HOW WE TREAT THE CHILD, THE CHILD WILL TREAT THE WORLD

My mom used to tell an interesting story about when I three and in nursery school.  My mom got called into school one day and was asked to observe me playing in the play house.  I was pretending to be the “mother” and was reprimanding my “children”.  I was wagging my tiny index finger in the face of one boy in particular and speaking in a loud and displeased voice to him.  My mom said I was pacing and had my other hand on my narrow little hip.  She was somewhat taken aback at the similarity to a scene that could, and had, occurred on countless occasions in our home (thank goodness I didn’t have access to a slipper, or the call to my mom may have gone in a different direction, entirely).  What my mother didn’t pick up on, and my teacher pointed out was that I would exclusively speak Spanish when speaking to my “children”, but would immediately switch to English when our play was interrupted or when I was a child in the family and no longer the “parent”.

Children are mirrors and reflect back to us everything we say and do.  The vast majority of what children learn, they learn from what is modeled for them (much to the chagrin of teachers everywhere).  Everything we hear and experience is indelibly recorded in our subconscious.  As adults we must try to remember that every time we open our mouths or conduct ourselves in front of children we are acting as role models. 

We often make the mistake of thinking that since children are smaller than we are and have less information and experience than we do, that they don't have all the same feelings that we do.  This is an untrue belief.  The same type of treatment that would humiliate, embarrass or hurt an adult, will humiliate, embarrass and hurt a child.  When human beings are being hurt emotionally, our thinking shuts down.  Oftentimes we lecture, shame, criticize, exhibit anger, bully, disregard the wishes and feelings of children in an effort to “teach” a specific lesson but this is highly ineffective, as at this point, the thinking shuts down and the learning stops and only the recording of the behavior that is being modeled remains.

 

How many times have you heard, or said yourself, “These kids don’t treat anyone or anything with respect!”  Ironically, adults often try to teach respect by treating kids disrespectfully.  Children learn respect (or disrespect) from how we treat them and how we treat each other.  If your kids see their dad (or mom) screaming and disregarding your feelings and worse yet being abusive towards you (physically, emotionally or otherwise) you can expect the kids to begin to exhibit the same behavior.  When children live with disrespect, they learn disrespect.  We can teach or model respect only by treating each other with respect and by giving children the same respect we expect to receive. 

Kids have long been treated as second class citizens and treated as inferior, in terms of their wishes and feelings.  Since most adults have experienced disrespect when they were kids and carry memories or “recordings" of disrespect that were recorded when we were children, when children challenge us, it pushes our recording's “play button” and we find ourselves saying the very same things that were said to us as children.  How many times have suddenly realized that you were channeling one of your parents while speaking to your kids?  It happens to me quite often.  Tone, words and inflection are often replicated without even realizing it.  In fact, most disrespectful responses are automatic and we’ve already said them before we even realize what we've said.  Treating children disrespectfully is like using physical punishment as discipline.  It only works as long as we are bigger than they are. 

Learning to treat children with respect will require a true paradigm shift for most of us.  This will only come from a shift in how we honestly view children and how we define respect.  As it is not very politically correct to publicly acknowledge that we discount children’s feelings as a whole, this acknowledgement is neither easy, nor likely to happen in public.  This is fine, but we need to personally and honestly ask ourselves how we view kids.  Children are born with human dignity and to treat a person, even a small person, with human dignity is to acknowledge this and to preserve their dignity.  

Whether the child is yours or not it is important to model respectful behavior at all times.  However we treat the child, the child will treat the world.  It’s pretty ridiculous of adults to expect children to understand and practice the Golden Rule if we treat them with less respect than we give our peers.  In saying that children deserve the same respect we would give our friends, I am not saying we should treat children like adults or we should never get angry.  I’m a parent and our job is to teach and direct our kids, but I’m also human and kids don’t make that job easy.  I'm saying that there is nothing we ever have to say to a child that we need to say in a disrespectful way.

Yelling, "I'm angry!  Your behavior is unacceptable” is not disrespectful, in my opinion.  Screaming at, belittling, embarrassing and humiliating your child is.  Screaming, “I’m the parent and don’t care how you feel.  You don’t tell me what to do, I tell you!” is disrespectful.  In those two small sentences, you’ve told your child that she isn’t worthy of an opinion, her feelings don’t matter and since you’re bigger than she is you’re going to do what you want whether it makes her comfortable or not.  Many of us would take offense if someone told us that.  A good check to see if something you’ve said to your child is disrespectful is asking yourself, “would I say those words, in that tone of voice, to my good friend?"  If your answer is no, then it was probably disrespectful.  When we model disrespect, we must then suck up our egos and model apologizing.

We can, and should, train ourselves to stop and think before we speak.  Remember that everything we say and do will be recorded and imitated.  When we give children the same respect we expect, we teach children respect.  How we treat them is what we teach them.

"Children have never been very good at listening to
their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."
- James Baldwin