February 24, 2017 at 5:21 pm

One of the things that became very apparent when I ran parenting and child-care groups was that a lot of adults expect children to think like they do.  They do not have the capacity to do so. Nor do they have the same sense of reality. What seems a lie to us may simply be a confusion in a young child’s mind as to what happened and what they thought happened. We need to be gentle and take time to explain the truth rather than assuming the child is somehow “naughty.”

We should also look at the context of difficult or unhelpful behaviour as the child’s perspective may be very different from our own. Here is a true story.

We moved house. Everything was in boxes, including poster paints. My two year old daughter overheard my husband and I say we wanted to paint the bathroom.

The following morning I found my daughter (who had just moved to her own big bed, was missing from the bedroom.

I searched the house and heard a voice from the bathroom. “I am painting the bathroom, mummy.”

“I am painting the bathroom, mummy.”

She had. It was BLACK. There was black poster paint all over the place.

I took delight for years in asking my students and parents how they would react. Many were sure they would be really angvry and that it was naughty behaviour.

Now look at the context. My helpful two year old had heard that we wanted the bathroom painted. In her view paint was paint. It would be nice of her to help her mummy and daddy by painting the bathroom…….so she got up and tried her hardest to do something really nice for us. She was trying to be ultra good, not naughty.

Imagine if we had punished her for trying to help us? What damage we could we have done?

Stopping to consider the context can take a lot of stress out of parenting.