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When disciplining your child, extremes are rarely helpful. Avoid the following five extremes.
#1 The authoritarian parent:
Some parents command, dictate and control their children and they become totally dominated. Authoritarian parents apply severe discipline and their children live in constant fear of retribution. Such children grow up to be quarrelsome and disobedient.
They become the troublemakers at school and tend to be nervous and quick-tempered. They never learn to make decisions on their own. They develop deep feelings of bitterness and resentment that may later blossom into open hostility.
#2 The permissive parent:
Here, the children are in control with parents bending to their wishes. Discipline becomes a major problem since the adults can’t control their children’s behavior and neither can the children. The children don’t respect others and their property.
They may exhibit more emotional problems than children raised under authoritarian rule. They interpret their parents’ permissiveness wrongly. Consequently, they develop disrespect for them.
#3 The unloving parent:
Many studies on children in institutions confirm the importance of parental love and attention during the early years of a child’s life. In one study, Dr. Rene Spitz, an American psychoanalyst, says without emotional satisfaction, children die. He says emotional starvation is as dangerous as the physical one. It’s slower but just as defective.
Extreme cases involve total neglect, abandonment and cruelty. Many parents also apply severe punishment, constantly criticizing or nagging a child, seeing only her shortcomings, holding a child to unsuitable or unattainable standards, or comparing her unfairly with others.
#4 The possessive parent:
Some well-intentioned but ill-advised parents don’t allow their children to grow up and develop in a natural manner. Under the pretext of love and concern, they fail to allow their youngsters to take reasonable risks or to do things by themselves. They want to keep their children as close to and as totally dependent on them as possible.
Still others invest much or all of their hopes and dreams for the future in their child. Often this occurs in a family where a parent is not getting emotional fulfillment from other sources. A child needs a parent, but a parent should not ‘need’ a child in the same sense.
Possessiveness, over-concern, or too much mother-love is a cover-up or compensation for unconscious rejection. A mother may feel guilty for the rejection she feels toward her child. She makes up for it by showing excessive concern and anxiety for her. We can’t protect a child from life, nor should we attempt to, but we are obliged to train her to face life with courage.
#5 Opposite extremes:
It is difficult to step aside when you feel your partner as a parent is not handling a disciplinary situation correctly. But stepping aside is exactly what you should do! Far greater damage is done to the child if she observes both of you disagreeing over how she should be handled. If you oppose what your partner is saying or doing, raise your concern in private.
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