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Do your children respect you? Or do you just have mere compliance?
Recently, Jackie at Parental Stress wrote a piece on the question of respect for parents, which had some interesting insights.
She offered 3 reasons why your children might not respect you:
1. They don’t know how to respect. Does your kid know what respect means? Why it is given? And how it is shown? Do they know the form of treating with respect — how they would act and talk if they were “showing respect?”
2. Do you really deserve respect? I don’t mean the trade-off between taking care of/providing for someone and the compliance they pay back. I mean the two-way street of respect, which is earned and learned. Do you treat them with respect, and also treat them how they should understand themselves to be treated when they are not respected? Do you do it consistently? or do you just brush off their disrespectful behavior sometimes, so they don’t really learn?
3. You allow them to disrespect you and others. Again, no consequences when they speak rudely or improperly. You do everything for them and then feel a martyr when they don’t value it as highly as you think they should. You allow others to treat you without respect as well, perhaps, and generally allow the behavior.
Solutions for these 3 reasons:
Tell them what you want them to do to show respect.
Recognize and validate your kids thoughts, feelings, opinions, suggestions — don’t just demand they don’t do something.
Let them do things for themselves, and understand the value of those things.
