Raising Children Who Think For Themselves
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Raising Children Who Think For Themselves
Over the years, the cases of children’s behavior and how they grow up have been a point of discussion considering who should take control and how well children will be raised in society. However, parents play an essential role in nurturing and determining their children’s character. According to the author of the book, “Raising children who think for themselves” was motivated by how the parents suffer based on their children’s behaviors and regrets. However, the author was driven more by the story that he read concerning a young mother who had killed her two-year-old son for a trivial annoyance, cutting him into little pieces, frying him in a skillet served him to her dogs (Medhus, 2011). He saw the need to create awareness and stop the kind of madness existing in the world and for the benefit of the future generation as he refers “…and for the world in which my children would have to live their lives.”
The author points out the qualities that the child who is self-directed possess. The essential qualities include self-confidence: children always feel good about themselves as they can rationally access themselves and use it to grow instead of letting the assessment tear them down by learning how to tolerate their weakness. Secondly, competence is another quality where children use the ability to understand and control their surroundings. Whenever they fail, they learn a new way of taking control of life, taking risks, and understanding their ability at large. Independent is the third quality in which self-directed children rely on their thinking and believe that they are the problem-solvers by resisting the external influence. The fourth quality is that of children with high-quality moral character where they have the freedom to make choices considering the right decision without involving others’ approval or expectations.
In most cases, the decision that they make gives them the best feeling. Lastly, being an asset within the group is the other quality that self-directed children possess—being directed by the desire to belong all to have an important place in a group. Through the group’s actions, they gain a sense of belonging and improve their self-confidence and sense of self and independence.
I think that being an asset within the group is the most important quality that self-directed children should take. This is because through being an asset within the group, the child acquires the skills and develops a sense of belonging in the group, strengthens self-confidence, sense of self, and independence. By having the quality, one has other qualities and gains the internal and the external feeling. He is appreciated by others and appreciates him/ herself as the quality incorporates other qualities that one has to have.
Internal directed refers to how children make decisions based on their feelings and choices. The external direction is where a decision made by the children is based on others’ decisions. Thus the common difference can be pointed out from the way children are influenced when making choices. The two occur right at the infant I toddler stage, where they learn on the decisions they take based on the environment from others. It is a critical situation as it gave children the ability to determine what is right and what is wrong interacting with the external environments.
When eliminating elements that foster external direction, there are three behaviors that the parent can eliminate. They include modeling external directed in our own lives, being conditional with our children, and lastly, having faith in our children. I think that modeling externally directed behavior in our own lives is the most damaging behavior. The children tend to act the way the parents speak, feel, and think, showing how parents rely on external trying to create the right image. In return, the children adopt it the way the parents act. For instance, when a parent struggles in life but could make better choices by considering society’s approval, it lowers the child’s self-esteem when growing. He or she believes that the external choices determine their choices in life as they copy parent choices. The behavior is unhealthy as it drives the children to the same challenges that affect internal decisions trying to balance the obvious choices for society’s approval (Berger, 2009)—on the other hand, mishandling the feeling in front of the children affecting them in different ways. Thus, it creates sadness, guilt, embarrassment, anger, and disappointment, affecting the child. In general, we can the behavior affects the development of the children making it more damaging as they are unable to confront the real situation that they face in life.
Parents have been presented as the ones who take control of their children and determine the characters they develop based on their environment. Parental control has been represented as a way children learn control over their experience, thus showing them how to stick with the artificial standards to protect them from the world outside criticism, ridiculed, and excluded. And also to satisfy them in their ways. Parents have control over the reaction over their children’s power. Thus, there are three categories of parents “just leave the thinking to me,” “how could you, you beast!” And lastly, let me show you how you need to be”. I believe that the three categories fall on the permissive, strict, and overbearing type of parenting based on the parent’s reactions, as evidenced.
Parents have different behaviors that they use to nature their children differs from parents aiming to show how they should think, feel, and behave. They include criticism, judgments and evaluation, indoctrination, reprimand, and illogical punishments, over-controlling, and rescuing. Yes, I am familiar with judgment and evaluation and reprimand and illogical punishment behaviors since they were applied to me. They affected me in a way that I had to learn what is wrong and right based on the personal decision and the decision of the other, focusing on the impact. Though I had to take time to learn and develop confidence fearing the punishment, I turned to the point of making an independent decision without influence.
