Recently, while our 3-year old boy Muawiyah got excited in his storytelling and happily waved his hands, he clumsily knocked over his glass of juice, spilling the floor.
At the moment it happened, I was upset and let out a grunt of frustration.
Then Muawiyah looked me in the eye… waiting in anticipation, what his Abah will do next and how he will respond. I could see there was a whole mix of emotions in his eyes - curiosity, guilt, regret, fear, anxiety.
Then, in that split second, I thought to myself: This was a defining "parenting moment" - what outcome would I want from this? What kind of father do I want to be?
I felt there was almost an imaginary mentor on my shoulder, telling me - "remember your training". Control your emotions. Don’t let your flight-or-flight response trigger the "easiest" way out. Remember what you read about in those parenting books.
Situations like these present excellent opportunities for both parties - the child and the parents - to learn and develop together.
When our child spills something on the floor, our immediate "automatic" impulse would have been to scold the child and clean the mess ourselves. But this would deprive them from owning up to the consequences of their actions, and at the same time harm their self-esteem by demonstrating intolerance for mistakes.
But.. what about the other alternative? Just let them off the hook? Do we have to just accept that we are punching bags that have to clean up the aftermath of all their mistakes?
Turns out, there is a better, lesser known, third way: Lovingly teach them to own up the consequences.
Remembering techniques I learnt from the book "Positive Discipline", I responded, "Oh no.. You spilt the juice Muawiyah! It’s a mess! Now we have to clean up!"
I then went to get some tissue and cloth for him to clean it up.
Sounds simple enough, right? But there are a few details to make this effective:
1. Resist the urge to swoop in to “save” them - The idea here is to teach the child responsibility, so this requires your patience more so than theirs! Inevitably, they will do a sloppy job. This guy was wasting tissues and doing such a slow job. It's tempting to just declare "ah it's okay, I'll do it" and clean up the mess ourselves; but doing so would have robbed our child of the opportunity to learn and grow, especially in rectifying problems.
2. Sit down with him while he does it - As parents, sometimes, when we get upset, we give instructions, then we leave them and go do something else. This creates a lot of frustration and regret. Instead, employ the "be firm but kind" approach - sit down with them. Let them see that we aren’t upset with them and we are together with them to teach them.
We can choose to do it together too, but do it in such a way that shows that we are doing it because we are helping the child, not because we are taking away the responsibility.
3. Keep it friendly – After the first grunt of frustration, I made sure that I kept a friendly conversational tone throughout our interaction, making it clear I wasn’t angry or upset with him personally.
At the end of the day, if we want to instill grit and a growth mindset, what we want to teach the child is, "it's okay to make mistakes. We just have to clean up sometimes. And that's not so bad. In fact, it can be quite fun."
It was tempting to lecture and nag him for these silly mistakes. Yet if we do that, it will only cause him stress which won’t rectify the problem anyway. We might lose the big picture of the lesson: To build that trusting, loving two-way relationship as we teach discipline to our child.
4. Finish the job - Because of his overall sloppiness and inefficiency of the cleanup, after a few boring and mundane minutes, he quickly declared "I'm done! Nak main toys!". Again, I have to hold the fort, and playfully say, "oh, you're not done, Muawiyah! You still have to clean up that part. Would you like Abah to help you do it together?"
After a while resuming his cleaning, again he declared "Nak main toys!", which annoyed me a bit, because it seemed that he was purposely doing a lousy job to drive me to frustration to get his quick ticket out. Hold the fort, Abah, remember your training. We stuck to it, and eventually, I took a different negotiating strategy:
"yeah Abah pun nak main toys with Muawiyah. Okay, I’ll tell you what: After we finish cleaning then we go play toys together okay?"
“Okay!”
Then we kept at it until we were done.
This seems like an unnecessarily long writeup about a typical parenting challenge in a day - what can I say, I am an Engineer by profession - but this one scenario taught me a lot as a father and educator: To be firm, but kind. To teach discipline, with love and respect. To teach responsibility while building trust.
What looks like "simple" actions on the surface, and theoretically "easy" on paper, is actually a lot more challenging in practice, and demands a lot of patience up to the end.
As the parent, we have the upper hand to set the classroom tone and environment for our children in the school of life. So, what environment are you creating?
Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said, "Ar-Rahman (The Most Merciful) showers his rahmah (Love and mercy) to those who act with rahmah.
Have love and mercy for those on the Earth, and the One in the heaven will have love and Mercy for you" (At-Tirmidzi)
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