Growing Up Again: Parenting Ourselves, Parenting Our Children

JOHN HOLT author of How Children Fail

During the negotiating process, children learn they can count on their parents. They also learn important lessons in life: I win sometimes, you win sometimes, we both win sometimes. I can feel good about winning. I can learn to handle disappointment. I don’t always have to win. I can learn skills for cooperation.

Also, parents can remember that as children grow up and have less physical touch from their parents, one way they get recognition and make contact is by challenging, arguing, and hassling.

If both parent and child feel as if they’ve lost, it’s time for parents to take another look at the household rules and at their ability to negotiate clear contracts and enforce rules with love and structure, not punishment and criticism.

In order to decide which rules are to be negotiable and which are to be nonnegotiable, parents need to be clear and straight about their own values and about what is safe and what is unsafe, what is helpful and what is not helpful.

Successful structure is built from a combination of rules and skills. This section focuses on rules—what kinds there are, how to make them, how to evaluate them, and how to be sure they build self-confidence and competence instead of doubt or shame.

Some children are taught with super-rigid rules, with punishment unrelated to the deed, or with threats of abandonment or actual abandonment.

When loving and consistent boundaries are set for them, children learn gradually to set their own boundaries, to value themselves. They build their self-esteem. They get stimulation and recognition in safe ways.

When danger threatens, the impulse to fight or flee floods the body with ready energy. But survival in the urban jungle requires different skills than the ones our ancestors used in dealing with wild animals. Now the best way to survive is often not to fight or flee, but to flow. This requires thinking skills and self-discipline to overcome the imp