Sneak Up On Your Dreams

What are your goals for your children? Many people don’t think of this very directly.  People often answer things like I want them to be happy or successful.  If parents really just wanted their kids to be happy, they’d just let them sit at home and eat chips and play video games all day.  Even success if not so clear. Will your child be successful if she’s a doctor? What about if he’s a fireman?  Part of the problem of not having our goals for our children clear, is that we get tied up in anxiety about whether we’re doing the right things for our children.

We want clearly delineated goals for ourselves because we know that they help you achieve what you want, so why not for our children.  In this case, I don’t mean having our children make their own goals, but our goals as parents. What are we trying to give our children on their way to grown-uphood?

Many parents just try to provide their children with every single positive thing they think there is out there. The children should have every lesson, should get the most from school, should have lots of educational experiences and so on and so forth.  Without goals, though, it’s hard to figure out what is really necessary and what just makes us feel like we’re doing our best.

For my children, I want them to learn many skills. For example, I want them to be able to get themselves out of bed and ready for school on their own without anyone. I want them to pay attention to other people, their peers and the adults around them. I want them to be able to figure out how to deal in social situations and feel confident about their needs.  I want my children to be able to figure out what they want and break those goals down into smaller, doable tasks.  I want my children to understand that there is a lot of help available in the world for whatever questions they might have and they shold ask for it.  I want my children to be self-sufficient without necessarily being overstressed.

Having my goals written out helps me remember what is important to me. Then when something happens like my son wants to quit soccer, i can look back and think about the fact that I want my children to try new things, but that means letting them quit them if they turn out not to be interested in them.  It helps me realize that it’s more important for me to encourage my children to try new things, with the promise they can quit if they’re not interested, than it is for me to teach them not to quit.

What are your goals for your kids?  Can you spell them out clearly and specifically?  Don’t consider them in terms of “I don’t want…”  I will talk about fears for your kids in a later post.  What concrete types of things do you want for your kids? When they’re adults what do you want them to be capable of?

These are your goals, even though they’re for your kids.  Parenting can be overwhelming without an idea of where we’re going.  Most people’s goals will be reasonable and probably mirror their own life in some way.  I like having a laid back life, earning about as much money as I need, instead of lots extra.  I would like to pass that value onto my children, but other people may have other, very reasonable, goals for their children.  What do you want to achieve as a parent?

Many people have the significant goal of raising their children into good adults.  There is a great deal of advice available on how to handle children and teach them right from wrong and so forth.  Other than the fact that life can often interfere and add so many tasks to a person’s life that they have little energy left for their children, raising typical children is possible.  The biggest problem I see comes in when a child is much more difficult than the average.  Parents get frustrated and find that the regular advice just doesn’t work.

Difficult children are significantly different from typical children.  Typical children respond reasonably well to most of the current child-rearing techniques.  Respectfully and consistently delivered consequences or behavioral interventions work quickly and easily on typical children.  They’re the good to really well behaved children in any setting. They don’t need to be told things many times it’s generally easy to get them to do things.

Difficult children, on the other hand, don’t respond quickly and easily to these techniques. They refuse to listen, they have tantrums, they seem stubborn, they can be taught something over and over again, but still forget what they learned in the future.  These are the children in the class who the teacher and the other kids have labeled as troublemakers.

It used to be thought that the discipline used on these children just wanted strong or consistent enough. Bad parenting was seen as the problem in most of the circumstances, except a very few.  Parents needed to be firmer or less firm or whatever.  The problem was and is that there are so many influences on each individual child that it’s hard for modern science to know what the problem is.  Blaming the parent was just the easiest way to go.

Difficult children, though, have difficulty with something.  Their difficulty may be as simple as a personality mismatch between child and parent or child and society, but generally it’s something larger like some kind of discomfort inside them.  To figure out how to manage difficult children, you have to first figure out what the problem is.

There are many issues that could be bothering a child enough to make them not able to alter their behavior according to consequences.  These can be things such as sensory issues, food sensitivities, neurological problems, mental illness, and many other things.  Observing a difficult child’s behaviors can help the adults around him or her narrow down the problems and what can be done for him or her.