Proportion, People.
Note to parents:
A kid's taking a sip of Coke after having been expressly told not to do so is
It is not a sign of wilfull resistance to all parental authority. It is not the edge of a slippery behavioral slope. It is a sip of fucking Coke.
A sip of Coke does not warrant a scolding, or a mini-lecture about trustworthiness, or a refusal to play with the child. If any of those is your reaction, it's time to consider deflating your parental head a bit. (Now, if that sip of Coke is the final link in a continuous chain of button-pressing limit-testing that day, that's another thing: but it is not the Coke that warrants the scolding, it is the continuous chain of button-pressing limit-testing that does.)
Acts of disobedience are not all morally equivalent. (If they were, God would have smoten us back to bacteria ages ago.) Treating them as though they were will not help the child develop a sense of degrees of wrongness. It will not help her learn to negotiate the variability inherent in human social life. Insisting upon blind obedience to your authority is not going to keep her safer, it is going to prevent her from being able to recognize the times when it's really important to heed you: the times when the consequences are greater and more lasting than a mere slight to your parental authority.
So don't wear your anger or irritation on your sleeve (unless you're willing to be autocratic). Your child will only become acclimated to it. Save it for when it really matters. Don't, in other words, "cry 'wolf'."
A kid's taking a sip of Coke after having been expressly told not to do so is
No. Big. Deal.
It is not a sign of wilfull resistance to all parental authority. It is not the edge of a slippery behavioral slope. It is a sip of fucking Coke.
A sip of Coke does not warrant a scolding, or a mini-lecture about trustworthiness, or a refusal to play with the child. If any of those is your reaction, it's time to consider deflating your parental head a bit. (Now, if that sip of Coke is the final link in a continuous chain of button-pressing limit-testing that day, that's another thing: but it is not the Coke that warrants the scolding, it is the continuous chain of button-pressing limit-testing that does.)
Acts of disobedience are not all morally equivalent. (If they were, God would have smoten us back to bacteria ages ago.) Treating them as though they were will not help the child develop a sense of degrees of wrongness. It will not help her learn to negotiate the variability inherent in human social life. Insisting upon blind obedience to your authority is not going to keep her safer, it is going to prevent her from being able to recognize the times when it's really important to heed you: the times when the consequences are greater and more lasting than a mere slight to your parental authority.
So don't wear your anger or irritation on your sleeve (unless you're willing to be autocratic). Your child will only become acclimated to it. Save it for when it really matters. Don't, in other words, "cry 'wolf'."
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 10:15
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