We all know that there are some things we have to do for our kids: pay the bills, drive them around, feed them – you know obvious things they can’t do for themselves. However, there are some things we need to stop doing for our kids to help them become better people and grow up to be good adults.
Ylonda Gault Caviness, a parenting expert wrote a great book: Child, Please: How Mama’s Old-School Lessons Helped Me Check Myself Before I Wrecked Myself. She makes a lot of good points about how mothers today are overwhelmed with advice on how to be the best mom and how it can be difficult for hem to decide what is best. Her take on mothering is that mom knows best.
“With child number one, Caviness set her course: to give her children everythingshe had. Child number two came along and she patiently persisted. But when her third kid arrived, she was finally so exhausted that she decided to listen to what her mother had been saying to her for years: Give them everything they want, and there’ll be nothing left of you. In Child, Please, Caviness describes the road back to embracing a more sane—not to mention loving—way of raising children. Her mother had it right all along.”
Your kids aren’t perfect and they will mess up. Stop making them do things they aren’t good at just because you think they will appreciate it later on in life.
Caviness shared a story about how a child was playing a violin at a senior citizen center. The girl was messing up in a bad way and other kids in the audience were snickering. The child’s mother was defensive about it. “We don’t like to see our kids hurt or upset, but we can’t protect them from everything. “It’s not a huge injustice if something bad does happen to them,” Caviness says. Maybe the mother should have told the girl that violins are not her thing and find something she’d enjoy better.
Find time for yourself. Don’t give all of yourself away to them at your expense.
You may have made 3 dozen Frozen cupcakes, homemade Valentines, and led the PTO, “but if you’re doing so in a dingy t-shirt and tired sweats, what message is that sending your kids?” asks Caviness. She said that she recognized she needed to take care of her needs. She started taking an exercise class and the kids had snacks and coloring books while they waited outside for her. “They loved it and they could tell I felt good afterwards.”
Just make them do what is good for them. Stop negotiating with them and “talking them into” doing what they need to do.
Kids aren’t always going to know what is best for them. They don’t have the life experience we have. Instead of trying to coax our kids into eating their veggies or brushing their teeth, just make it something they must do. There is no debate and no negotiating, they do the things they need to do to be healthy people.
What are some parenting tips or advice you’ve learned from your mom?
