Jun 9, 2016

Ten Ways We Misunderstand Children

By Jan Hunt / naturalchild.org
Ten Ways We Misunderstand Children

1. We expect children to be able to do things before they are ready.

We ask an infant to keep quiet. We ask a 2-year-old to sit still. We ask a 3-year-old to clean his room. In all of these situations, we are being unrealistic. We are setting ourselves up for disappointment and setting up the child for repeated failures to please us. Yet many parents ask their young children to do things that even an older child would find difficult. In short, we ask children to stop acting their age.

2. We become angry when a child fails to meet our needs.

A child can only do what he can do. If a child cannot do something we ask, it is unfair and unrealistic to expect or demand more, and anger only makes things worse. A 2-year-old can only act like a 2-year-old, a 5-year-old cannot act like a 10-year-old, and a 10-year-old cannot act like an adult. To expect more is unrealistic and unhelpful. There are limits to what a child can manage, and if we don't accept those limits, it can only result in frustration on both sides.

3. We mistrust the child's motives.

If a child cannot meet our needs, we assume that he is being defiant, instead of looking closely at the situation from the child's point of view, so we can determine the truth of the matter. In reality, a "defiant" child may be ill, tired, hungry, in pain, responding to an emotional or physical hurt, or struggling with a hidden cause such as food allergy. Yet we seem to overlook these possibilities in favor of thinking the worst about the child's "personality".

4. We don't allow children to be children.

We somehow forget what it was like to be a child ourselves, and expect the child to act like an adult instead of acting his age. A healthy child will be rambunctious, noisy, emotionally expressive, and will have a short attention span. All of these "problems" are not problems at all, but are in fact normal qualities of a normal child. Rather, it is our society and our society's expectations of perfect behavior that are abnormal.

5. We get it backwards.

We expect, and demand, that the child meet our needs - for quiet, for uninterrupted sleep, for obedience to our wishes, and so on. Instead of accepting our parental role to meet the child's needs, we expect the child to care for ours. We can become so focused on our own unmet needs and frustrations that we forget this is a child, who has needs of his own.

6. We blame and criticize when a child makes a mistake.

Children have had very little experience in life, and they will inevitably make mistakes. Mistakes are a natural part of learning at any age. Instead of understanding and helping the child, we blame him, as though he should be able to learn everything perfectly the first time. To err is human; to err in childhood is human and unavoidable. Yet we react to each mistake, infraction of a rule, or misbehavior with surprise and disappointment. It makes no sense to understand that a child will make mistakes, and then to react as though we think the child should behave perfectly at all times.

7. We forget how deeply blame and criticism can hurt a child.

Many parents are coming to understand that physically hurting a child is wrong and harmful, yet many of us forget how painful angry words, insults, and blame can be to a child who can only believe that he is at fault.

8. We forget how healing loving actions can be.

We fall into vicious cycles of blame and misbehavior, instead of stopping to give the child love, reassurance, self-esteem, and security with hugs and kind words.

9. We forget that our behavior provides the most potent lessons to the child.

It is truly "not what we say but what we do" that the child takes to heart. A parent who hits a child for hitting, telling him that hitting is wrong, is in fact teaching that hitting is right, at least for those in power. It is the parent who responds to problems with peaceful solutions who is teaching his child how to be a peaceful adult. So-called problems present our best opportunity for teaching values, because children learn best when they are learning about real things in real life.

10. We see only the outward behavior, not the love and good intentions inside the child.

When a child's behavior disappoints us, we should, more than anything else we do, "assume the best". We should always assume that the child means well and is behaving as well as possible considering all the circumstances (whether obvious or unknown to us), together with his level of experience in life. If we always assume the best about our child, the child will be free to do his best. If we give only love, love is all we will receive.

Jan Hunt, M.Sc., offers phone counseling worldwide, with a focus on parenting and unschooling. She is the Director of The Natural Child Project and author of The Natural Child: Parenting from the Heart and A Gift for Baby.

Rate this article 
Culture
Economics
Documentaries from the legendary Media Education Foundation
Trending Videos
Project 2025 Explained in Schoolhouse Rock Style!
5 min - The song that could save America. Share widely. Written, animated and performed by Jason KravitsProduced and mixed by Sean Dixon with Jason Kravits, Christopher Walz, and Brian O’Neill
Trump Picks Hawks & Neocons to Run US Foreign Policy: Meet His Warmongering Cabinet
37 min - Donald Trump has nominated warmongering neoconservatives to run his foreign policy, including Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor, Pete Hegseth as Defense...
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)
58 min - A series of BBC films about how humans have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the...
What Do We Do Now?
9 min - What do we do now that the orange fascist is back? Support me at: https://patreon.com/ericrosenfieldhttps://www.dsausa.org  https://www.iww.org  
Life at a Walmart Sweatshop
13 min - In China, factory workers live in dorms owned by Walmart - workers pay rent and utilities.  If they move out of the dorms to live in a place not connected to Walmart, they still have to pay rent...
Vote Like A Radical
5 min - Voting like a radical means voting for our movements. This election and every election, #VoteLikeARadical 📣 You might be a radical. But if you’re like most of us, you never learned how to vote...
I Served 16 Years In The Air Force And Left Because Of Gaza
8 min - What would you do if you joined the Air Force to defend the United States but realized your job made you complicit in ruining the lives of innocent Palestinians? Former Air Force engineer Riley...
Trending Articles
Documentaries that Inspire Ecological Consciousness
Wondering What to Watch? Try These First
Subscribe for $5/mo to Watch over 50 Patron-Exclusive Films

 

Become a Patron. Support Films For Action.

For $5 a month, you'll gain access to over 50 patron-exclusive documentaries while keeping us ad-free and financially independent. We need 350 more Patrons to grow our team in 2024.

Subscribe | Explore the 50+ Patron Films

Our 6000+ video library is 99% free, ad-free, and entirely community-funded thanks to our patrons!

Sign up for our Email Newsletter