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<\/a><\/p>\nEver since the girls were infants, we’ve focused on establishing a culture of mutual respect and open communication with them. We’ve made a conscious choice to steer away from spanking, yelling, and shaming in our parenting. We even avoid punishments generally, preferring training in _consequences_. We certainly don’t let the children boss us around (for I am the Mama!), but our methods in achieving compliance, etiquette, and appropriate behavior are more on the side of invitations and incentives than laying down the law.<\/p>\n
p>{color:gray}. Click photo to enlarge.<\/p>\n
(I know not everyone makes these same choices about parenting, but this is what we do, and maybe we’ll talk about why some other time.)<\/p>\n
However, I’ve been feeling lately that things are occasionally a little bit _too_ comfortable for our girls. Example: spilling milk. This happens to everyone, right? We even have a proverb in our culture, “There’s no need to cry over spilled milk.” And this is true: you shouldn’t feel as if you have to cry if milk is spilled.<\/p>\n
But it sure is nice of you to say, “Oh, goodness! I’m so sorry I spilled that milk. Here, let me get a rag and help you clean it up.” We are noticing that we need to train the girls to respond in this way, instead of:<\/p>\n
# laughing
\n# studying patterns in the streams of milk flowing off the table (as interesting as they are!)
\n# staring silently while we clean it up<\/p>\n
Lately, I’ve been telling them, “Everyone spills milk sometimes — but I want you to be a _little bit worried_ about spilling your milk and to learn to be extra-helpful when it’s time to clean up a spill like this.”<\/p>\n
Our wise friend and therapist the Rev. Dr. Christopher Miller has been saying this kind of thing to me for years, namely that a certain amount of shame and anxiety is good. It helps you to take a shower, put on deodorant in the morning, and get your work done by the deadline. A little bit of shame helps us function in community, and we definitely want that for our girls.<\/p>\n
We’re finding lots of areas where a _little bit of worrying_ can be useful:<\/p>\n
* remembering to use the bathroom (“I want you to be a _little bit worried_ about peeing in your underpants”)
\n* thinking ahead about cleaning up (“I want you to be a _little bit worried_ about how, when the time comes, you’ll clean up all the toys you want to dump out on the floor”)
\n* taking good care of possessions (“I want you to be a _little bit worried_ about ink soaking through your drawing onto the table”)
\n* being conscious of safety (“I want you to be a _little bit worried_ about falling on your head when you’re swinging from the trapeze by your knees”)<\/p>\n
For my sake, I’m appreciating thinking about being just a _little_ bit worried about my concerns. In my own life, I can sometimes go overboard with my expectations of how clean our house should be, how much work I should be getting done, or what our meals should taste like. So last night, as I found myself worrying about the work I need to do for our homeschooling co-op, I thought, “Maybe I should just be a _little_ bit worried about this, but not so much that it keeps me awake.” And that’s just what I did!<\/p>\n
And now that I’m done being a _little bit worried_ about finding time to write this post, I think I’ll go make myself a cup of tea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our latest parenting strategy involves raising our children’s level of anxiety. But just a little.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7126,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7116"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7130,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7116\/revisions\/7130"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}