"I just don't get it. I have read all the articles, started an incentive chart, established expectations and defined consequences. I've tried EVERYTHING that the so-called experts suggest, and I'm just not having any success with my child's behavior."
Sound familiar? Maybe you've said something similar yourself. Or maybe you are a grandparent and you've heard your son/daughter venting about this same thing to you recently. Do you know someone who seems to be spinning their wheels and can't figure out where they are going wrong?
The exact "problem" is really impossible to diagnose without taking a real in-depth look into each individual case. However, the majority of situations that I have observed over the years seem to have one common denominator: a lack of follow-through. It doesn't really matter how great of a plan you have in place if you aren't consistent in the end.
There are a million reasons for parents to fail to follow-through. Exhaustion, mom (or dad) guilt, busy schedules, "I've-done-this-a-million-times-and-I-just-can't-anymore" (that one is a personal favorite!), laziness, contempt for being the "bad cop," and the list could really go on and on. We've all been there, myself included, but the truth of the matter is all these excuses do is hold us back from achieving our desired results.
Kids are so intuitive. They often deserve much more credit than we give them. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile, even the easiest ones. If you are conditioning your children that all those threats about what will happen if they don't (fill in the blank), are just empty threats, they will very quickly stop believing you. And why shouldn't they? You know just as well as they do that you have no intention of taking away the sleepover at their grandparents. After all, that would mean losing out on date night for you.
"If you do that one more time..."
"Don't make me..."
"You better ______, or else ________"
Or else what parents? Quit giving empty threats that you have no intention of following through with!! All it does is make you lose all of your credibility with your children and actually makes parenting so much harder, and more frustrating, then it needs to be. I don't know about you, but I think parenting naturally comes with enough challenges and frustrations of its own, without us muddying the waters.
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