I’d been searching for a better discipline system for months, doing lots of reading of parenting books and trying to find the right way to deal with behavioral problems without getting too angry or being too permissive. I kept questing for the perfect system, to me nothing would be more perfect than to read a book, lay out a plan, enact it, and have everything turn out neat and orderly, but of course life isn’t a spice cabinet. You can’t buy cute little spice risers at Bed Bath and Beyond, alphabetize the neatly labeled jars and have everyone marvel at your fantastic system. So I’ve accepted that there is no single approach that is going to revolutionize our family relationships.
My reading veered off in a different direction when I read Melissa Wiley’s patience post, the comments and then several entries on blogs that were mentioned in the continuing discussion. I was particularly struck by several things Melissa said but the foremost one was the idea of treating your children the way you would want to be treated. Once I read it, this seemed like such an obvious basic idea, but I’d never really thought that way before. Why is it that it is always easier to be be mean or disrespectful to someone we love like our spouse or our kids or our parents? I think, for me at least, it’s because I know they will love me anyway even if I say the worst of what I’m thinking or I let my tiredness over-take me and fail to reign in my anger, but that doesn’t make it right.
Here are two quotes from Melissa that I particularly like, the first from the main post:
“It’s a complete violation of the Golden Rule, isn’t it? Treating children the way we’d like to be treated if we were in their shoes means finding other ways of dealing with those out-of-control moments.”
and the second from one of Melissa’s responses to comments: “I kept coming back to the golden rule, how we ought to treat others the way we want to be treated, and it struck me that very few parents treat their kids the way they, themselves, would like to be treated.”
I’m not always succeeding but I am at least trying to treat M and C like I’d want to be treated. That doesn’t mean giving them whatever they want because I wouldn’t want to be disappointed. I would want to be lovingly guided if I were causing someone harm or doing something that made living together in a household difficult. One can deny a request respectfully, the way you would if a friend asked something or you that you could not or would not give.
Another comment of Melissa’s that struck a chord with me was her statement toward the end of When Does A Busy Mom Write? that she always turns away from the computer screen when a child comes to ask her something. (Willa also mentions the impact of this comment in a great post that sums up a lot of the unschooling discussion that came out of Melissa’s post.) I’ve been thinking a lot about giving my full attention to M when she talks to me. I’m often listening to her as I do something else - reading an email, sort the snail mail, washing the dishes - and sometimes that can’t be helped, but she deserves to have time when she is my main focus and to feel listened to. I don’t like it when someone else is only half-listening to me, so I’m trying to be more mindful of giving her my full attention and really hearing what she has to say or telling her that I will listen as soon as I finish if the task can’t wait (like changing C’s diaper).
