Happy With Your Kids?
Are you happy with the way that you and your kids get along? If you said no, I’m not surprised. There has always been the family conflict of rebellious, know-it-all kids and parents struggling to understand what they did wrong. The answer is that most likely you have done nothing wrong. Kids are going to push the limits of control. It’s human nature. Of course the kind of rebellion changes with the age of the child. For a toddler it may be biting or screaming. For a preteen it may be not coming straight home from school. And as the kids turn into teenagers the full wrath of rebellion may show it face with opinions, clothing and hair styles, friends, and school work and activity choices. Not to mention the gangs and drug use. Childhood used to be simpler when I was a kid. Maybe because there was much less public communication about all the bad stuff out there in society that today’s kids are exposed to today. Were there bad things when I was a kid? Sure, I just didn’t know about them, so I was naive and protected. Was that a good thing? It was for me. I had a pretty happy childhood. With today’s kids getting on the internet at an ever decreasing age, it’s not surprising that they want to know more about topics that you would rather that they didn’t. Unfortunately we can’t protect our kids these days, like our parents protected us from the big bad world, until they are old enough to understand the differences between good and bad more efficiently. And then there are the ever changing methods of discipline. I got a whooping if I was bad. Somewhere along the line, in an effort to protect children from abuse, parents lost some of the ability to discipline effectively. Since it’s not politically correct to give your kids a whooping any more, parent have resorted to ‘Time-Out’ or saying ‘Or Else’. The problem with these methods, to me anyway, is that ‘Time-Out’ is much too easy to cope with for most kids, and ‘Or-Else’ may not be carried out. Now there is a child who thinks that you are a push over because ‘Or-Else’ never happens. So what is the answer to the problems of today’s parents? I believe if you start at an eary age to teach standards of living, values, etiquette, the religion of your choice, how to give and accept charity, how to love and be loved, you’re doing the best that any parent can do. Let your kids learn by their mistakes like every other kid through out time has. Don’t sweat the small stuff.
Thanks for reading
Shoofly
