Some Things Some Parents Sometimes Overdo

Psychological researches in both the past and modern ages have revealed how errors in childrearing could lead to personality problems later in life. We have seen hints of these vital findings in seminars, commercials, slogans, speeches, and other media. In this issue, let us encapsulate some practices that parents must avoid overdoing.

Over-protection. Trina asks her 8-year old daughter, Karen, to buy a bottle of vinegar from a sari-sari store in the neighborhood. Her industrious husband immediately comes to the rescue, volunteering, “I’ll do that. Karen’s too young to go for errand. She might trip or meet an accident or what.”
In another house, a vigilant mother instructs her 5-year old son, “Never play outside with dirty children. There are enough toys in the house that you can play with. Besides, there are a lot of hazards along the street and germs in the soil.”
That dangers abound outside the house may be true. But there is more danger in too much protection, which cannot outdo the benefits “risks outside” can offer.
Child psychologist Piaget (1965) posits that playing with other children fosters better social development, adjustment and cooperation. Childhood is an age of exploration. Exploration leads to the development of creativity, resourcefulness, independence, sense of duty, confidence, social skills, and many other vital factors.
Erikson (1980) asserts that when children are not allowed freedom and are over-protected, they develop too much sense of shame of doubt. They grow up to be shy, unconfident and incompetent. In addition, experimental researches disclose that play activities in childhood “may teach the skills and concepts that help children become mature, fully functioning human beings” (Berger, 1988).
When a baby attempts to stride up the stairs, therefore, it is healthier to say, “Go ahead, but be careful. I’ll be at your back.”

Over-gratification. In practice, it is by and large difficult to turn down a child’s sweet request. So when all of his requests are sweet, we tend to give in to all of them. Is there any danger in doing so? Much.
Studies have shown that too much gratification spoils a child and curtails development of frustration tolerance. Frustration tolerance is the ability to withstand failures in general, which is one essential indicator of emotional maturity and well-adjusted personality.
What does this imply? It is necessary to say, “No,” once in a while.
A child who has been used to being the “winner” always tends to have a difficult time accepting the fact when he is the “loser”.
Siruno and Siruno (1978) accent that children of indulgent parents are likely to be passive, prone to (weak in) frustration, resentful and withdrawn in relationships.
Meanwhile, Baumind’s study (1967) exposes that children raised with minimum regulation tend to be bossy and self-centered, rebellious, lacking in self-control, rather aimless, and quite low in independence and achievement.
Studies also show a correlation between delay of gratification and self-control. Children who are not overly gratified tend to have better moral development. This means that it is helpful to say, “Wait,” when necessary.
Sigelman and Shaffer (1995) put the entire concept this way: “Children need love…and limits.”

Over-regulation. Disciplining is a parental duty. But too much of it is definitely detrimental. Hurlock (1982) uses the term authoritarian discipline, which she characterizes as the type where rules are given without explanation, harsh and cruel corporal punishments are usually inflicted, and reason for children’s violation are not or seldom taken into consideration.
The common effects in children, Hurlock asserts, may include excessive obedience in the presence of adults but aggression in the presence of peers. Kids brought up in too much regulation later tend to resent authority and develop poor personal and social adjustments. “The more physical punishment is used, the more likely the child is to become sullen, obstinate, and negativistic.”
Koestner, Zuroff and Powers (1991) cite that extremely restrictive parenting, especially when combined with hostility or rejection, is very less likely to succeed. Baumrind (1967) proves in a research that children of authoritarian parents “tend to be moody and seemingly unhappy, easily annoyed, relatively aimless and not very pleasant to be around.”
When we are too tight with kids, we may be hampering the development of their sense of independence, creativity, and healthy self-expression.
In line with this theme is involving children through choices and consequences. Dinkmayer et al. (1989) suggest that children must learn to make decisions and take responsibility for their own behavior. “Giving young children choices helps them begin to develop independence and cooperation.”

