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Healthy Structure
For children to build their own healthy internal structure and self discipline, they must use the materials offered to them. If a child doesn't get healthy structure in the form of consistent and appropriate rules and boundaries, he or she may become unsure and insecure, perhaps unable to adequately handle life's challenges. Many children will even work on making things look like they're okay on the outside, but something completely different may be going on inside.
A child may become rigid and critical inside due to lack of healthy structure provided while growing up. This may cause inflexibility and sharpness, an inability to make appropriate decisions in challenging or, perhaps, even simple situations. This lack of inner healthy structure may prevent children from taking full account of a situation, their actions and attitudes, others' needs and their own needs.
According to Parenting Educator and author Jean Illsley Clarke, there are six basic ways parents offer, or fail to offer, structure to their children. The six ways fall on a continuum from most strict to least strict. They are Rigidity, Criticism, Non-negotiable rules, Negotiable rules, Marshmallow, and Abandonment. To understand and better navigate these ways, it's helpful for parents to picture themselves driving a parenting vehicle down Clarke's six lane "structure highway". The far left lane (Rigidity) is most strict and the far right lane (Abandonment) is least strict. It's the two center lanes, Non-negotiable rules and Negotiable rules, that offer healthy structure appropriate to the child's age and development.
Rigidity is the most strict. In the rigid position, the rule is more important than the child and enforced without regard to the child's needs or the impact to the relationship between parent and child.
Criticism may be a bit more flexible than rigidity, but it involves ridicule, shaming, name-calling, labeling, and gradiosity, and strongly suggests how the child can fail.
Appropriate non-negotiable rules tell children what to do to be safe and successful. These rules are made for the child's welfare (not the parent's needs) and are routinely and consistently enforced.
Appropriate negotiable rules teach children how to think and be responsible. Starting in small ways when children are young and expanding as children grow, the process of negotiating rules teaches children what to consider as they learn to set their own boundaries and build their own internal structures.
Marshmallow parenting patronizes or gives in to the demands of a child. It teaches a child that consistent rules are not necessary and have little value, and prevents a child from becoming capable in various situations.
Abandonment occurs when parents fail to make and enforce rules to protect children, or help children learn skills appropriate to their ages.
Healthy structure is believable and acceptable to a child when the child feels loved. Structure without love and nurture is harsh and inadequate and is only half of what children need.
As time-tested as it is timely, Growing Up Again offers further guidance on providing children with the structure and nurturing that are so critical to their healthy development--and to our own.
Jean Illsley Clarke and Connie Dawson provide the information every adult caring for children should know--about ages and stages of development, ways to nurture our children and ourselves, and tools for personal and family growth. This new edition also addresses the special demands of parenting adopted children and the problem of overindulgence; a recognition and exploration of prenatal life and our final days as unique life stages; new examples of nurturing, structuring, and discounting, as well as concise ways to identify them; help for handling parenting conflicts in blended families, and guidelines on supporting children's spiritual growth.
If you feel trapped between extremes when you're disciplining your children, you'll appreciate the time-tested advice in this classic guide. You don't have to spank your children to get them to behave - and you don't have to worry that you're spoiling them, either. Drawing from four major child guidance philosophies, parent educator Elizabeth Crary provides dozens of examples and exercises to help you find the best way to rear your children.
"Without Spanking or Spoiling" will help you understand:- Why scolding and spanking can increase the very behavior you want to avoid; - Why praising children sometimes leads to problems; - How to get kids to substitute an acceptable behavior for something intolerable; and - How to determine effective consequences for unacceptable behavior.
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