Читать книгу Your children are not your children - Павел Эрзяйкин - Страница 6

Delegating is the only way to operate in management. Related to upbringing, it’s the main instrument to form the responsibility for one’s life. The first thing we delegate to our children is their baby potty, then a spoon, then let them get dressed by themselves and so on. Delegating finishes when we see that our children can fully be responsible for their lives and can live independently. It may happen when children are under twenty, but it may not happen until they are over thirty.

The only way to effectively delegate is to make it a game. If parents force children, parents get resistance, hostility,

avoidance and protest. But if, for example, you turn tying shoe-laces in an absorbing game, children will never refuse it. At some moment, children will decide that they can do it without you, and then you have to be patient and leave them, face to face, with a new skill. My friends told me about their three-year-old son, who announced that he will go to the kindergarten by himself. The way he said that made it absolutely clear for parents: they can do nothing about it. Beginning with the next day their son got dressed, left the house alone and went to the kindergarten. His parents followed him behind the bushes, so that he would not notice. They were following him for three months, until they realized he could go to the kindergarten alone.