Читать книгу The Good Behaviour Book: How to have a better-behaved child from birth to age ten - Martha Sears - Страница 37

What if, due to medical problems, domestic changes, or just bad parenting advice, you weren’t able to connect with your infant during the first two years, and now you are having discipline problems with your child? The beauty of human nature is its resiliency, the ability to bounce back from a poor start and have a happy ending. Yet reconnecting can be complicated by developmental mistiming. If you connected early, you were bonding when your baby wanted to bond. Trying to connect with the older child is more difficult because you are trying to bond when the child is working on breaking away. Still, it’s never too late to get attached. If you are having discipline problems with your child, no matter what your child’s age, step one on the road to recovery is to examine the depth of your parent-child connection. If it is weak, strengthen it. Remember, a child’s attitude wasn’t built in a day, and behaviour doesn’t change overnight. You may need to devote six to twelve months to the reconnection process. This time may include drastic lifestyle changes, involvement in your child’s projects, a high frequency of focused attention, and lots of time just having fun with your child. One parent we know home-schooled her six-year-old for a year; another father took his seven-year-old with him on frequent business trips. One parent described his reconnecting process with a difficult child: “It was like camping out with our five-year-old for a year.” Whatever you need to do to shorten the distance between you and your child, do it; and discipline will follow naturally.

Timing is important. Developing children take two steps forward when they need to act and feel independent. The child may be generally negative; “I do it myself.” During this stage parent-child conflicts are likely to occur. Then they take one step backward, a positive stage when they return to home base for some needed emotional refuelling. During this stage, the child is most open to reconnecting. Watch for openers: the child sits next to you on the couch while you are reading; stop reading the magazine and read your child. Your older child reappears for the nighttime story to the toddler and hints for “one night” sleeping in your room; honour this request. When your child shadows you, take the opportunity to reconnect. If you try to bond while your child is trying to break, you are likely to meet resistance.