B”H
Good morning ladies! Welcome back to our third post on a four part series on Educating Kids with TimE Emotional Guidance Center. Today Mijal and Jael will talk to us about Setting Limits. Oy! Such a biggie and sometimes hard to enforce, especially when you have a number of kids to manage. Right?
__________
Setting limits
Parenting is never easy and one of the hardest things to do is find the right balance between what you should or shouldn’t let your child do… after all, you want your child to be able to explore life but at the same time you have to keep him safe! So how should you set the limits?
- Set age appropriate expectations – You can’t expect a two-year-old to sit still for a 3-hour lunch or dinner without giving him any distraction or activity.
- Be consistent with the rules & consequences – Try to be as consistent as possible with both the rules you give and the consequences that you will occur if those rules are broken. If you say, “After you eat your broccoli, you can watch TV,” make sure you do allow the child to watch TV – or at least offer the option- even if he doesn’t ask for it.
- Aim for consequences that can be applied as soon as possible – If too much time passes between the behavior and the consequence, then the consequence has less power to influence behavior.
_____
Do you struggle with setting boundaries? I personally sometimes fail on delivering the consequences. As the kids’ mistakes get more complex, I try to take my time to think of a realistic and enforceable consequence and often… yikes, by the time I get to it, I fizzle out and do not implement the consequence. Not good on my part. Any one ever been guilty of this? What else do you struggle with? Let’s help each other people ;-)
It takes a village to educate our kids, doesn’t it? ;-)
Leave a Reply