Over-expectation. In their desire to “bring the best out of their child,” some parents are tempted to put too much pressure on him at the expense of his personal limitations. While there may be a good motive, the problem starts when parents fail to draw the line between what is a child’s “best” and what is beyond it.
After a two-hour talk on child rearing sometime in 1997, I had the chance to listen to a weeping mother’s grievance against her husband who scolded their son a lot when he fails to perform well in his class. We may fault the father for being unfair, but many parents commit the same mistake.
Dinkmayer et al. (1989) underscore the importance of showing real interest in areas that interest children, and not only the areas parents feel are important. Encouragement, the authors emphasize, starts at valuing and accepting children as they are, believing in them, and treating them with respect. “Children have different abilities, interests, and rates of they development.”
Many Filipino parents are lured by the glory of academic honors. They would do everything so their kids are not left out. There may be nothing wrong with this, but only when done within the bounds of the children. It is not fair to compare a child with others (that is, to evaluate a child against other children’s performance), or to threaten to withdraw love when he fails to keep up with your standards (as in saying, “Pag di ka nag-top di na kita love.”), or to so overemphasize achievement that there seems to be no more room for mistake.

Parenting may not be as easy as theories say. It entails a lot of flexibility, patience, self-control, understanding, and a pool of other “musts”, and “must-be’s”. But the key, it seems, for successful childrearing is keeping things within desirable bounds — not too much, not too less of everything. And we cannot afford to play around or get by in parenting: whether our kids succeed or not in the future lies largely on whether we did the right thing or not.

3 C's of Good Discipline

When we discipline a child, we not only bring out a desirable behavior; we bring out a desirable person. The kind of discipline we administer can therefore give a preview of the kind of person our child will be in the future. Hence, disciplining is not only a parental routine and expectation; it is a highly delicate responsibility that deserves and requires thorough consideration.
For this issue, let me share with you three (3) C’s of good discipline.

Comprehensive Discipline. Discipline should focus not on only one or some aspects of personality. It must encompass the whole child. Many Filipino parents equate discipline with punishment. While punishment can be beneficial when properly administered, it is not the only component of good discipline. Recognition, encouragement and praises must be integral part of parenting. The end goal of disciplining is to facilitate optimum personality development by capitalizing on child’s strength while teaching him to live with his imperfections.
There are parents who are good at looking into holes of their child’s behavior. They flare up when he fails to fix his bed, flanks in a quiz, or breaks a toy. But they miss his good deeds. Praises are powerful tools in molding behavior. When a child is sufficiently recognized for an achievement, he tends to repeat it again. Well-reinforced behaviors become an integral part of personality, and a young person carries them along even as he matures.
Comprehensive discipline also implies multi-scope parenting. Academic grandeur is good, but it is not everything. A number of today’s parents focus so much on scholastic achievement that they fail to check other areas of development — values, spiritual upbringing, social relationships, and the like. There are academic giants who are poor in interpersonal dealings. There are scholars but are too skinny to be true. These are products of imbalance parenting.

Clear Discipline. In fairness to goodness, children MUST know why they are being punished, or what they are praised for. When he finishes a good drawing, it is ineffective to just say, “Anggaling mo!” It must be behavior-specific: “Anggaling mong mag-drawing!” is a better-said praise. It is noteworthy that seemingly trivial achievements are indeed big thing in the eyes of kids. And these should be praised, too.
When he misbehaves, it is futile to simply slap him without a word. Tell him clearly the reason why you have to do it. Point out what the misdemeanor precisely is, why it is wrong, and what should have been done instead. In other words, it is incomplete to say, “Mali yan!” Always pair it with “Eto ang tama….”
Discipline is not a means by which angry parents simply ventilate their fuming emotions. Our children are not chimneys or mufflers that serve as exhausts through which we can air our tempers out and pacify our wrath. An important rule in parenting is that we discipline not because of anger, but because of love! This is why psychologists discourage parents from administering discipline while they are at the peak of anger. Heightened emotions can cloud our dispositions. And when things are not clear to us, neither can they be clear at all to our kids.
At any rate, children deserve their parents’ guidance and help to avoid repeating the mistake and replace it with the desirable behavior. It will be helpful to remember that discipline is supposed to be a collaborative effort between the parents and the child.

