3
Tough Love Parenting Strategies
The
ultimate goal is for your children to impose a little tough love,
self-discipline, on themselves down the road: to get out of bed each day and
report to work, to pass on that dessert and hit the gym, to manage their finances
well. Help your child be able to do that by building these 12 Character
Traits Every Child Needs to Develop.
As
parents, we’re hard wired to protect our children from harm—even from momentary
discomfort. But sometimes those moments of disappointment or frustration are
necessary to drive home important lessons. For some strong-willed children,
nothing but tough love gets through. Here are some ways you might use tough
love to overcome problems with your kids. Try these 3 Tough Love
Parenting Strategies to help them master new skills, gain self-discipline,
and learn important lessons through natural consequences.
1.
The forgetful child. If one of yours is the chronic forgetter of homework,
leaver of lunch boxes, and loser of jackets, some tough love may be in order.
When your child calls in a panic from school to ask you to bring the missing
assignment, think long and hard about it—especially if this is a recurring
problem. Let him or her take the zero, along with all the standard correction
at home that comes with a low grade. Let her go without lunch and be hungry for
a few hours. Natural consequences are excellent teachers—let them do their job.
2.
The disobedient child. If your child persistently breaks the rules you’ve
established for him, you may need to ban the very thing he wants badly enough
to disobey. For instance, if you’ve set a limit on video gaming to one hour per
day but he ignores it and plays longer, the gaming system probably needs to
disappear for a good while. This principle could also be used to make sure that
phone usage stays within the boundaries you permit. Your child will learn that
the cost of breaking the rules is far greater than the temporary pleasure of
breaking them. Not sure which correction is most appropriate? Check out iMOM’s Consequence
Calculator for some help in deciding.
3.
The lazy child. We all have one kid or more who absolutely hates chores,
or work of any kind. This is another instance where the antidote may be that
the very thing she’s trying to avoid only grows when she ignores it. For every
chore that’s skipped, another gets added to the list. If the chores are not
done by a set time, privileges are lost (hanging out with friends, using
technology) until the work is done. Help your child stay on track with one of
our printable chore and responsibility
charts. There are different versions appropriate for different ages.
The
greatest challenge in tough love parenting is overcoming your own angst. We, as
parents, love to see a report card with straight A’s, so forcing a child to eat
the zero and deal with the consequences makes us
uncomfortable. We hate the hassle of taking away privileges and devices, and
we don’t exactly enjoy the process of policing household chores. But that’s
parenting. A job that, by its very definition, is inconvenient when done right.
But your children are worth it and the consequences they (and you) suffer now
to learn the lessons needed are far less damaging and permanent than the ones
they’ll endure to learn these things as adults.
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Rights Reserved. Family First, All Pro Dad, iMOM, and Family Minute with Mark
Merrill are registered trademarks.
Taken from: http://www.imom.com/3-tough-love-parenting-strategies/
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