Good • Strong • Safe

published on July 27th, 1:07 p.m.

What is the most important skill we can teach our children? You got it—Self Control. Now, what is the absolutely hardest thing to teach our children? Right again! Self Control! Why? Because it’s all about limits, setting limits, helping our kids set limits, helping them obey our limits and helping then learn how to set their own limits as they get older. Self control is about boundaries, those fences in life. We have physical, mental and emotional self control fences, something that helps us get along with ourselves as well as others. All of us feel differently about fences. Some of us like them, they feel safe, we know where we stop and go. Others of us hate fences, we hate to feel fenced in. The grass is always greener on that other side of the fence and so on. But teaching our kids self control is like having a good neighbor fence; it teaches our kids how to behave so they can become good, responsible adults and live a happy existence. Without the skill of self control, others don’t want to be around us. We can’t commit to jobs, a spouse, a life. We DO need the skill of knowing where the boundaries lie so we can stay safe, happy and well adjusted. To raise kids with good self control, there are a couple of points to remember: Establish clear rules in your household. Establish consequences for not respecting those rules. Be consistent in your follow up. Children are “testing” creatures, that’s how they find out about the world. We all began testing at a young age or else we wouldn’t be walking and talking now. But in that testing, children have to be guided in the right directions. They don’t inherently know that they shouldn’t walk out into the middle of the street, they have to be told not to and the dangers of doing it. The hard way to find out that fire is hot is by touching the fire, so as parents we warn our children not to touch the hot stovetop because they will get hurt. We as parents have to be consistent in telling them where their boundaries are; physically, mentally and emotionally. Obviously the physical things are like the dangerous street or hot stove. Mentally and emotionally self control is a little harder to figure out. We build their self confidence and emotional stability when we tell them they did a great job on something, or if we tell them they could try harder. We emphasize that it is “not nice to yell and scream to get your way” but to ask nicely. As parents, even in those trying moments in life, we CANNOT give in. If we do, we are not helping our children learn self control at all. We enable them to forget the rules, forget anyone but themselves, and they become selfish rule breaking teenagers. Argh!! Establishing good self control in our kids comes out of loving our kids. We care enough to want to help them become wonderful loving adults. So we help establish their fences to corral their feelings, letting them know temper tantrums are not acceptable, that striking someone in anger is not acceptable, that being conniving to make someone do something you want them to do is not acceptable. How we treat our kids is how they will treat us. If we respect them enough to want to help them be respectful, then as teens and older adults they will be able to be self confident, self assured and caring about others and Us! Help those kids to be good, strong & safe.