With great apologies and thanks to Tampa Mom (and her friends), these pearls of wisdom got me thinking today:
Why do we enable our children to mediocrity and/or coddle them into becoming emotional cripples? Our children are so smart and amazing, but so many times we’re caught up in our own emotions and make their challenges all about us instead of just handing them back and saying, “How are you going to handle this?”
We’d have a lot more motivated, capable young adults in this world if we didn’t solve our kids’ problems for them and instead gave them guidance to help them solve their own. That’s what I’m working on and it’s just awesome seeing exactly how capable and smart my kids are.
If you guide your children and allow them the freedom to make the choices, they learn from the good and the bad and are far more capable, decisive, sympathetic, and empathetic. Keeping them safe is one thing, keeping them smothered is something else entirely!
I completely agree with allowing children to fail and to learn to make decisions for themselves … and suffer the consequences. A big bone of contention between me and WineGuy currently is how far do you let a child fall and/or when do you step in and start running things again. What do you do if you see your child is not handling his responsibilities as you’ve tried to give them back to him?
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Posted by Alto2 
