I heard something the other day that got me thinking about rules.
A parent was reporting about how dinner was going at home, and proudly mentioned that in this family's home if you did not eat your dinner you went straight to bed. The child living by this rule was about 21 months old. I do not know whether or not the child in question chose bed or dinner, but it made me wonder, how do you get a toddler to finish dinner or force them to sleep. And more importantly, why?
This story reminds me that sometimes, no matter our good intentions and focused parenting, we can so easily be led astray by the traditions passed down to us, forcing and punishing our children over rules that have been handed to us but may not have any relevance to our own child's development. Sometimes we consider rules of our childhood and attribute them to our successes in life, and so we find them essential to pass down. Sometimes those rules are spot on, like "wash your hands after you use the bathroom," and sometimes those rules are just the continuation of a cycle of misunderstanding how the child develops or the perpetuation of a rule that once had a purpose but now makes no sense.
My first case and point:
finish your dinner. This rule has been around for decades, repeated in families over and over again. Likely, this rule was brought on by the Great Depression, when families had very little and waste was almost a tragedy. In fact, in 1917, a
Clean Plate Club campaign by the U.S. Government began (revived again in 1947) to encourage Americans not to let food go to waste (food shortages being a concern after WW1 and WW2). The youngest of children fail to understand the concern of a food shortage, and so the idea was to have them focus on cleaning the plate rather than explaining that they needed to eat
now in case there wasn't food
later. So, clearly, this rule developed out of the desire to protect young children, but does that apply today??
Actually, today, most nutritionists and pediatricians will tell you that this very rule lies at the heart of the current American childhood epidemic: obesity. Children who are learning to eat, and that means both infants and toddlers, are learning to listen to their bodies. Their brains and bodies are learning to work together to understand what the "full" signal is and how to respond to it. Their bodies crave certain nutrients and not others, so they will be fixated on certain types of foods and not others, eating what they crave until they feel full. And then they stop. They do not care how much food you chose to put on their plate. When you force a young child to eat more than his fill, you end up overriding his ability to listen to his own body, leading to overeating later in childhood and life. Rather than punish children for listening to their bodies, it's far better to influence their eating choices by making sure that the choices on the plate are all healthy ones and then letting the child make the decisions from there.
This brings me to my second case and point:
no dessert until after you finish dinner. A first blush, this rule seems to make sense; of course you need to finish all the healthy stuff before you get to the unhealthy stuff. The problem with this rule is that it can often have the results of the last rule I mentioned. Making dessert a tradition after a meal creates a habit, often ending up with children craving the sugar at the end of the meal. Instead of dessert being a nice occasional treat, it becomes habitual, a necessity. It also becomes a
reward for eating the hbealthy stuff, changing all the reasons why kids should eat healthy things in the first place. I once knew a parent whose toddler wouldn't eat more than a few bits of dinner. Knowing that dessert would come at the end, she simply rushed the process. A battle would ensue to force her to eat more dinner, thus creating the entire previous scenario of not allowing children to respond to their bodies. By making dinner all about eating dessert, we change the whole purpose of nourishing our bodies. It gets dangerously close to making some foods seem good while others seem bad. What can we do instead? Desserts can be a treat or a surprise, and they can happen whenever, so they aren't always tagged onto the end of dinner. If we make dessert something healthy like fruit or kefir frozen yogurt (
ProBugs for the win!), then we won't be stressed about how many morsels our children are eating either. In the case of fruit, you can add it right into the dinner, so there is no before or after.
Another rule that has long frustrated me is the popular: you have to share. The reality is, in my opinion, making children share is not sharing. Sharing has to involve the desire to give to another person, and if you're being forced, it's not sharing. This is often why most people hate their taxes, right? Despite the fact that taxes are theoretically all of a society's members sharing resources to be utilized to the benefit of all, when you don't have a choice, it certainly doesn't feel like sharing.
Developmentally, children who don't share are not ready to share. As they become developmentally ready to share, they
will ultimately begin to share. Children actually like sharing. And as they shift into higher planes of development (after the age of 5/6), their desires to share become even more evident. If you want the educational anthropology on the matter, then read
Michael Erard's story. Scientifically, though, there is enough evidence to show that sharing happens somewhere along the developmental process; the older children get, the more likely they are to
want to share. A
study involving the "dictator game,"gave children (aged 3 to 7) stickers to distribute to others. Some of the stickers were ones they favored, and some were not. The pattern became clear: the older the child, the more likely he would engage in prosocial (sharing) behavior, giving a good percentage of stickers away (nearly half sometimes). The only difference was that they usually gave away fewer (although they still gave them away) of their favorite stickers.
The reality is, sharing generates from concepts of altruism and fairness, which are developmental abstracts the brain doesn't more deeply form until the
second plane of development (ages 6-12). You will see these characteristics in younger children, but they do not become more obvious and engrained until later. For this reason, you can encourage sharing without forcing it. Your child probably shares quite a bit, and it often goes unrecognized. Every time he offers you some of his food, or the dog some of his food, he's sharing. Any moment he gives anything he has to another, that's sharing. We can emphasize those moments with encouragement: "
thank you so much for sharing with me, it makes me so happy!" By
giving the language for the actions and encouraging them, children begin to understand that this behavior is beneficial. We can also encourage sharing by modeling it. When we give our child a piece of our food or an article of our clothing, we can tell them what we are doing: "
here, I'll share this with you." Through our modeling of a behavior, children learn to demonstrate the same behavior.
Along those same lines, one rule I find silly to enforce, and deeply believe we should model instead is
you have to say you are sorry. I have written in length how I believe sorry to be a
get out of jail free card. It's just a word that has very little meaning when forced. What's the point of saying sorry if you don't mean it? Kids will only learn to
mean "sorry" when they feel it and when we provide them with the language as we recognize their experience of compassion or remorse. They learn the word when
we use it, telling them or others when we are sorry. It is our demonstration of compassion and remorse, and the word for it, that will help children learn to be sorry. When dealing directly with a children's antisocial behaviors, we can ask children to make reparations for their actions (helping the person they have harmed).
Speaking of words, a rule I've always felt contention with is that kids can't say bad words. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating we raise a generation of potty mouths or ignore swearing. But, I do think we need to be realistic about these words that are used everywhere, and by us (no matter how careful we hope to be). These words have power that can draw you in. Personally, I think we need to talk openly about these words and make children aware of their meanings and how others feel about them. The biggest problem with swear words is that they are often used as "hurting" words. Rather than these be "bad" words, we can explain to children that they are words that can offend or upset someone. My real issue with this rule is that it makes no sense to banish words from a child's vocabulary that we ourselves often use; we need to banish it from our language as well. We need to openly admonish ourselves for the use of the words, talk about why we used them, and even request our children to help us think of better ways to say things. No one in the family should say bad words. And if there are consequences for using these words publicly, then the consequences should apply to everyone in the family, including the adults.
Finally, the last rule that has always frustrated me: you have to be asleep by (insert time here). I do believe in bedtime and routines, but I think we have to be realistic that children will fall asleep when they are tired. All we can do is ask that they be in bed by a certain time, but we can't make them fall asleep. I also think bed time needs to be adaptable, taking into account whether or not our children are tired. If your child is wide awake, a few extra stories might be just what he needs to get him to that period of tired. In the end, I'm a far bigger fan of routines (which are more about an order of events rather than specific times) than I am of schedules.
So there you have it, all the rules I throw out the window. I have always had a rebellious streak. W How about you? What rules have you thrown straight out the window?
