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Do you ever wonder what you have done wrong when your child does something wrong? Well, this morning I couldn’t get my daughter motivated to get ready for school. She just stayed in her bedroom and pottered around and I was getting quite concerned about the time.

It was 7.55am when I finally turned up the pressure by saying to her, “OK, Becky, if you want a lift to school I am leaving at 8.15am. You have 20 minutes to get dressed, have breakfast and pack your bag”. Then I went away again.

She finally emerged right on 8.15am and started running around furiously as she hadn’t eaten breakfast and was hungry. I simply said to her, “what a shame you will have to miss out on breakfast this morning as we have to leave now”. I started to walk towards the car and poor Becky realized that mum meant business and she would be going hungry.

I drove Becky to school and she was pretty quiet in the car. Becky knew that she had done the wrong thing by trying to test the boundaries. And if she tries that again she will get the same result. I will not waver in my boundaries for her sake.

Sometimes kids will try to control adults by dawdling like this. We have no control over that. All we can control is our reaction to their actions. Becky knows now that there will be a sad consequence of no breakfast should she try to dawdle like that again. A valuable lesson for any child to learn.

I know it is sad to have to do that but if I keep on saving Becky she will never learn that the world requires people to be on time. I had to leave for work. I had to earn money to feed my children and pay the mortgage. And that’s the way life is. Becky had a responsibility to be at school on time.

We need to allow our children to learn through their mistakes. I could have easily whipped up some breakfast or waited another 3 minutes for Becky. But the issue here was that Becky knew the boundaries and still defied me by being on a “go slow” to purposely try to annoy me.

The end result was that Beck was very hungry until morning tea break today. But I think perhaps she will think twice about doing the same thing again. Why? Because she didn’t like the end result. She experienced the consequences of her poor choices this morning.

It was heart breaking to see a hungry child going to school. But I had no control over Beck’s actions. She made some bad choices today. But when we allow our kids to make mistakes and learn from them they will thank you later on in life. I guarantee it.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 11:26 am and is filed under Parenting Articles.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.