Situation of the Week (Kelly): "Storming off in a museum because of a pottery disagreement" If you want that to make sense, you have to listen!
Topic: Talking about your parenting ideas and principles with your kids (begins 7:05)
Link: Parenting Principles at Rational Jenn
Q & A: When (if ever) should you intervene with other people's kids in public situations? (begins 24:24)
As always, send us feedback and comments, we'd love to hear them! And send us questions, too.
First of all, I would like to express how excited I am to have found your guys' blogs. When I initially heard the idea of non punitive parenting I assumed it was basically "permissive" parenting. The more I looked into it the more I understood and realized that this was how I wanted to parent but I still didn't understand how exactly to DO it, if that makes sense. And then I found you two! So thank you. I like the examples you gave of stepping in when a child is doing something overly rude or dangerous. I do this too, and I don't think it's something that people would expect a positive discipline parent to do. I'm not sure where I was going with that, but anyways, I AM curious to hear what you guys have to say about the "bad" words. Are there basically no words off-limits in your home/s?
ReplyDeleteHi anonymous,
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry it has taken us so long to reply to your comment.
We don't believe in bad words, exactly. Some words are inappropriate in certain contexts (when talking to Grandma) and very appropriate in others (when you smash your finger with a hammer).
We teach these contexts, and explain our expectations to our children. They can say anything they like in the privacy of their own room and almost anything (including the bad words, but not unkind name calling) at home or in our car. But there are contexts where cursing is very rude (professional, formal, most public settings), and we explain these rules of society.
I don't know about Jenn, but my policy is not to ban cursing in public. I explain the consequences of doing it (mostly social stigma, sometimes exclusion from spaces), and if Livy chose to do it anyway, she would have to face these consequences.
Livy has always been very careful about the context in which she uses curse words, but she is a cautious, quiet child, in general. I would be interested in how much testing of these social consequences more extroverted or daring children might do.