Should you take that assignment to school that your child left at home? Should you pick them up from school whey they say they feel sick when their sickness seems highly dubious? Should you pack their lunches and set out their clothes after a certain age? Should you intervene when they’re struggling with friends? It’s such a challenge to figure out when we’re crossing the line from showing compassion for our children to coddling and enabling them!
In this week’s Radio Show, April and Saren discuss how we can give our children the help and attention they need while helping them learn to be self sufficient in important ways.
Click here to view a PDF summary of the podcast.
Show Notes
Family Systems eCourse – This course helps you teach your children important life-skills through clear laws and consequences, housework help requirements, expectations about what they need to pay for with their own discretionary funds, etc.
Expectations of our Kids: Episode 6 (great podcast by Saren and April about how much to push our children to excel)
Music from Creations by Michael R. Hicks
Audio Editing by Christy Elder
So happy to listen to this today because it is something I struggle with CONSTANTLY! My husband is a very suck-it-up-buttercup kinda guy (his mom is the same way) whereas I lean more toward compassion, but I think just being married to him I’ve gotten tougher- but I always wonder, is it too tough?
I struggle with this with my oldest daughter (9) a LOT! She is very negative- has always been that way, was just kind of born a grump- and it seems like nearly every day I hear, “This is the WORST DAY EVER!” or “Fine. I know. Nobody likes me anyway.” It seems like everything is a catastrophic event, no middle ground, either happiness or total devastation. If I cater to that attitude, and always pull her into my arms and say, “What’s wrong, baby?” then she will turn into even more of a drama queen than ever. And yet I know she does need that sometimes. She’s like the boy who cried wolf with her emotional needs- how do I know when she’s really hurting and when it’s just melodrama??
This is something I’ve been praying about, but if anybody has any suggestions for me, I’d appreciate it!
I loved this conversation!
I know I’ve probably shared this story a million times because it’s so great, but when I couldn’t stop missing the bus as a middle schooler, my mom started having me take a taxi! I had to pay with it with my babysitting money! So hilarious to me now. My mom was NOT a coddler. But guess what, I stopped missing the bus!
Finding the balance between tough love vs. compassion is SO tough. This must be in the internal debate of all mothers! I loved April’s point about knowing your kids and when they need/deserve to be coddled (and when it’s just becoming a habit) and acting accordingly. One of my favorite parenting quotes ever comes from Clayton Christensen: “The same heat that softens a carrot hardens an egg.” We have to know our children individually and learn when to be tough and when to be compassionate.
I have thought often about a Power of Moms’ Pick article by Rachel Hixon, “Cushion Against the Writhing.” Sometimes when we know that our kids are having a tough time/are super sleep deprived/are working their hardest, we can decide to be a cushion against their writhing and do something to help them out that we wouldn’t normally do. My non-coddler mother did this for me when she knew I was at my wits’ end (like staying up late to help me finish a project when I was an overwhelmed student body president). I think of this often with my kids when they are being uncharacteristically needy–sometimes we all just need someone to be our cushion!
Thanks for the great conversation, Ladies.