Punishment For Kids Who Don’t Behave
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December 7th, 2006
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Raising our almost three year old son has gone well. So far. At least I think so. But as I've mentioned before, the real judge of how I've done will not be me. It will be my son and his sister. The goal is not to have a nice three year old. The goal is to raise my son to be a good, well behaving person as he gets older. When he's 15 or 20 years old I would love for him to tell me that me and his mother did a great job. But I would also appreciate if he told me what we did poorly.
My parents obviously feel differently since they freaked out after reading of some innocent things I didn't like with my upbringing. Life turned out fine for us but I can't help to wonder about where things went wrong in other families. Parents who say they've tried everything and always see no other way than dramatic change as a way to send a message. Knowing more would mean learning important lessons of how not to raise a child. There are tons of these situations but I've read about a couple in the past two days which makes me wonder if I could ever end up in a similar situation? How about calling the cops when your 12 year old opens his Christmas present too early? Or leaving your 15 year old alone for two years in a Cambodian Buddhist temple? Sounds drastic to me. Things are never as simple as they sound in the papers but relations must have been going south years before such action was required. Personally, I would consider myself a complete failure as a father if my son had to go through something like this. Or is this perhaps more common than we believe?
I see a problem today with accountability. Parents often don't feel responsible for their children's actions. When bad things happen it's a bad crowd, horrible teachers at school, Grandparents, friends, or society in general who is at fault. Never the parents. Even the most useless shit parents don't accept responsibility for their poor job done. I couldn't disagree more with this kind of reasoning. I think it's important to take credit for things done. Good and bad. Fortunately I've never had a problem with this in my adult life. But it does take courage to admit faults and realize there is much to improve.
I consider myself 100% responsible for my children's actions as they grow older. If my son turns out to be a serial killing rapist, you can blame me. But I will also take credit if he becomes the President of the Red Cross and teaches underprivileged kids in his spare time. All the credit for good things will of course stay with me while my wife obviously must be blamed for 50% of all the bad stuff. Isn't that how family relations work in todays society?
I think it’s definitely more common than we believe — maybe not so drastic as to actually involve the cops, but I’ve heard a lot of that too. I think when he’s 15, you’ll probably hear a LOT about what you did poorly — at least that’s what I hear from friends and rellies with teens, even fine, normal-enough teens. Testing boundries? I don’t know.
It’s really refreshing to see this attitude. We have alot of parents like this in Australia. People who think it’s the schools role to educate their children, the cops role to teach them about the rules in law or the driving schools role to teach them to drive.
Granted, we can’t teach our kids everything but hell, I want to make sure as hell that they look back at their childhood and say “my dad taught me so much”.
Even down to things like bedtime routine, I had fallen into the trap the past few weeks of watching TV right before bedtime with Kayla-Bear…….because it’s easy…..or i’m tired…..there’s always an excuse isn’t there??. The thing with that is that i’m not being involved with her, sure i’m sitting on the couch with her….but we are just both sitting watching life pass us by…..but now that we read again, I hope that she will remember bedtime as “daddy told me great stories”…..not…..i really liked that tv show.
It’s great to see that some people give being a parent the responsibility it deserves.