Consistent Discipline. Discipline is not a game of taste that we do it when we want, not when we don’t. It should be consistent across time. A misbehavior must be consistently treated as a misbehavior all throughout. It doesn’t become right just because you are in a good mood. Psychologist Edward Thorndike appropriately laid down that withheld punishment is reinforcement in disguise. When a child expects to be corrected for repeating a misdemeanor for which he had been previously punished, and he is not corrected, it appears to him that his misdemeanor is “rewarded”. He will therefore tend to repeat it over again.
This is one reason why disciplining is a task that requires an ocean of patience. We cannot expect a child to automatically respond to our one-time rebuke. Especially during toddler period, negativism — defiance of authority and doing the opposite of parents’ orders — is very much pronounced. Little as they are, kids do sometimes intentionally disobey to “explore” our reaction. Then we should patiently, lovingly, firmly and consistently correct them.
Discipline should also be consistent across siblings. It is an entirely confusing labyrinth in the eyes of our kids if they see our inconsistencies in treating them. What would one child think and feel if another sibling is ignored for committing a mistake, which the former had been previously punished for? By way of saying, except for “tasks of age”, what is wrong for one should be wrong for all.

In closing, disciplining should not merely be an offshoot of enraged temper. It should be a well-planned long-term training program that parents must carefully, sufficiently and properly undertake. Roy Smith once said that discipline is a refining fire by which talent becomes ability. In fact it is more than that. I see it is a refining fire by which a child becomes a person.

Teacher, Leader

(I published this article in the magazine of Colegio De Dagupan, formerly Computronix College, where I used to work.)

I came across a teacher-author’s interesting experience while driving on her way home from vacation. Wanting to arrive sooner, she followed a car that took a U-turn on a one-way street. Soon enough, a street police stopped both cars and issued them tickets. “I could not blame the driver ahead of me,” the author said. “I followed him, but he did not realize he became my leader.”
We realize it or not, we become leaders when we become teachers. Students look up at us, trust us, and follow us. To be an effective teacher, therefore, we must be effective leaders.

Pleasant, but not a pleaser. “I asked you last time to try to make someone happy,” a preschool teacher opens. “How many of you have done so?”
“I have,” a boy promptly replied.
“That’s nice, Juan. What did you do?”
“I went to see my Aunt, and she’s always happy when I go home.”
Are people happy when we are around? Then we are probably pleasant. But we should think again if we sense that people dislike our presence. Being congenial to people, however, does not mean we should try to please everyone at the expense of sincerity.
It is always foul to praise, or keep back an embarrassing remark from someone, for the sake of pleasing him. As Lord Alfred Tennyson incisively articulated, “A face-flatterer and backbiter are the same.”

Organized, but not rigid. A tangled leader is a baffled leader. A teacher cannot dispose of efficient services when everything around him is higgledy-piggledy.
Some people would rather tuck papers somewhere — between pages of a book, under other papers, inside drawers with unintelligible contents, etc. So in the end, things they originally “keep” and intend to “use in the future” end up fruitlessly hiding in places they cannot even remember.

• Do we plan how to creatively finish an entire syllabus for a semester without sacrificing instructional quality (or do we often leave our students receiving only half of what they paid for)?
  Do we so set up our activities as not to go beyond deadlines (since we know that our bosses feel just the way we feel when our students ignore our deadlines)?
• Do we have orderly files of our students’ quizzes, tests and other submissions (because we know for God’s sake that they deserve prompt feedback for efforts they exerted sincerely)?
• Do we keep handy records of incentives we promise to give (as when we say “I’ll give plus 2 to those who….”)?
• Do we maintain systematic folders of lesson notes and materials we use in the class (in the thought of being able to use them again in the future)?
  As always, orderliness is a mark of an educated man.

