Life is sometimes presented as a minefield, where there are many mines that can be stepped on. So I decided to put together all the major parenting mistakes. Well, according to my observations, of course.
PERFECTION
"I will either do my best or die." This is a mistake more often than moms. Mom tries to do everything for five, she does not succeed. She freaks out, gets exhausted and then for two weeks does nothing at all. It can be exhausting very quickly. It will be easier to set a minimum rate and follow it. That is, a four or a C on everyday matters is a good mark. Better than 225522555.
But sometimes people deliberately raise the bar for themselves so as not to cope with it and arrange for a good reason for themselves. That is, if I can't get my children to school on time today, then let them sit at home.
The teacher will stain the diary with remarks - well, in general. Or, let's say a person washes the dishes to the point that his hands begin to bleed from dryness. Dozens of plates and everything is very meticulous. And then his subconscious mind thinks: “Aha! And what if”- well, then guess what will be repeated with an enviable frequency. A person will bring himself to illness on purpose in order to have a good reason not to wash the dishes. (But is the dish worth the disease?) People are quite cunning when they need to deceive themselves.
LONG HYSTERIC
The worst thing. Long demand cycle. If you see a child whining for an hour and a half: "Buy it!" - it means that the parents give up in an hour and a half. Then the parents will become more patient.
They will endure him for two hours, and three, and four - and all this time the poor child will have to whine, behave like a monkey, and cry: "Buy it!" And he will do it, because he knows that this is the only way he will be heard.
What a load on the psyche - both children and adults! Then the parent will either fail or buy it anyway. This situation is called a "slot machine".
That is, an unknown result. Why do people get addicted to slot machines? Because they are interested in whether there will be a big win, a small one, or again a bummer.
Addiction. This option then forms people dependent on random reinforcements. That is: a ride / not a ride. And this is a basic mistake of a trainer, very simple. Yes - always yes. No - always not.
And there is a situation when agreement only goes through hysterics. That is, you know in advance that a person will only say "yes" when he betrays a storm beforehand. And children understand this faster than adults. Not in words, of course, but in practice. A very common case.
Recently I saw my mother, whom the child poked in the back with a sharp pen for about forty minutes in a row, swore and demanded to go to the store.
Mom explained with great patience why this was impossible. They have already been there, they have everything, let's go tomorrow, etc. At the forty-first minute, Mom was ripped off the coils, and a bad scene took place.
Then the red, half-dead mother lifted from the floor the broken pieces of a handle, separate parts of her child's toilet, put the child in her arms, already completely sluggish from tears and half-dead, and - what did they do? Right! - Let's go to the shop…
It is a typical mistake of patient moms that they form patient, long-lasting tantrums. Here you just need to understand your game and your mistakes. There is no easy way out of the situation. Just saying “don't do that”, “let's not go anywhere” is useless. Tell the drunkard "don't drink - you will die." Will he hear? Hardly. He has a different mechanism here. Fighting, by the way, is also useless.
PUNISHMENT
Such children, who have been brainwashed for two hours, are not afraid of spanking. And in general, the more often they are punished, the less they fear punishment. Now what will happen in fact? Everyone will tell this twitching mother harshly: “Explain to your child that he DOES NOT STOOM, DO NOT COUGH, DO NOT RUN, NORMALLY ASKED, and so on.
Explain, you are a mother! And she explains to him forty-five minutes a day, not realizing that the mistake is that she reinforces the skill through hysteria. That is, he does not hear until there is this whole mess.
There is an ingenious book by Karen Pryor "Don't growl at the dog." She is just about such difficult cases. I highly recommend this book. It puts the brain in place. And from my books about education - "Riot of babies."
INCLUSION OF A CHILD IN ADULT DISASSEMBLIES
Tell your daddy. Tell your mother. Children willingly turn on. But then the children play on two fronts cunningly, and in their personal life it interferes with them. Many then do not want their families, because they expect in advance that there will be such a circus. Come on!
EXCESSIVE RESOURCES
If the family has enough money (not about wealth, but just average income), then it is somewhat more difficult for children in such families to understand many simple things. They become like urban pedigree horses raised in safe stables. The horse will go out of town, and there is a barbed wire stretched. She will prick, but will not move back, but from horror she will run forward, get confused, etc.
Or he goes into the forest, and there is clay and branches - it will tear the side. Or she will drag herself up the mountain, not realizing that she will never go back down. Therefore, they used to take either peasant horses or Cossack horses to the war - they knew how to think a little. And if the commander foolishly sat on a very beautiful city horse, then she would gallop from horror directly to the enemy cannon, and an uncomfortable situation arose that there was an army, and the commander disappeared somewhere.
It is very good when resources are scarce. There was one very good family in my childhood. They lived with us in the same entrance. They had one large pot of borscht for a week in the refrigerator. Well, very big, like a bucket. That is, they did not starve, but that was all they had that this saucepan. They cooked it on Sunday, and around Friday or Saturday it was eaten clean. And the children there grew up very socially adapted and intelligent from the everyday point of view. Although there was no conscious upbringing. That is, the parents just worked hard, and the children also quickly got involved in the process.
A child from an excess family, of course, will not withstand simple life competition with them, that's for sure. In Moscow now this is very noticeable, because similar families from different cities and republics come to the well-fed city - twenty years have passed, and Muscovites are whining: is that why they ousted us? How? Why? Yes, they just have a pot of borscht, and pay the rent every month: either die or win! No time to whine.
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND
Also a common mistake. Everything in the family focuses on one person. He is a getter, he pulls everything, settles everything, etc. But the breadwinner could not bear the load, left or died - the family collapsed, no one knows how to hunt, keep a business, etc. A very common situation. Usually the breadwinner himself is to blame for not learning how to delegate authority. I learned to intuitively recognize such people.
These are usually middle-ranking managers, entrepreneurs and other people who solve the problems of a whole crowd of subordinates, but do not know how to form the skill so that people can solve something on their own. Or suppress people who are trying to solve them. This is a very common mistake. At least for the family. Well, you can give a positive example to make it a little more fun.
RIDING THE CART TOGETHER
Families are very well formed, where children participate in some kind of common work with their parents. For example, one of our familiar family was building a house, inadvertently took out a loan, got very confused and began to sew dolls for sale herself. Such simple folk dolls made of rags. Learned themselves and. It was necessary to make 20-30 dolls a day. And all the children knew that there are no dolls - there is nothing at all. Wildly simple. And everyone did them. They came up with some kind of simplifying systems - to make hands separately, scarves separately, braid, a typewriter, a synthetic winterizer made of old toys, an ancient textured coat under rags, looks good, etc. But everything was fair here. That is, the children felt that their parents were not hiding their bank account under the couch.
And the parents really knew that there would be no dolls - there would be no soup and no loan paid on time. In addition to dolls, they also made pies for sale from yeast dough. About two-thirds of the income is dolls, and a third is pies. And somehow it helped the family to resist both as a family and in terms of upbringing, although they did not have a conscious upbringing, and they did not read books about upbringing.
In general, it is an interesting observation that the best upbringing for some reason is carried out in those families where they do not bother with pedagogy, they do not delve into psychological schemes and do everything intuitively - they just live next to children, love them and do not greatly complicate them.
REFERENCE
Dmitry Emets is a philologist and writer, author of over 30 books. The main book series: "Tanya Grotter", "Methodius Buslaev", "School of Divers". The books "The Rebellion of Babies", "The Day of Babies", "The Mysterious Someone Out There" are devoted to the problems of parenting and large families. Married, father of seven children.
