Her words to me were as follows (paraphrased):
- Do not spend all your time managing your children. There is no end to it and you are not doing anyone any favors by this. Do your part and let your children do theirs. In her case, she would leave to do some volunteer work on weekends leaving her children with chores or schoolwork, which she expects to be done when she gets back. The children have the freedom to schedule their time accordingly.
- Do not spend time nagging your children to do their work. If you limit their work to two activities and emphasize education, everything will get done and your children will not be a "jack of all trades.. master of none".
- It'll all work out. You only have to provide the motivation and encouragement.
- treat my pre-teen and teen as individuals who need guidance and motivation. (I feel sometime we end up treating colleagues and neighbors better than we treat our own kids)
- allow my kids to express their needs and let them schedule their work (help with the scheduling maybe)
- give my children the opportunity to show they can motivate themselves
- definitely expect more from my children (self motivation) from now on.. without being disappointed if they don't do as much as I'd have liked them to do.
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4 comments:
One other mantra I have for me and the aham-udaiyaal is
Let's have more conversations with the children and less threats/ultimatums/scolding etc.
10yearslate,
Makes sense esp at an impressionable age. I suspect things change when the children are in High School/College years when they want to do what they want even if they know it's not right.
Hopefully the brainwashing (in a good sense) of previous years will stand them in good stead.
Negotiated agreements/rules have always worked for us so far. We are also on the brink of it's not cool to take classical music lessons phase.
I know I can push it down their throat, but I suffer from the indigestion..
So, end up giving options.. you can do jazz guitar, but (I sugesst) sticking with piano for another couple years deal
or you can do this IF you do that... therein lies my dilemma.
"Makes sense esp at an impressionable age. I suspect things change when the children are in High School/College years"
My view is, if we as parents get into the 'conversation' habit early, it then becomes second nature by the time they get to their teens.
One recent example..I give my nine year old twenty words every night to expand her vocab. This includes 'hard/tricky' words like slaughter, conceivable etc.
One night she got nine such words wrong. I then spelt it out correctly, asked her to study them as I was going to re-dictate in 10 minutes time.
She rebelled, threw a tantrum, stormed off..you know, the usual.
Now, my initial reaction was to lay down the law...'you will obey me' etc.
However I bit down hard, let her cool off, went to her a few minutes later and after weathering some more tears etc, arrived at the root cause of the problem, which was, she did not understand these words, nor was familiar with them and was spelling them phonetically.
And that's when I apologized for overlooking such a simple no-brainer. We then agreed that she would get to read the passage from which I was picking the words, ask me what the difficult words were, I'd explain them..and then we'd do our twenty words.
It works well now. She reads from a fairly advanced text (we're doing Jim Corbett now), understands the words and then we do the dictation.
Sorry for making such a long and circuitous comment, but my view is the more practice I and my wife get in these circs and the more convinced my children are that there will be a dialogue as opposed to a finger waving monologue, the more we will be able to have easy conversations as we all get older.
This way, I am trying to insure against the day when they get to their twenties and we are unable to find something in common to talk about.
10yearslate,
your daughter is fortunate to have understanding parents. I think we sometimes push too much without understanding where they are coming from.
My 9 year old reads a lot.. this kid did not start reading until 2nd grade, giving us some wakeful nights. I used to read him Tom Sawyer in original.. w/ all the slang and language. He loved it. We have Corbett also.. He also loved DaVinci code. His vocab is pretty high, he usu has an idea of what a word means even if he doesn't know the exact meaning.. and usage. Natuaral speller to boot. His older brother (also a voracious reader, but an awful speller, spells which, witch) even consults w/ him on words/spelling (==Big Deal!).
Glad the reading the passage beforehand is working out. Makes things a lil' more interesting!
PS - do enjoy reading long posts..
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