Today we are going to discuss the idea of showing your oppositional defiant disorder child love. This is actually a mistake that parents make, thinking that they are showing their children love. I will explain what I mean by that.
When our children are very infants and small babies, we do a lot to protect them from harm and from damaging themselves because they just lack understanding. The problem happens when children get older we, as parents, tend to continue protecting our children from the mistakes that they make.
As a result, what happens is our children become sheltered and it can become a problem in that your children will never learn to take responsibility for their actions. The proper way to show that you really love your child is to help them become a healthy, normal, and well functioning teenager and then adult.
Unfortunately, this requires your children to make mistakes and then take responsibility for those mistakes. Your children should learn to suffer the consequences of their mistakes.
We cannot keep sheltering our children as they get older. Our children have to learn to grow up, move on, and take care of themselves. They will not do this if we, as parents, pick up all of their mistakes and protect their actions. It is a mistake that all parents can make.
What you want to do is show your children responsible love. Teach your children that if they do something wrong that they have to pay the consequences.
Mistakes have consequences.
The best way for your child or anyone to learn from something is to make a mistake or do something wrong and feel the pain of the consequences. So this goes for small children as well as older children and teenagers too.
When your child is older, the consequences tend to be more severe. So for example, if your child is stealing, one of the worst things that you can do is to protect them from the police. Do not protect your children from their actions of stealing because they will never learn that stealing has very painful consequences.
On the other hand, if you really love your children and want what is best for them, if they do something very very wrong and you let them face the consequences themselves, they will learn that bad things have bad consequences.
By doing this, your children will learn that punishments are serious and that the world is a serious place. They will learn that if you do not behave yourself, bad things can happen to you.
Now it is counter-intuitive, because we want to protect our children. But sometimes protecting our children too much can be really detrimental for them. So it is a hard lesson that we as parents have to learn. We have to break away from protecting our children and change our whole way of thinking.
We have to let our children suffer their mistakes so that when they get older, they will learn to be much more careful and not make these mistakes, especially when the mistakes have serious consequences.
Because a child who gets into trouble at 15 years old is going to be in a different situation then a child who gets into trouble at 19 years of age. If a parent protects a child at age 15, that parent will protect their child at age 19 too. You, as the parent, do not want that to happen.
This is Dr. Anthony Kane with the Complete Connection Parenting Program with another parenting tip for your today. If you would like more tips or sign up for our free newsletter, please visit our website at www.ccparenting.com