Open-minded, but not all-too-receptive. Charles Kettering once said, “If you’re doing something the same way you’ve been doing it for 10 years, chances are you’re doing it wrong.” We live in a world where the only permanent thing is change.
A department head at a reputable university in Baguio City told of his encounter with a teacher-applicant, who has had extensive experience in teaching a subject. Asked how much she knows the course, she declared, “I’ve been handling the same subject the same way for years. I know it by heart, by the letter.”
She was not taken in.
A broad-minded teacher is open-minded. He doesn’t easily believe anything that he hears, but neither does he close his mind to possibilities. He knows that even his long-held ideas may eventually be proven false tomorrow. He welcomes suggestions, appreciates innovations, and takes corrections maturely and intelligently, and learns from them.
He listens to opinions of others — colleagues and students alike — patiently, sincerely and attentively. He is not confined within the nuke of his perspective, regardless of how “huge” it may be. He takes each day and situation for professional growth and learning.

Democratic, but not loose. Psychologist Glen Elder (1962) had an appealing way of differentiating autocratic from an authoritarian leadership: in an autocratic home, parents do not allow young people to express their opinions or make decisions about any aspect of their own lives; in an authoritarian home, adolescents can contribute opinions, but parents always make the final decision according to their own judgment.
Authoritarian orientation then is plainly autocracy in the guise of “democracy”.
A responsible democratic leader is able to facilitate group decision-making effectively without the fear of bearing the accountability if things go wrong. He appropriately delegates tasks, but does not wash hands off.
In the classroom, democratic atmosphere gives much space for personal growth. Educators Lardizabal, et al. (1996) assert that effective discipline should be based on the tenets of democracy. College students can efficiently contribute to classroom decision-makings.
Furthermore, an effective teacher recognizes the human aspect of every person and makes necessary adjustments. While he knows his rules and keeps up with them, he sees every offense as a unique case. He knows that no one rule — not even one teaching method — applies best to every situation.

Principled, but not stiff. General Reed, President of Congress during the American Revolution, once received an offer — ten thousand guineas — from the British Commissioners, should he desert his country. His answer was clear-cut: “Gentlemen, I am poor, very poor. But your king is not rich enough to buy me.”
A noble teacher (since we claim that teaching is the noblest profession) maintains clear principles in life, and lives by them. He shows values that are worth emulating. He strives to be a genuine model to his students. He does what he knows is right and fair.
Again, even our principles should have room for malleability. We should be the masters, not the slaves, of our philosophies.
I overheard a Math teacher stating, “In Mathematics, all problems have a solution. If something doesn’t have a solution, then it is not a problem.” I see similar precepts when it comes to principles:
“All values ought to be flexible. If something is not flexible, then it is not a value.”
It is equally apt to say, “All true teachers should be principled. If someone is not principled, then he is not a true teacher.”

Frank, but not rude. Frankness is an asset. But it should not be confused with rudeness. One can be utterly forthright without being blunt. The former is motivated by concern and earnestness. The latter is motivated by undomesticated temper or poor breeding, or both.
Communication experts Bagin and Grazian have these to say: “Remember that manners are free. Be as courteous to the mail clerk as you would to the CEO…. People will respect you for doing so…. Be diplomatic without being phony. Avoid hurting others’ feelings….”
A cultured educator knows when and where to correct an errant. He knows that not all places are a right place to rebuke, no matter how noble the intention may be. He judiciously chooses the words to use, and delivers them circumspectly.

Mark Twain’s popular line still holds true today: “To teach is to learn twice.” Indeed, teaching and learning are a duo. And so are learning and leading. Nobody can assert that he is an effective teacher, until he is an effective leader.