Consequences

A few weeks ago I was sitting outside with my very newborn baby watching my two older children play.  Like many Americans with kids, we have a Cozy Coupe and at one point my children went down our sloped driveway with my three-year-old son driving and my almost five-year-old daughter standing on the back.  I told her that she was being unsafe and warned her that she could easily fall off and get hurt and I asked her to get off.  She chose to ignore me and stayed on the car.  I asked her again and she just said, “No.”  At this point I decided to let it go.  Not ten seconds later, the car tipped over as they were crossing the road (having looked both ways, of course).  My daughter was able to jump off and was not hurt, but my son who had been inside the car was now in the road, stuck underneath the car.  

Since I was still holding my newborn, I asked my daughter to go help her brother.  The tipping was a result of her bad choice and I wanted her to take care of the situation.  A nice neighbor also went to his aid and thankfully he didn’t even have a scratch.

In the moment, I was really embarrassed by what my neighbors had seen.  To begin with my child completely ignored me when I asked her to do something.  That is unusual but still annoying and embarrassing when it happens  in front of other parents. Then I started wondering if I should have made her listen to me because someone almost got hurt so now I am a neglectful parent as well as one who is ignored by her children.  It hadn’t even crossed my mind that my son could get hurt during this process and I felt badly, even though he ended up being fine.  The whole situation bothered me for weeks as I went back and forth about what I should have done but I have finally decided that I’m okay with what happened for two reasons.

First, kids need to learn that there are consequences to choices.  I had let my daughter know she was not making a safe choice, warned her of the consequence and then let her choose for herself.  I suppose I could have forced her to get off the car and in a more serious situation, I probably would have “helped” her be obedient, but what would she have learned?  It is harsh reality that I’m just coming around to but I recognize that my children are not always going to listen to me and they need to experience consequences while they are young and the consequences are still relatively simple and safe.  They need to learn coping skills for challenging situations and have the ability to deal with mistakes.

Recently in my church’s magazine for adults there was an excellent article on raising resilient children.  The author encouraged parents to allow their children to experience the natural and logical consequences of their choices.  This is how they will learn accountability and responsibility for their actions.  He also said to respect children’s decisions, even if their poor choices lead to lost privileges, or I would add, Cozy Coupes tipping over.  

(See http://www.lds.org/ensign/2013/03/raising-resilient-children?lang=eng or click here for the full article)

I also recently read an article from Psychology Today entitled “A Nation of Wimps” that suggests young adult depression has increased so steadily in the last few years because parents are not allowing their children to deal with their own problems.  With cell phones, kids are so used to being able to connect with their parents that as soon as they encounter difficulty, they call their parents, who deal with the problem.  Kids don’t have to plan ahead or think for themselves and figure out how to deal with difficulties because parents, who want life to be easy for their kids, take away the pain or consequences of bad choices.  

"’Kids need to feel badly sometimes,’ says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. ‘We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope.’  Messing up, however, even on the playground, is wildly out of style. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation.”

(See  http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200411/nation-wimps or click here for the full article)

In light of this information, I wish I hadn’t been out there that day watching my kids play.  I can easily see them from the window and I think that if my daughter had been in charge of the situation, things would have played out a bit differently.  Instead of me dragging her inside kicking and screaming (she didn’t listen to me and wouldn’t apologize to her brother!) I think that had they been alone, my daughter would still have tipped over the car but instead of knowing that she disobeyed me, would have recognized on her own that it was a bad choice.  Then I hope she would have felt badly about her brother and would have helped him up and she probably would have apologized on her own because she’s a sweet girl when I’m not trying to force her.  

The second reason I’m okay with how this incident worked out is because it helped me recognize that I was reacting to parental peer pressure. It can be stressful to be a parent when another parent is watching.  I suppose we all want to show our best face in front of others and expect our children to do the same but that really isn’t fair to them or to us. I have very nice neighbors but I know I was harsher with my daughter because I was embarrassed and worried about what they would think of me.  Lesson learned: don’t let embarrassment dictate parenting choices.

While every parent knows the risk of not intervening in a potentially hazardous situation, what I learned from the above articles and from my own Cozy Coupe experience is that it is much harder to appreciate the risk of intervening too much.  It is a constant battle to find the right balance but hopefully with a better understanding and increased awareness of the value in letting our children experience life for what it is, the consequence will be independent, resilient and happy adults.