Miki Dedijer

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Discipline

Patience and the steady fire

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It’s no guarded parental secret that a child’s wild fire and love of life doesn’t easily submit to tasks and chores, to the daily demands of keeping house or staying the course.

The understandable temptation in the hubbub of modern life is to keep our child otherwise occupied, perhaps hooked up to another channel of entertainment, as we dive again into the dishes or the gathering dust.

What is lost, if we regularly do, is the child’s learning to endure moments that don’t readily feed the fire, that don’t deliver excitement or pacification or both.

What is gained, if we don’t succumb to temptation, is something less immediate than a distraction and therefore a bit harder to gage and harder to insist upon.

Through our willingness to bind our child to moments that hold no promise of gratification, now or later, she gains some familiarity with patience.

Patience, abiding by what is without recourse to immediate relief, endurance, submission to the hard and unsatisfying work at hand without a promise of either praise or recompense.

It’s hard work for a child, and adults, to practice patience. Few of us are willingly subjected to adversity. Few of us are likely to thank anyone who insists we endure the unjust suffering of sweeping the floor or cleaning our room, or worse.

Chances are, though, that a child familiar with patience will one day know something worth knowing about the work of tending a steady fire, even on the inevitable day when the storm draws near, a day when warmth and light is most needed.


The spell of potential

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There are a few spells around, beliefs that are so common we hardly notice their insidious impact on how we lead our lives.

Like when we tell a child “You can be anything you want to be”, without us actually having any way to know what that child’s potential truly is.

Potential has no definite shape, nor a given end. It’s amorphous and limitless.

Under the spell of potential a child will always fall short, growing accustomed to never being all that she has been told she can be. She loses sight of her true value, and her natural capacity for belonging slowly withers.

You, I and our children cannot be anything we want to be. That’s good news.

Because once we recognize the spell for what it is–another expression of a culture that has fallen ill from all kinds of abstraction and excess–we can begin to accept who we actually are.

Most of us are quite ordinary, we suffer and we struggle, we are gifted in ways that bring us joy and some kind of income to help meet our needs, and if we’re fortunate, we have a place where we know the land and the people in it well enough to feel at home.

If we can accept the confines of our selves, we can more readily value our child for who he or she actually is. Then the child’s gifts, such as they are, become surprising treasures, tended through discipline, and complementing the gifts of others.

Considered consequence

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You don’t have to be the consequence visited upon your child’s choices.

Let winter teach her what it’s like to rush out without putting on that extra pair of warm socks.

Let molten wax on the knuckle of her pinkie teach her about a burning candle.

The most loving way to parent can be to get out of the way so your child learns through considered consequence.

Then be there whenever needed as a gentle guide for the teaching to take root.

Connect before you direct

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Coming out of our house, I see my youngest son peeing all over our new patio. I’m incredulous, and tell him to get a bucket and wash the stones.

Later I ask how come he peed there. And here’s what he tells me–he was competing with his brother to see who could pee the farthest into the bushes. He was backing away while peeing to see how far it would go, and as he ran out of pee, it splattered on the stones.

We had a good laugh about that (along with my pang of paternal guilt). Then we agreed that the next peeing competition will be held on the lawn, well away from the patio.

It’s tempting to stop our child in his tracks when he screams in the car, throws a pine cone at his sister, turns his plate full of food onto the floor.

Sometimes you might have to–if whatever is happening is truly dangerous. Fortunately, it so rarely is.

Still, you might feel an irrisistible urge to master a situation. When you do–when you forcefully intervene–you’re placing control before connection.

Your relationship with your child–as any relationship–asks that your child feels safe with you, seen, respected, understood, no matter how odd the behavior might seem to you.

To paraphrase Alfie Kohn–assume your child’s best motives consistent with the facts.

When my son was peeing on the patio, I could have assumed he was playing, and just asked what was going on. To be honest, a bit of pee never hurt a patio.

All to say, there’s a good lesson here for the relational parent–connect with your child before you direct his behavior.

One-liners: parenting in a single sentence

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“It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it.”

My son spoke this sentence today. We were stuck with the car in an icy ditch. Foolishly, I had tried to reverse uphill on a crust of compacted snow and rain. There was a lot for me to learn here (and model too!).

He’s heard me speak that exact sentence a dozen if not hundreds of times in his little life. It’s a one-liner we often use in our family.

You’ll have some one-liners yourself, I’m sure. Take a moment to think about a few. What do you say again and again in certain situations?

Here are a few common ones: “Practice makes perfect”; “Don’t cry over spilled milk”; “Easy come, easy go.”

You may or may not agree with these. Perhaps they underscore values that are different from yours. But whatever you consider an essential teaching for your child, make sure you can boil it down to a single sentence. With a handful of one-liners, you can then drip-feed your core family teachings throughout childhood.

Redundancy emphasizes importance.

Short-cut to an embrace

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It’s hard to embrace your screaming child.

Often because your child isn’t receptive when he’s enraged. Or maybe because you don’t feel very loving.

That’s a hard place for a parent, knowing that right now you don’t feel affection. All you want is to match your kids anger with some of your own.

Arguing doesn’t make it much better. Trying to understand doesn’t make it better. Words don’t necessarily help. Yelling certainly doesn’t help.

Get good at finding the shortest path from here to enveloping your child in an affectionate embrace.

Find that short-cut, and you’ve also found the quickest way to restore your relationship.