Balancing Act: Concern and Indulgence

As parents, we can go to extremes – neglecting our children one time and paying obsessive attention to them the next, perhaps to compensate for the neglect.

Do not overindulge your children by giving them too much of what they want and too little of what they truly need – maybe they need you to say NO.

A family counselor tells this story: One day, she went mall shopping with her 4-year-old daughter. She bought her little girl new clothes and a new doll for her birthday. As they were leaving the mall, the daughter spotted a teddy bear that she liked in a store window. “I want that teddy bear!”, she said. It sounded somewhere between a request and a demand. “No,” the mother told her. “I want that teddy bear right now!” Her response was now a demand. “We’ll go say hello to the teddy bear,” the mother reassured her as they walked into the store. Once in the store they both hugged the teddy bear and talked to it. The mother noticed that it was one of those expensive bears so she knew she could never justify buying it for her. “Now say goodbye to the teddy bear,” she told her daughter. “We need to go.” “No, I want the teddy bear!” the little girl insisted.

Once outside, the kicking, jumping, and screaming began. More than simply desiring a teddy bear, the mother felt the daughter was asking for limits to be set on her behavior. Much of the day had been spent in pleasing her. Now she seemed to be asking where the limits were. Holding her new doll, she started jumping up and down screaming, “I want that Teddy Bear!” The mother held her face firmly, looked straight into her eyes and said, “If you don’t stop screaming, I’m going to take your new birthday doll away until tomorrow.”

The daughter started screaming even louder. While people watched the scene, the mother began the difficult process of taking the doll from her daughter’s clutched hands. Screams filled the mall.

By the time they returned to the car, the daughter had settled down and her sweetness had returned. “Can I play with my new doll tomorrow, mama? Can I just let daddy have a peek tonight?” Yes, the mother said, giving her a kiss. The teddy bear was never mentioned again.

At a parenting workshop I once attended, this question was asked: How do we deal with our 7-year-old daughter who says we do not love her if we do not buy her what she wants? Come on -- this kid knows that her parents love her. She is using this message to manipulate her parents, to check out if her ploy will work. If our children equate our love with the things we can buy for them, then we have been sending them the wrong message.

Yes, frustrating our children once in a while isn’t going to kill them.

Sometimes parents indulge their children because they do not want them to undergo the hardships they went through. I remember a friend of mine who lived a rags-to-riches story. One time, he was asked by his son to buy a pair of shoes worth $120. He eventually bought the pair for his son but not before reminding him how he had to go to school barefoot and that he had never bought a pair of shoes worth more than two dollars until he was 30 years old. Do you think his son was moved by his story? All he said to his father was – “Tough luck for you, dad, that your parents were poor. Mine happen to be very rich.”

Provide your children’s needs for protection, affection, and direction but do not do for them what they are capable of doing for themselves. At a government agency where I worked many years ago, I would see some of my staff working on the computer after office hours. I would approach them to check out what they were working on. In many instances, I would discover that they were encoding their children’s reports or term papers. Do you wish that your own parents were as conscientious?

Let your children do things for themselves and give them permission to make and learn from their mistakes.

Part 3

http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Raise-an-Independent-Child---Part-3