A Lesson?

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Lets talk about what is and is not appropriate when teaching a child a lesson.

scenario #1 - Your child continues to run around the room coming dangerously close to the corner of a table with each turn around the room. You mention that he should be careful and to watch the corner. He doesn't and he runs into it. The odds of him seriously hurting himself are very low and so this is a lesson he will only learn from his own trial and error.

Scenario # 2 - Your 14 year old granddaughter is angry and is threatening to run away from home. You take her and drop her off at a hospital in Indiana where they have just passed a law giving you immunity for abandonment. This is not acceptable because you see you have to go much farther out of your way to "teach" her something she has no way of truly understanding in the first place. She will not understand the fact that you abandoned her (which you still did) until days, months or even years later. And if you are going to chose this direction you completely undermine the lesson when you went to pick her back up.

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