Fear or Regard – Why Do Our Children Respect Us?
“Shouldn’t we be teaching our children to respect us?” said a father in a session of my parenting class. “I certainly respected my father – I always did what he said. How can you get a child to respect you if you don’t use punishment or rewards?”
Whoa. A parent was confronting me with a question that had hovered in my sub-conscious for years, but which I had not examined because it was too difficult, too challenging. What was ‘respect’? How would I answer him?
I teach, and try to live by, an approach to parenting called Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.). When I write or speak about P.E.T., I summarise the course as ‘helping parents and children to develop a relationship of mutual respect’. I emphasise that P.E.T. differentiates itself because it helps parents avoid the use of rewards and punishment.
Now I was faced with a vexed question: “Are there different types of respect, and why do I think it is important in parenting?” . Read on for the full article.
Larissa Dann blog post 26 April 2016 Image courtesy Shutterstock
