While reading and surfing the internet I came across a statement that said, “Disciplining children is lot like climbing up a pyramid.”
On giving this statement a thought, I realised how true & significant it was. Most parents nowadays follow the upside down pyramid. No wonder we see so many cases of teens being indisciplined. When kids are small, it is necessary to provide a lot of guidance and discipline. We need to train them constantly by explaining them the consequences of each situation. We need to be consistent & persistent. It’s exhausting, extremely exhausting, but believe me that that is the key to developing a good human!
We really need to put in a lot of the hard work when they are two, three and four years old. We need to constantly check them, explain them and at times give them consequences for their behavior. We will see that by the time they reach the age of five, six & seven years they would have learnt to obey. They would have learnt to listen to you. They would have learnt that you love them and so they tend to be easier to manage. Now, we can relax the rules a little.
By the time they are in their teens, we will be able to relax our boundaries around them quite a bit and then in the coming years have no real rules at all. On the contrary, what we do is let them be the way they are for the first six or seven years and when they are used to no rules at all, we bombard them with rules. A perfect recipe for creating a REBEL !
We need to prepare them for the real world where they will have to be responsible for themselves. They would be able to handle it because they would have the foundation of learning a moral code, learning to respect others, learning to listen to you and, above all, learning responsibility.
That’s how discipline is like a pyramid: you start with a base of a lot of rules and boundaries and you decrease them as you go up the years. The pyramid gets narrower and narrower until you reach the top where the rules disappear.
And that’s when our little one is ready to fly out of the nest!
