Читать книгу The Good Behaviour Book: How to have a better-behaved child from birth to age ten - Martha Sears - Страница 74

Each stage of development has its “yeses” and “nos”; the stakes just get higher as children get older. Learning how to give and receive a “no” is part of maturity and part of discipline.

“No” is a child’s word too. Prepare yourself to be on the receiving end of “No”. Your two-year-old has just run out the door. You ask her to come back. She yells, “No!” Your first reaction is likely to be, “This little pipsqueak is not going to talk back to me that way. I’ll show her who’s boss …” (In our family, being disrespectful is a real “no-no”.) Understanding what’s behind that two-year-old and that two-letter word will help you accept this normal toddler behaviour. Don’t take “No” personally. Saying no is important for a child’s development, for establishing his identity as an individual. This is not defiance or a rejection of your authority. (See the meaning of defiance.) Some parents feel they cannot tolerate any “nos” at all from their children, thinking that to permit this would undermine their authority. They wind up curtailing an important process of self-emergence: Children have to experiment with where their mother leaves off and where they begin. Parents can learn to respect individual wishes and still stay in charge and maintain limits. The boundaries of selfhood will be weak if the self gets no exercise. As your child gets older, the ability to get along with peers in certain situations (stealing, cheating, drugs, and so on) will depend on her ability to say no.

By eighteen months Lauren had surmised that “No” meant we wanted her to stop what she was doing. One day she was happily playing with water at the kitchen sink. As she saw me approaching, and in anticipation of my stopping her play, she blurted out an emphatic “No, Dad!” Lauren had staked out her territory, and she had concluded she had a right to do this. Her “No” meant she was guarding her space. I verbalized what I thought her “No” meant: “You don’t want me to stop you. You want to play with the water. Go ahead, that looks like fun.” If I had wanted her to stop I would have said, “Sorry, not now. How about a squirt bottle with water in it?”