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hi I'm dr. Laura Markham of aha
parenting dot-com and today we're
talking about how you can help your
child become more responsible now the
first thing you can do is give your
child choices right from the time your
child even understands what you're
talking about do you want the blue cup
do you want the red cup why does this
matter
well judgment develops from experience
and sometimes good judgment develops
from bad experiences so kids really need
the chance to make decisions right from
the beginning and that way the decisions
they make when they're out of your sight
when they're 17 18 and 19 are going to
be much better decisions than a child
for whom you've made all the choices the
second thing you can do is problem-solve
rather than blame or punish your child
now what do I mean by that well just
take the word punish out of your own cab
you Larry entirely instead think in
terms of problem solving so your child
has done something wrong you're looking
for a punishment ah
instead say well we have a problem here
not even your child has being a problem
because your child isn't your child val
has created a problem so we look at the
problem and we help our child figure out
what could we do about this problem
you broke your sister's toy right or
worse yet you hit your sister and you
damaged that relationship what can we do
to problem-solve there is there repair
that you can make a reparation and
that's how children learn how that even
though we're human and sometimes we make
mistakes we can always make things
better and it empowers them instead of
making them feel like bad people
the third thing is setting limits in an
empathic way I want to tell you about a
piece of research that has been going on
the studies about this for the last 50
years and we have some very clear
indicators of what helps kids come out
great be responsible but also be
emotionally intelligent and just
all-around wonderful people so look at
this we tend to think that parenting
kids are always up when but when we
interact with our children
we're always on a scale between
permissive and authoritarian right we're
somewhere on this scale of demandingness
if we demand a lot
or over here on the authoritarian side
of the scale if we don't demand very
much we're over here on the permissive
side these are the kids that run around
the restaurant and annoy everybody these
are the kids who everyone says are
spoiled rotten these kids are the kids
who really when you ask them later
they'll say their kid their parents were
very strict but often they aren't
speaking to their parents if the parents
are very strict the parrot the kids have
rebelled a lot during the high school
years and so we might think okay the
sweet spots right in between but here's
the disadvantage to that the
disadvantage is I want my kids to get
straight A's that's over here right I
want my kids to write nice thank-you
letters that's over here I want my kids
to sit down in the restaurant instead of
running around annoying people that's
over here too so what am I supposed to
do if I'm too demanding my kids are
gonna be mad at me right and in fact
there's a lot of research that demanding
parents don't raise kids who think for
themselves and they're actually very are
they are very vulnerable to peer
pressure as they grow up but there is a
solution you know why we've only got
half the picture here here's what we
need to look at there's another axis
this axis is the support axis so if you
look at dim high demandingness over here
but high support over here suddenly we
get the sweet spot that's the kind of
parent we want to be we want to be as
demanding as the authoritarian parent in
the sense of no you can't run around the
restaurant sweetie but we want to be as
supportive I see it's not really
appropriate to have brought you to this
restaurant you're only three years old
and it's the end of a long day right
we're seeing it from our child's point
of view and we're supporting her or
honey you can be as jealous and mad at
your sister as you want but you cannot
break her toy right we need to do
something about this problem you've
created that's the sweet spot in
parenting empathic limits thank you
you
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