Review Your Parenting Rules This Year
Some of the rules you set for your kids will be long-standing expectations. You will probably never be okay with kids hitting you or each other, for example. As long as they live with you, it’s never cool for them to have a party while you’re out of town, or lie about where they have been. But some of the rules you set are for a specific point in time. It may not even be the rules you set out to create; instead, they emerged as a solution to a problem.
When my son was four and my adopted son was three, for example, I had to create a rule that one of them gets in the car first and the other gets out first. This was because my car was always parked on the street and they could only get in and out of one side safely, but of course they both wanted to get in first and get out first, although (or maybe because ) that meant to climb everything on top of each other.
I would have hoped that if they were 13 and 14 years old, I still would not have to achieve this, because I expected that 1) they would not care, and 2) I could trust them to safely get into the car on their own from the street. …
However, changing the rules that we have had for years does not always occur to us. Sometimes a rule is no longer useful, but we still enforce it simply because we have always applied it. This is why I propose that we restart our parenting guidelines for this promising new year. We should take a moment to ask ourselves if the no-snack-on-the-couch rule can be dropped this year because kids don’t actually leave crumbs all over creation every time they eat.
It doesn’t have to be a huge and time-consuming exercise. All you have to do is try to unplug yourself from the enforcement autopilot for a few days in order to be more critical about things like why the kids have to be inside before it gets dark – maybe they’re old enough. to stay there a little longer. At the very least, it might be time to loosen some of the reins to see if they fit the occasion (you’ll find out if it’s time to kick those snacks out of the living room again).
Some of our rules should evolve as our children age, and the beginning of the year is a good time to think about where it might be worth relaxing.