Explore Our Blog for Insights

From the moment that parents find out that they’re expecting, the hopes and dreams for the perfect childhood commence. Even when expecting parents don’t know exactly what their child is going to look like yet, they have visions of their child experiencing a happy, healthy and fulfilling life.

Recently, I overhead a group of women sharing war stories about their experiences with child care. The stories ranged from the horrific intoxicated nanny to complaints about the unbelievably high cost of child care and capped with this unexpected question: “Why would you decide to have kids if you weren’t going to raise them?”

When parents and child care providers talk with me about establishing rules for their households and classrooms, I ask them to always identify what it is they want the kids to do, not what they want them not to do. Use Nice Touches versus Don’t Hit or Use Inside Voices versus No Yelling.

This weekend, I had the chance to attend a Boy Scouts Pinewood Derby competition. Attending the event almost instantly triggered the question, “How many parents completely took over this project, completing the derby car for the kid instead of with the kid?” The number of people who answer yes to this question is likely—and unfortunately—a lot higher than I’d like it to be.

Lately, I’ve been hearing or reading a lot about that classic daycare and preschool rule “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.” Adults argue that by telling kids this sing-song phrase, we are teaching them that life isn’t fair and people can’t always have the things that they want.

Are you frustrated or even embarrassed by your child’s lack of boundaries? While learning to recognize the social cues of appropriate boundaries is something that typically comes with age and requires patience on the part of the parent, this is a developmental stage that won’t just naturally develop on its own. Just as parents help with the developmental process for things like learning to say the alphabet and count to 10, so too do parents need to guide and teach the child how to develop age-appropriate boundaries by recognizing the social rules that govern boundaries.

Recently, I had the opportunity to play Sorry with a five-year-old. As we played the game, the child picked her card at each turn and pouted, whined, and threatened to quit the game each time she picked a card that didn’t allow one of her pawns to escape from the START point.

New research has suggested that parents use natural consequences–in place of punishments like spanking–as a way to guide children’s behaviors. Basically, what this research suggests is that historical discipline techniques, like spanking, teach a child to fear the parent and do what is asked of him out of fear.

I’m often inspired to write articles based on scenes from TV and movies. I have a difficult time shutting off my therapist brain and I ask myself, “Hmm…that was an interesting parenting lesson. I wonder if the parent viewers got that message?” When I ask myself that question, I just have to write about it, just in case the parent viewers in fact did not get the message.