Strictness or softness?

This is a very difficult question for many inexperienced parents. Most parents eventually find the right answer. But some, however experienced they are, are constantly worried.

I can immediately express my opinion here and say that in fact it's not a matter of rigor or softness. Good parents who are not afraid to show firmness where necessary, achieve good results with moderate severity and moderate softness. On the other hand, rigor, coming from cruelty, or softness, which is explained by shyness or indecision, leads to bad consequences. It all depends on your attitude to the child and on your educational principles.

In the approaches to education there have been big changes. It is difficult to understand this issue without a small historical review. The rigor of upbringing changes noticeably from one period to another. The Victorian period, for example, was distinguished by great rigor with respect to good manners and modesty of behavior. In the twentieth century, especially after the First World War, a reaction to excessive severity began. It was determined by several factors. The great American pioneers in pedagogical research, such as John Dewey and William Kilpatrick, have proved that the child learns better and faster if the teacher adapts to the level of his mental and physical development and simultaneously recognizes that the child wants and is ready to learn. Freud and his followers showed that too stubborn teaching to use the toilet or intimidating a child with sex problems can distort his personality and lead to neuroses. The study of juvenile offenders showed that most of them suffered in childhood not from lack of rigor, but from lack of love and attention. These discoveries, along with many others, led to a general weakening of the severity in approaching children and to increasing attention to them as individuals. Famous American pediatricians Aldrich, Powers, Gesell applied a similar approach to the medical care of infants and older children. But right up to the 1940s doctors insisted on strict observance of infant feeding rules, fearing that irregular feeding and unequal amounts of the mixture would lead to stomach diseases and increased child mortality. However, the results of the experiments of Dr. Preston McLlendon and Francis Simsarjan, published in 1942, helped persuade the doctors that the children themselves can determine the schedule of their feeding and still remain completely healthy. Since that moment, rapid and decisive changes have taken place in medical practice. Today, most babies in the United States have a more or less flexible feeding schedule.

Doctors who strictly warn parents not to spoil the child, now advise to satisfy his needs not only in nutrition, but also in love and affection.

These discoveries and these changes in relation to children and in methods of upbringing turned out to be beneficial for the majority of children and parents. Less became nervous, more happy.

But in such a culture as ours, it is impossible to survive such a change of philosophy - it can be called a revolution - without causing doubts and confusion for so many parents. It is peculiar for a person to try to raise his children in the same way as they brought him up. It is easy enough to learn new trends regarding vitamins or inoculations. But if you were very strictly educated, demanded from you unconditional obedience, good manners, truthfulness, if the parents were strict about sex, it is quite natural, even inevitable, that you will try to educate your children in the same way. Perhaps you change your views under the influence of what you read or heard, but when your child does something that was considered bad at the time of your childhood, you will start to get nervous, anxious or angry. And there's nothing to be ashamed of. Nature is counting on that, and you will educate your children with an eye for your own childhood. That is why different civilizations were able to maintain stability, passing their ideals from generation to generation.

Many parents have successfully raised their children, despite the changes over the past fifty years, precisely because they themselves once grew up happy;they continued to educate their children the way they raised them, but they took into account new theories and methods and did not go to extremes. When doctors stressed the need for strict regularity of feeding in general, parents generally followed these recommendations( and most children in most cases adjusted to this), but at the same time were not afraid to depart from the schedule if the child was very hungry,because at heart they understood that his demands were just.

When later the doctors began to advocate a flexible approach to the daily routine of the child, conscious parents and it did not bring to extremes. They laid the sleepy but stubborn and unwilling to go to bed with the child, because they knew very well( mostly from their own children's experience) that sleeping is the time of sleep and no theory of flexibility and variability can change it.

Parents, entangled in the new theories, are basically of two varieties. First, these are those who have grown insecure in themselves and in their ability to reason with reason. If you do not trust yourself, willy-nilly you will rely on the opinion of someone else. The second group consists of parents who believe that they were brought up too strictly. They remember how they were indignant at their own parents at times, and do not want their children to be treated like that either. But it is very difficult to achieve this. If you want to bring up children the way you were brought up, you simply follow the pattern. You know how obedient and polite you want to see your children. You do not need to invent anything. But if you want to raise them not in the way you were brought up yourself, for example, more gently or less despotically, you do not have a pattern for following. If the situation goes out of control - for example, the child begins to abuse your indulgence and gentleness, - it is more difficult for you to correct the situation. You are angry with the child, but the more angry you are, the more you have a sense of guilt: you are afraid that you are on the very path you were so anxious to avoid.

Of course, I'm exaggerating a little. We all, being young parents, partly agree, partly do not agree with how they raised us. The point is the degree of agreement or disagreement. The majority finds a compromise, which more or less suits them. I exaggerate in order to emphasize the difficulties that some parents face.