Alternatively, parents can encourage introspections in different ways, like questioning the children’s. Doing so stimulates the internal dialogue among the children given that through the questions thrown on them directs them to actions by reflecting on different answers giving a self-direction. Secondly, we have statement prompts technique where a parent raises an issue to the child by using a simple statement that can enhance the dialogue internally; as a result, it enables the child to learn the better choices for example when a parent says to a child that it is not advisable to run on a wet floor. The will develop internal dialogue and view it as the inappropriate avoiding it in the future. Giving our children the choices we want to live with is another habit; it acts as a better way to boost the internal dialogue as it gives the child choices maintaining happiness. Modeling internal dialogue is also a behavior that others apply among parents giving them a choice to develop internal dialogue, reflecting the issues that raised the dialogue.
A walkthrough is also another technique that parents apply to children helping them to understand the ways through which they can face their external environment. Thus, focusing on the ways through which the challenge can be handled. The pros and cons list helps children technique aims to develop internal dialogues to solve problems and to make difficult choices. Thus, it teaches how to balance different variables on decisions and predict the potential outcome. The consequence list also walks similarly like the pros and cons list, avoiding the disadvantages and advantages but show the effects of their decisions. Lastly, we have the parents with the behavior of using praise and rewards to promote internal directions instead of the external directions though they are said to harmful or beneficial. Introspection is considered important given that it can be used to enhance a child to develop internal dialogue learning to be indecent and figuring out the consequences of their choices, giving them happiness and the people around them.
Based on the author it is appropriate to give a reward or praise a child when he has done the right thing by motivating and praising them the way they do the actions as the author describes we should praise children on the actions that lead to their winning of trophies, medals, games or good grades. Alternatively, the children should not be praised by parents when they win, stars, medals, and trophies and earn good grades. I think by doing so, the author reasons that the actions that the will be praised for there are from the internal decision and will help a child develop internal decisions towards making the right choices, and I agree with it. By avoiding the praising them over reward, they will be impressed with the awards developing external choices and will not attain real happiness to develop their confidence.
Derailing unhealthy internal dialogue affects the ability of the child to make decisions to engage in self-deceit, self-deprecation through excuses, justifications, and rationalizations considering that the truth is painful or being afraid and shameful fearing how the society can take them. Thus, parents can handle it in different ways, like helping them confront their unhealthy internal dialogue by being self-truth. By doing so, they help the children to be with themselves or others. By doing so, it helps from engaging in healthier internal dialogue to solve the problem. Secondly, helping the rebounded from the effects of facing the truth; therefore, it helps them to face the truth from the pain they encounter by being untruthful and being confronted, instead of hiding the truth from the comments made evoking the guilty feeling, shame, embarrassment, or anger. Thus as a parent should avoid the threat, ultimatums, and harsh or punishments. Lastly, by helping them find the solutions through honest, healthy internal dialogue when facing the truth, the conflicts of being rejected by others. By honest and open, give them the right choices and the feeling of being appreciated despite the past actions.
The author also reflects on the natural intuition, where she explains it as a feeling that leads a person to do something without knowing the actual reason toward doing it. We need it as it helps one seek guidance from the soul to avoid external influences that do not understand the circumstances surrounding a person. Through the sense, one avoids the harm by making the right choices by extending the personal boundaries considering others as we consider ourselves. Yes, I can employ my natural intuition, given that when I make decisions, sometimes I have to consider how it affects others in the society. It has helped me increase my relationship with others by learning how to make decisions and handle challenges that we face in daily life.
When we talk of empathy, it refers to the experience of thoughts, attitudes, and feelings of another person. Children can be thought of empathy by helping them understand others deeply and assigning the empathy- triad level. Empathy-triad entails the happiness, inner strength as well as the outlook at a given point. For example, a person has a conflict with the other over a given crisis; it disrupts the happiness knowing that you are the cause. One can decide to confront the other and provide the opportunity to consider other people happy as they do not need that opportunity like the others may have needed it.
In conclusion, I found the book to be challenging to read. It reflects on the ideas and the steps that we have to take in life to ensure that we inspire others in the generation, especially children, alternatively it reflected on the weakness that as a person I face, thus turning it as a challenge. But I consider that the concepts are clear given that they created a sense and how I should be handling the children to derive their internal decisions. It also allowed me to reflect on my experience as a kid and the relation with my parents based on the behaviors they employed to show me how to make the right choices. Yes, I was familiar with the idea presented given that I have learned it before, and we all know that mostly the characters of the child are derived from parent’s right from childhood. My experience was great, given that I could reflect the steps in the real-life situation. I think through the reading in both books. It creates a better understanding and a better chance for understanding what the child needs and reflecting on the experience acquired.
References
Medhus, E. (2011). Raising children who think for themselves. Simon and Schuster.
Berger, K. S. (2009). Invitation to the life span. Macmillan.