Parenting

After working with at-risk and high-risk teens intimately for about two years now, I have come to some realizations about children, parenting and the like. What follows is a rough beginning to some of these thoughts and lessons learned put to paper.

What you pay attention to dictates how your child will act. This works in both a positive and a negative way. If you display all of the assignments your child scores an A on, your child will strive for good grades. If, however, you ignore her when she's doing well in school (perhaps because she isn't a bother to you at this point), but yell at her when she's failing, she will fail. If you're all right with him being quiet all the time and only pay attention to him (even if it is only to tell him to shut up) when he's making loud noises, he will make loud noises. You may not particularly value failing grades or annoying sounds, but what you give attention to teaches your child what is valuable in life because children thrive off of attention and cannot yet distinguish good from bad values.

You shape your child's social norms. This seems like a no-brainer, but I think not enough parents realize this. If you like to sit on the couch watching basketball and cheering for your favorite team no matter what else is going on around you - someone is trying to concentrate, take an important phone call, work on a project, etc. - your children will be as zoned in and show a similar disregard of others' space as well. It may or may not be with sports, but your child will find something. If you are cheerful when you meet people, use traditional manners of "please" and "thank you," laugh at other people's jokes, swear or call people names, your child will do those things as well.

Your child learns cleanliness habits from you. This begins with bathing him as an infant (Once a day...or once a week?) and continues throughout life. It generalizes to brushing his teeth, washing his hands, making his bed, changing his socks and underwear, using deodorant, vacuuming and caring about whether or not he eats off of clean dishes. When he pees his pants, do you clean it up immediately? Or do you let it go because it will evaporate eventually? When she doesn't shower for five or six days at a time, do you notice? Do you say anything? How often do you, the parent, brush your teeth? Sweep the floor? How much do you care what your house looks like when people come over? What do you do about it? Because it makes a difference, I promise.

Your child interacts with people outside the home the way she is allowed to act (and how other people are allowed to act) inside your home. If a child is allowed to bully his younger brother (name calling, hitting, manipulating, etc.), he will bully other people. He has learned that he has power not only over the little brother, but over Mom and Dad, who, even though they may tell him to stop, don't effect change in his behavior because he is more persistent than they are. And the younger, bullied brother will be both a target for other bullies (the behavior he is accustomed to at home) and may also bully those children over whom he can assert some power (younger children, children with either mental or physical handicaps, etc.) because that is another behavior he has learned from home and is one that he associates with power. The bullying that either child enacts may not be the TV version under the willow tree at lunch and may not involve stealing lunch money, but it may land him in trouble at some point. And then the parents say "I had no idea he could be like this..."

Negligent parents breed negligent children. Perhaps you only neglect paying attention to your daughter's diet. She may have a stellar diet on her own, but may be negligent with her math homework. Maybe you neglect following through with consequences. Maybe then your child neglects cleaning her room. You neglect to tell the truth; your child neglects to tell you what he does after school at his friend's house. You neglect to apologize when you do something wrong because it's easier for you to blame the other person...Your child mysteriously develops a similar trait. The negligence may or may not assert itself in the same manner, but it will appear in your child in some form. All it takes is some awareness on the part of the parent to prevent that.

That's it for now...But this is still in the works. It's something I've been thinking about for a while. I know that I may be a little jaded in some respects because I work with such an extreme portion of the teenage population, but I like that because it makes me more aware. The more I think about this, the more I pay attention to my interactions with my siblings, my students, even my dogs, and especially the teens who represent my learning curve.