in her bedroom and pottered around and I was getting quite concerned about the time.
It was 7.55am when I finally turned up the pressure by saying to her, “OK, Becky, if you want a lift to school I am leaving at 8.15am. You have 20 minutes to get dressed, have breakfast and pack your bag”. Then I went away again.
Finally at about 8.15am she emerged, and all of a sudden was rushing around furiously trying to be ready on time. But I stuck to my guns. I said to her, “It’s a pity you won’t have time to have breakfast now”, and went to the car. Becky followed, shoes and socks in her hand as they hadn’t been put on yet.
I drove her to school and there was not much conversation. I stopped at the gate, she got out and that was about all. Becky seemed to be testing me this morning to see if I would stick to my boundaries. I think she found out the answer to that one. Poor Becky had to go hungry until morning break as she hadn’t eaten any breakfast.
Sometimes kids will try to control adults by dawdling like this. We have no control over that. All we can control is our reaction to their actions. Becky knows now that there will be a sad consequence of no breakfast should she try to dawdle like that again. A valuable lesson for any child to learn.
I know this seems harsh but I had to go to work this morning and I could not have Becky holding me up. She also has a responsibility to the school to arrive on time. And when she is late I leave it up to the school to give her a consequence.
We need to allow our children to learn through their mistakes. I could have easily whipped up some breakfast or waited another 3 minutes for Becky. But the issue here was that Becky knew the boundaries and still defied me by being on a “go slow” to purposely try to annoy me.
The end result was that Beck was very hungry until morning tea break today. But I think perhaps she will think twice about doing the same thing again. Why? Because she didn’t like the end result. She experienced the consequences of her poor choices this morning.
I know this can be a hard thing for parents as we all love our kids and want the best for them. But sometimes the best thing for our kids is to allow them to make a mistake so that they can learn from it. When kids learn from trial and error they will thank you later on in life.
