Monday, February 02, 2009

The most awful, stupid parenting advice

My mother sent me a link a column by Dr. Debby Schwarz Hirschhorn. Dr. Hirschhorn writes that The most awful, stupid parenting advice is to "Let children work it out." Her rules for parenting are:

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1. You, the parent, are responsible for teaching all social behavior the first time.
2. You then are responsible to coach the child on future occurrences of that kind of behavior as a way to prod his memory as to the original coaching idea.
3. As the child grows older and occurrences of this situation come up again, it is your job to wean yourself of helping/coaching so as to give more and more responsibility to the child for (a)recognizing the problem; (b)remembering that he once did have answers to it from the initial teaching and subsequent coaching; (c)correctly applying what he learned in the past to the present situation.
4. A point comes when it is actually good for the child to experience the (painful) outcome of his choices because he has already been coached numerous times and sometimes he must experience Life directly in order to learn.
5. It is always possible for you, the parent, to re-evaluate the rate at which you are either jumping in with the coaching too quickly or not quickly enough and change the level of help you are giving at any one time. As long as you re-evaluate this regularly, you are in a win-win situation. Even screwing up leads to a win, because the re-evaluation teaches you something and it allows your child to learn from the situation—and from your re-evaluation itself.

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Technorati tags: family, parenting, children, education

1 comment:

Bob Durtschi said...

2. You then are responsible to coach the child on future occurrences of that kind of behavior as a way to prod his memory as to the original coaching idea.

One of the things I discovered when teaching in Japan and later as a night class teacher for Weber State and later Hartnell college is how quickly they forget even the most basic ideas. It seems harder to remember that with my own children.

One of the other lessons I have learned and find hard to remember at times is to avoid performing "Magic" when natural consequences should prevail for a child's actions.