Parenting Guidelines – Teach Your Kids This!

All of the advice and parenting guidelines I offer to you is the same advice I will be offering my children when they have kids of their own.

Bonus Tip: Only offer parenting advice when your child asks!

Let’s discuss the Do’s and Don’ts when it comes to parenting.

Teach The Value of Constructive Aggression and Constructive Passivity

A lot of adults don’t know this and are convinced that passivity is right or wrong, or aggression is wrong or right. Viewing aggression and passivity as right or wrong is a recipe to become stuck, and only allows one way of knowing how to deal with problems.

The goal is for our children and ourselves to use passivity and aggression constructively when it’s called for.

A lot of people tend to fall under one or the other. It’s important to understand the value of both.

Constructive aggression is used when someone is trying for a gold medal, confronting a problem, or swerves out of the way of an animal or person in the road.

Constructing passivity is used when agreeing to disagree, respecting someone who is on a different page, or taking a one down when you recognize there is someone else in the room with more experience or leadership qualities.

There are constructive parts of both and you want to pass both on to your children.

How do you pass constructive aggression and passivity to your child?

If you haven’t figured this out already, telling your child what to do is not a good idea.

It’s not a good idea because then they’re doing it because you said so, and not because they’ve learned and developed on their own. You want them to experiment with both, that way they can decide themselves what works best for them in each situation.

Do that by asking questions. The key parenting component as a child gets older is to ask a lot of questions. This is from middle school until adulthood.

Scenario

Your child says they’re not playing in their sports games enough, and they are going to confront their coach.

Passivity approach: The parent may respond by saying, “Oh no, don’t do that. You’re going to cause problems.” This is code for telling your child what to do, and what not to do. You don’t want your tendency to take over their decision.

Instead, ask questions. You can ask, “How will you do that when you confront your coach?” Your child may respond by saying, “I want to know how come he’s not playing me, I want to know how to get more playing time.” That is a good response from your child, right? In return respond by saying, “Okay, let me know how that turns out.”

If your child says, they’re going to tell their coach to play them, or else… You might want to ask them, “How do you think that’s going to go?” or “Would you like it if someone approached you that way?” Again, you don’t want to say, “Oh, don’t do that!” Just ask questions, and see if they can come up with a solution on their own.

If your child confronted the coach and it didn’t go so well, you don’t want to respond with, “I told you so.” Use this opportunity to ask more questions such as, “How would you do it differently next time?”

The goal is for your child to use what works for them, but also let them know there are other ways to approach situations. If your child isn’t sure about a different approach, try offering different suggestions for your child to choose from. This gives your child the opportunity to get adept at using both, constructive passivity and constructive aggression.

Destructive aggression is yelling, losing your temper, demanding, and/or calling names.

Destructive passivity is letting something happen without stepping in, taking the one down when you have experience, knowledge, or leadership skills to offer.

Steering away from destructive behaviors and towards constructive behavior will help your child greatly, and this is what we want!