Have a New Kid by Friday (22 page)

When I taught at the university, students would come up with all kinds of excuses. One football player—a 6’8” defensive end who weighed 300 pounds—told me one day, “Dr. Leman, this chick was supposed to type my paper for me and she doesn’t have it done.”

I raised my eyebrow at him. “Well, in
my
class I don’t accept excuses. So by agreement with Coach Robinson, I’ll just tell him that you won’t be ready for practice today.” After that point, that big football player would whip into class and lay his homework right on my desk before he even sat down.

Some kids are just lazy by nature. They’ve got their parents trained to remind them, coach them, and bribe them. But laziness isn’t a quality you want to encourage, because your child needs to pull his share of the load as a family member. That’s part of his responsibility.

If you ask your child to do something, you should ask only
once
. Otherwise you are being disrespectful to that child. You’re saying, “I think you’re so stupid that I have to remind you several times to do that.”

The next time you want your child to do something, say it once.

“Kenny, I want you to clean out the garage today.”

All day you watch Kenny laze around in the hammock, playing on his Game Boy. By nighttime, the garage still hasn’t been cleaned. You don’t remind your child.

The next morning at 9 a.m. is Little League tryouts. Your son comes out, dressed and excited, in his baseball gear, tossing his baseball. “Come on, Mom! It’s time to go!” he says happily.

“Honey, we’re not going to tryouts today.”

He looks stunned. “Not going to tryouts? Why?”

Here’s the teachable moment.

“Your dad wanted you to clean out the garage and I asked you to do it, and I see it’s still not done.”

At that point, your child will promise you anything—including 30 days of hard labor—if you take him to Little League. But he doesn’t get to go to Little League that day. If he misses the tryouts, so be it.

When the garage is clean to his dad’s satisfaction, he gets to go to Little League. And chances are, the next time he’s asked to clean the garage, he’ll do it in record time.

All this was done with no bribing, no cajoling, no reminding.

If this sounds harsh to you, let me ask you, “Do you want your child to be responsible or not?”

If you set the precedent of always reminding and coaxing children, then you’ll always be reminding and coaxing. But what happens when they’re in college, in an apartment of their own, and with a job in the real world, and you’re not there to remind them?

Take the long view. What do you want your child to look like at 18, 20, and 30 years old?

If you want your child to be responsible, give him responsibility. Don’t bail him out when he fails to follow through. Don’t snowplow his roads in life. Failure and the resulting consequences are good training.

Remember, B doesn’t happen until A is completed.

Lying

Kids lie for two basic reasons.

One is for wish fulfillment. Some kids will come home and tell you they scored three goals in soccer . . . and then you find out they didn’t play at all.

The second is out of fear. “Did you break that vase?” you demand. “No! I didn’t do it! The cat did it!” your 6-year-old claims. Most children lie out of fear. But lying is a mountain, because in order for there to be a relationship between two human beings,it must be based on trust. Otherwise, you’ll feel violated.

So if your child lies to you, he needs to be caught in that lie and told that lying is not acceptable. There also needs to be a second consequence for lying. Let’s say that, a couple days later, your child says something innocuous, such as, “Can I go next door and play with Ronnie?”

Your answer needs to be a matter-of-fact “No.”

“But why?” your child asks. “You always let me go.”

Now’s the teachable moment, even more than being caught in the lie.

“Honey, I don’t have any assurance that you’re going to be where you said you’ll be. Remember Wednesday night, when you told me you were going to be at Susan’s—and you weren’t?”

Do you beat the kid over the head? No. And you don’t do it long term. But saying something like that two or three times makes a memorable impression on a child that lying isn’t what you do. It doesn’t gain you anything, and it breaks down trust between the two of you. Children need to see and feel that immediate result.

There’s an age-old admonition: “You won’t get in trouble if you tell me the truth.” That needs to be true in your family too. If your child does break that vase and comes to you with the truth, she can know that you’re unhappy, but she should not be punished for telling you the truth. In those situations, you’ll need to think carefully before you open your mouth. How you respond to such a situation directly relates to how comfortable your child is in telling you the truth.

