Child Metality, how we can help.

Child mentality is one of those things that is talked about when children are abused, I want to talk about the more broad subject of children's way of thinking without influence.

With that said let us take a quick look at the mind of a child. A child is typically very naive and innocent to how things in our world operate. I know that might sound like a bit of a cruel way of saying it but that's what it really boils down too.

It isn't their fault though, they can't help that.We all learned things through experience. A child doesn't understand the pain of being burned until he puts his hand on the stove, then he never does it again.

With that said, I think we can all agree it is our job as adults to guide them to a more direct path where they don't have to experience as many bad events to learn. Lack of knowledge is never a crime, it's simply the lack of will to use the knowledge you have that is unjust.

Putting a lit match on a puddle of gas is obviously going to cause a fire, but for those who don't know that gas is flammable it's not really their fault if they just mindless chucked a match in a puddle expecting to put the match out. This is a rather extreme example of how lack of knowledge isn't the same as doing something dumb but it is also very good at showing you a mindset that a child might have.

So, with that, considering how a child's mind works is it really okay to get mad at them for something they did that they didn't know would result in such an event? It's true, punishing them teaches them not to do that again, but at the same concept teaching them fear instead of understanding doesn't seem like an effective way to keep them from having similar incidents. 

For example, imagine that we light a candle and throw a scarf on it, big fire right? We get in trouble and typical parental response is a smacking, but does that really teach him anything? Typically speaking you could argue that it teaching him if he throws a scarf on a candle he will get hurt, but what if he throws a shirt on a candle?

See how that can happen now? If you don't teach him that the problem isn't in what he did as much as the result of what he did (causing a big fire) and how to prevent such a thing from happening again (not throwing stuff on a candle) then it is easily very repeatable and explainable for a child to do a similar thing with just a slight difference in how he does it.

Teaching a child responsibility and teaching a child knowledge are two very different things, it is the job of the parent to try and explain things in the level of a child so he can understand it and keep from doing it or similar situations again.

However you also have to be careful of how you explain certain things to a child because if you make something broad seem negative and also make it sound like his fault then you can cause issues where he will make the wrong decisions later to avoid such events from happening.

Rewards can be sweet

For example, what if he just started throwing things around the store, how could you explain the problem here? The true problem is that it is causing a mess and you will have to replace anything that gets broken, but replacing stuff on a shelf doesn't seem like a good excuse to a young child who sees it as magically being there anyway.

So what do you do in this situation, well I was personally profound to find a typical response of the parent is either screaming at the child (really not going to help, sorry, you're just scaring him and drawing even more attention) or telling him a lie to prevent him from doing it. What if you tell him something to induce fear again? Bad idea and here is why.

What happens if the lie is something like "because everyone will make fun of you" or "everyone will think badly of us" well then, what happens when they get to school? They become very easily influenced by the slightest peer pressure. Drug use and rebellion are right around the corner.

Well that didn't work, so now what? What if we try something magical? "Because Santa won't visit you if you act that way." Okay that's cool, teach them self control by using Santa, this too can backfire though. When they get older and forget Santa they might also forget their self control.

They could have replaced Santa with something else to keep their self control in check but it's highly possible they didn't. So honestly what is the right solution to this problem? Teach them responsibility in the closet way to how the real world would, have him do chores equivalent to the amount of damage he caused. Have this as a possible money value, this teaches him that if he ever does anything that destroys something he will have to pay money for it.

There are a ton of similar situations like this that happen every day. We wonder why the generations are getting so rowdy but I honestly believe that it is the way parents are handling punishment. I'm not saying they are bad parents, I know good people who have crazy kids, it's simply their lack of knowledge as to a good way to approach a situation that causing the bad outcome. It's not really their fault, they just didn't know any better.

I'm really interested in anything that anyone of you readers would like to add to this or similar experiences you have had in the past.