Bette Davis, Hollywood icon: “If you’ve never been hated by your child, you’ve never been a parent”
Anyone who is a parent knows of the joys and difficulties that come with raising a child.
Raising a child is one of the most pleasurable and challenging experiences in life. But as a parent you are always walking a fine line between wanting to be loved and having to be honest with your child.
While we want to fulfil all our children’s dreams, sometimes it’s not feasible. We are sometime prone to making promises that we cannot keep or they desire something that is beyond the attainable.
From personal experience, learning to say “no” unabashedly from the very beginning and being honest, Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy aside, has served well. It is easier to loosen the rules and acquiesce down the road than to impose restrictions at a later date.
As the Hollywood icon, actress Bette Davis once said: “If you’ve never been hated by your child, you’ve never been a parent.”
The balancing act of parenting a child
The philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell broke with the old philosophy of “spare the rod and spoil the child,” and that children were meant to be seen and not heard. The English intellectual advocated for giving children affection but balancing that with predictable routines and strict rules.
If the rules were broken, he didn’t believe in harsh punishment. Instead, he believed that disciplining a child with such methods as “alone time,” leaving the child reflecting on why they are there with the door open and able to return once they figured it out, was far more effective in persuading a child to get onboard due to the sense of FOMO, fear of missing out.
“The great principle in a contest with a child is: do not yield, but do not punish,” he wrote in his 1926 book On Education, Especially in Early Childhood. “The normal parent sometimes yields for the sake of a quiet life, and sometimes punishes from exasperation; the right method, to be successful, requires a difficult combination of, patience and power of suggestion.”
Russell was also a strong advocate of being honest with children saying “there is no excuse for deceiving children.” For once a child realizes that their parents have lied, “they lose confidence in them and feel justified in lying to them.”
Likewise, it’s of the utmost importance to keep one’s promises to children or the child will not think that the parent’s word is trustworthy. The same goes when threatening discipline, paraphrasing: never make a threat of a punishment that you cannot follow through with, you will have to anyways lest you want them to walk all over you in the future.
“There is no greater reason for children to honour parents than for parents to honour children except, that while the children are young, the parents are stronger than children,” Russell said.
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