Kids can be as dumb as mud and will do stupid things in life (like hanging a camera out the window of a car and dropping it), but if they own up to them and say they’re sorry, they need to know that life will go on. You won’t beat them over the head for years for their mistake. The relationship between the two of you will still be okay.

Regarding lying, here’s the kicker: parents too have to be careful about their own lies; even those pesky little white lies are still lies. If you say to your child, “If someone from work calls, I’m not here,” and it’s not the truth, your child is smart enough to know it. And then your child thinks,
If it’s okay for you to lie, it’s okay
for me to lie
.

Manners

Manners never go out of style. They should be taught to your child from day 1. If you haven’t taught them, it’s never too late. Any age can learn them.

When my grandson Conner leaves our house with his little duck suitcase on rollers, he says (without my daughter prompting him), “Thank you, Grandpa. Thank you, Grandmama.” Why does he, at age 3, do what many teenagers don’t do? And without any prompting? Because my daughter has taken time to train him to be courteous.

With all due respect, training a beagle and training a child have a lot of similarities. You have to tell them to do the same thing over and over and over until it sticks.

I’m a car-pool dad, and I really hate it when I’m driving children somewhere and they forget to say thank you.
What’s wrong with
kids today?
I think. And then I wonder,
And what’s wrong with their parents?

Common courtesy should be a given that you teach your child. Anything other than saying “please,” “thank you,” and “you’re welcome” is not acceptable.

One little girl I know takes things an extra step. When she has friends over to play and she and her mom take them home, that little girl walks her friend up to the door, and she thanks not only her friend for playing but the friend’s mother for letting her child come over. “You ought to see the startled looks from those moms the first time you hear Mei tell them thank you,” Mei’s mother told me, laughing. “Later they tell me how much they appreciated that, how unusual it is, and that they would love to have Mei over anytime.”

Manners will take your child a long way in life. Don’t miss teaching the basics.

Me, Me, Me

“But I want . . .”

“I don’t feel like . . .”

Children are naturally selfish and thoughtless until they’re trained to be otherwise. You’re the parent and the authority over your child, so that’s one of your very important jobs. Children need to learn that they are not the center of the universe. They need to learn that there are other people in that universe to think about.

Let’s say you have a 12-year-old boy, a 9-year-old girl, and an 8-year-old girl. You have many talks about how you’re all a family and you need to share in the fun and the work. Your kids get allowances. You all go on trips together. But your 12-year-old just doesn’t get it. He squabbles about helping do the dishes and cleaning the bathroom because he doesn’t feel like doing it. He complains about what you put in his school lunches. He critiques everything you do in the kitchen, including the way you cook dinner. And he criticizes everything his sisters do.

So what can you do? Let’s say the next night you’re preparing dinner. He’s standing there critiquing everything you and his sisters are doing. “You know, girls,” yousay, “I need your help in the bedroom. Evan, you can go ahead and make dinner yourself. That way you’ll make sure it gets done just the way you want it to.”

Think you’re getting the message across? Ka-ching!

You may also want to assign him to make not only his own lunch but also his sisters’ lunches for a week. And if he grouses about cleaning one bathroom, assign him to clean all the bathrooms in the house. He’ll get the idea fairly quickly that the world isn’t about me, me, me.

The point is, as a parent, you always need to be teaching your children how to be responsible and how to think of others. Children will always have childlike behavior because they’re children. But as you take time for training, you’ll be fine-tuning their Attitude, Behavior, and long-term Character.

Messy Room

“I think a sign ought to be posted outside my son’s room:
Toxic
Zone. Don’t enter for fear of your life.
”

I’m not a high-standard guy. I’m a want-to-see-the-floor-twiceaweek kind of guy. But even I have my limits. (My wife, Sande, a firstborn, has a lot less tolerance for mess than I do, as the baby of my family.) Many teen rooms are downright toxic.

Kids are mess makers, and they won’t usually have the same standard you do for keeping their bedrooms picked up. And, after all, they have a lot of important stuff in there (like makeup, iPods, rocks), and they only have one room that’s totally theirs in which to store their precious belongings. So if you expect them to keep their bedroom as clean as you do the rest of the house, you’ll be sorely disappointed.