Room for Taking on Responsibility and Making Choices
Of course children need overall rules, routines and guidelines. Knowing how things work and what to expect helps kids feel secure.
This existential feeling of safety is necessary for them to want to fully explore the world and develop their skills.
However, an important part of raising responsible children is also allowing them to take on a degree of responsibility.
Responsibility seen through the old fashioned parenting style lens would typically be: ‘You must do the dishes to learn the responsibility of housekeeping’.
Here responsibility is typically seen in terms of obeying orders by taking on ‘adult’ chores. If you want obedient adults that are good at following orders, this is the way to do it.
However, responsibility seen through the lens of positive conscious parenting is about teaching your kid to take responsibility for his or her own life in a much broader sense.
It’s about teaching your child that the world is open – that within any framework there is always a range of choices – but … whatever you choose, you will have to live with the consequences of that choice:
So the big question in relation to child discipline is how do we have rules while at the same time being flexible so there is space for our child’s choice-making?
Also, how do we respect our child’s needs without compromising our own?
See how to deal with this typical parenting issue and get valuable insight into how both you and your child will get what you both need (as distinct from what your child may think he or she wants)!
Basically the key is that you, the parent, decide the overall framework because you know what is needed on an overall level but you allow your child to make choices within your framework.
