Kid Whisperer Nation Tips for Parents #91-95

Kid Whisperer Nation Tip for Parents #91

TRUE AND FALSE DOES EXIST

In a world that tells people to find “their truth,” it’s easy to forget that, when trying to teach your kid(s) to use positive, pro-social behaviors, there are things that are inherently effective and things that are not. Kids need as many warnings as you give them. Stop warning them. It doesn’t work. Fact: arguing with kids trains them to argue more. Also a fact: solving kids’ problems that they can solve themselves hurts kids.

As much as our culture tries to tell us that there is no such thing as knowledge or wisdom or facts, that’s just not true, and that belief can destroy our families.

Kid Whisperer Nation Tip for Parents #92

CUTE PARENTING CAN KILL YOUR KIDS

Refusing to hold your kids accountable for their actions can kill them. Kids who are not held accountable at home tend to not understand cause and effect. Kids who do not understand cause and effect often engage in dangerous behaviors that can often lead to fatalities and permanent injuries.

So, when you talk about how you just feel too badly about holding your kids accountable, that you don’t want to make them sad, and that you just want them to have and keep all of the comforts and products that you associate with what happy kids should have no matter how they act- you may be putting them in mortal danger. It’s not cute, it’s not helpful, and it’s not nice.

Kid Whisperer Nation Tip for Parents #93

ALLOW FAILURE TO ACT AS AN EXTRA PARENT

Parents often feel like they need an extra hand to teach their kids lessons about life, especially when their kids don’t seem to be very good listeners when life lessons are taught.

That’s because kids are not nearly as good at listening as they are at noticing what choices doesn’t work out. Allowing kids to suffer from their own irresponsibility, carelessness, or laziness allows the parent to hire on a new teacher. That teacher’s name is Failure.

Allowing Failure to do the teaching is more effective than using lectures or doing any talking. Getting out of the way of Failure takes no energy and no time. This works out, because if you are a typical parent, you have neither.

Kid Whisperer Nation Tip for Parents #94

FEEL NO SHAME

Your Facebook feed that shows every one of your friends’ families smiling together on a beach wearing matching white linen, or happily flying a kite, is not real. It’s nothing. Don’t let it make you feel badly about your family.

Kid Whisperer Nation Tip for Parents #95

AVOID PARENTING ADVICE

A vast, vast majority of “Parenting” books and the resulting “Parenting” advice is not designed to help you. The dynamics that drive this industry appear to be something like this:

The most popular “Parenting” books aim, first and foremost, to make a certain percentage of parents feel good about themselves by getting them to use simplistic, cute tactics that they are probably mostly doing anyway. Perhaps the publishers of these books know very well that the best way to get parents to share the book with friends is to get them to feel that they “mastered” parenting so that they can side-brag to other parents--not really about the content of what they learned from the book, but what they were already pretty much doing anyway. More books are sold as a result, but no one gets any real help. Worse yet, parents who have kids who are wired to be difficult end up feeling terrible about themselves and their kids because the advice in question was never actually designed to be helpful. It was designed as a marketing ploy.