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Tips for Taming Children
- Hold your baby close to your skin
- Play classical tunes (Mozart, Haydn, Brahms)
- Talk to your baby, even before he or she can understand a word
- Spend time on the floor with your baby so you can see the world from his perspective
- Be careful when naming your baby; avoid cartoon names, movie star names or overly-used baby names
- Share your baby with other parents, other relatives and friends - don't try to go it alone
- Try to spend some time apart from your baby - you both need to get along without one another
- Never punish a baby. Whatever the baby does is exactly what he or she is supposed to do, so just stand in awe and wonder and adore your child's growth
- Punish children rarely and minimally. Instead, talk to them about the complexities of knowing the right thing to do
- Always teach your child. You can not teach your child too much; your child will eagerly and joyously learn everything you eagerly and joyously teach them
- Shut the TV. If you read, your child will read. If you exercise, the child will exercise. If you watch TV, the child will become the lazy slacker you appear to be
- Be optimistic. Express optimism about your child's basic goodness. Children will become what you tell them they are. Never insult a child
- Go with little children wherever they go and do whatever they do about half the time. Then take them with you to do whatever you are doing the other half of the time.
- Do not drink or do drugs while you are with your children. You need all of your faculties about you
- Provide structures, like meals or family outings, and expect your child to fit into those plans. Don't overschedule a child's activities away from home. The child must, above all, be a member of the family
- Give the child something valuable to do, not as discipline or punishment, but because the family needs it done
- Be polite to children. You are teaching them to behave properly
- Express pride in your children, not just for their successes, but for the workings of their mind, body and thoughts
- Spend time with your mate. Children's greatest security comes from their parents' relationship
Tips for Taming Adolescents
- Celebrate their puberty. If they take their sexuality underground because it embarrasses you, they may not emerge for years
- Don't let your teenage kids shock you. Insist upon hearing it all, and honestly compare your own adolescence.
- Stay connected with you adolescent kids. Get them out in the woods or up on a mountain, anyplace where you are not in control and you are dependent on one another
- Keep your adolescents moving. They are only a problem when they stop. Sports and work saves lives.
- Rules must be clear. Negotiate them, write them out, have the child sign them, magnet them to the refrigerator, and follow them yourself.
- Don't escalate a punishment as a way of getting an adolescent under control. Your efforts will only throw them out of control. Just keep them with you until they have heard your calm feelings about what they are doing and you have heard theirs.
- If kids refuse to do what you tell them, refuse to provide goods and services for them.
- Don't try to protect kids from natural consequences. That is how they learn about reality.
- Don't threaten anything you aren't willing to do.
- Don't turn matters of style into matters of substance. Let your kids dress in their weird ways without making it a moral issue.
- Don't respect your children's privacy. Don't let them hide in their rooms and keep their lives a secret from you.
- Parents must not do anything unilaterally, must not undercut each other, and must not fight in front of children.
- If you are a single mother of a teenage son, accept your authority and don't let your son think he's the boss. Don't bring in a new stepfather unless he is extraordinarily humble and powerless. If you feel the need for a male partner in parenting, pull in the real father, or perhaps an uncle or grandfather, but you must stay in charge.
- Try to listen to their music. You can't be expected to live with it, but the lyrics will help you to understand their world.
- Never let your kids embarrass you or let the reactions of shocked friends, gawking strangers or indignant teachers be more important than the feelings of your child - even if he just made a humiliating mess.
- Forget what they did wrong the day before. Start each day as if it were a new relationship. Adolescents change very rapidly, so it probably is.
- Whatever your kids' age, try to hold them every day.
- Don't go nuts over what your adolescent is doing unless your have first talked it over with a family therapist.
- Remember that adolescence is the most painful time in anyone's life. You've been there, so you can see it from the adolescent's perspective, but they can not see it from yours. Keep thinking about how wonderful it will be when it's over and your kids are free to become just like you. They will come to love you just as much as you love your parents because they'll learn this, as they'll learn everything, not from what you tell them is right, but from your example.
The above was partially taken from the May/June 1995 issue of Psychology Today