Excuses are part of our culture’s vocabulary.
‘It’ll take too long.”
‘That’s just the way my kid is…’
‘I don’t have the energy.’
But are they really true? Excuses can become such a part of our daily lives that they become beliefs. Kids learn what they live. If you are using excuses, your kids are too.
Where do the excuses come from?
In his children’s book, No Excuses!: How What You Say Can Get In Your Way Wayne Dyer says, ‘People make excuses for all kinds of things. Excuses give us a reason not to do things that seem hard or scary.’
Excuses come from one place: FEAR.
1. The FEAR of having to CHANGE if we use an excuse, we can maintain the status quo. We can stay in the discomfort we already know rather than jumping into new, potential discomfort.
2. The FEAR of ACCEPTING ourselves and our children for WHO WE REALLY ARE’we are not the perfect parent, nor the perfect spouse. Our kids aren’t the perfect children with the perfect friends and room, and grades. Those perfect people don’t exist here in real life.
What’s the payoff?
Excuses help us to shift blame, to give up on something that may seem tricky, to escape or avoid a lot of life and learning.
When we use excuses, we don’t have to admit that we don’t know what to do to make things better.
Example: Jenny is tired’that’s why she’s throwing this temper tantrum (If we would have had her in bed earlier, she would be better behaved). Mom and Dad don’t bother to discipline Jenny and don’t acknowledge that at 4 years old, she can learn to control her behaviour. (I’m sure she’ll behave better at the next restaurant) Of course, if they don’t teach her how to behave, nothing will change next time.
It is a perceived payoff’short term gain with long term pain.
When we create excuses and save our kids from their bad choices, we are not allowing them the opportunity to learn. They will continue to make the same bad choices.
When we make excuses for our kids, and fail to hold them accountable, we are teaching them that they can’t do any better and that they should make excuses for their behaviour instead of learning from it.
What can we do instead?
Hold your child (and yourself) accountable. When you hear an excuse, call it one and stay with it to help your child to own the situation. If the work didn’t get done, allow your child to learn from the consequences. If someone or something has been harmed, allow your child to make amends:
1. Own the behaviour
2. Make it right with the person that was harmed
3. Fix the problem
4. Know what to do so that this doesn’t happen again in the future.
Tagged under: parenting power,excuses,temper tantrums
Category: parenting
