‘My husband says I’m not strict enough. He says I’m letting the children run rings around me.’
This mum wanted to know what I thought.
Watch the video or scroll down to read more…
I hear this question often.
There can be advantages to strictness – and that’s why people advocate it.
Being strict can stop ‘bad behaviour’ in its tracks – and also get children to do things.
However it doesn’t always work.
More often than not, it backfires and makes the situation worse.
Plus, there’s a cost to it:
Firstly, with strictness, instead of encouraging collaboration you’re enforcing your will over your children‘s. And you may be scaring them a little.
Secondly, strictness overrides emotions. You lose the chance to show your child kindness and understanding. With strictness, there’s no space for learning how to self-regulate and develop a healthy way of dealing with difficult emotions.
Strictness is about getting the result that the adult wants. It’s not about helping the child with what they’re going through.
For these two reasons, I don’t recommend strictness.
Why miss the opportunity to show our children how difficult feelings can be met with kindness and that win-win solutions are possible?
But if you feel you might need more strictness, here’s what I think:
It’s not actually strictness that you need. You need firmness.
Here are three signs that your children need more firmness:
- You’re avoiding saying things to your children or avoiding setting limits, because it’s uncomfortable for you when your children resist, react or express difficult feelings.
- Your child is doing dangerous things repeatedly, like pushing, running off, hitting.
- When your child is unhappy with something – when they react, have a meltdown or express disappointment/anger – you feel, “Oh no, they’re not happy. What did I do wrong?”
Your child really needs to feel that you’ve got a firm ‘no’ in your back pocket.
And, actually, they need to feel unhappy with some of your decisions. Not that you would make decisions in order to make them unhappy – that would be cruel. But some of your decisions are bound to make them unhappy. And if they’re not, then that’s another sign that you need more firmness.
When your child has a big feeling about something reasonable that you have decided, it’s actually ok. It means that they can relax into your leadership. They feel, and they know, that you are in charge, and that’s actually very comforting for your child.
They don’t want to be in charge of their lives. They may seem to want to be in charge, but actually it feels too big and too powerful to actually have the amount of control they seem to want.
So, firmness with kindness. They go hand in hand – and then your child will feel guided and understood, and that’s immensely powerful.
I call this process Kind Containment, and there are three steps:
Step #1
Empathise with their point of view. You might say something like, “I know you wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t been very angry with your brother.”
Your child feels that although you may be setting a limit, you understand them.
Step #2
Express your point of view – “…and I don’t want you to hit your brother.”
Step #3
Problem solving – where you work it out, finding a win-win solution together.
You can read more about Kind Containment in my free guide, Solve the Struggle With Your Kids.
Download it now by clicking on the link below. You’ll get the overview of how you can use this approach, with easy to understand examples.
