Does your toddler run in the street? This one key phrase will stop him in his tracks!
By Michelle Shelton
This article only has 757 words. Learning how to keep your toddler from running in the street is worth
approximately 3 and a half minutes, isn’t it?
Does your toddler run in the street? This one key phrase will stop him in his tracks!
By Michelle Shelton, Parenting Coach
www.keys2kids.com
Does your toddler run away from you? Does he run into the street at times or run towards it, nearly giving you a heart attack? All mothers have felt the panic of seeing their little guy sprinting toward the street! My mother used to say; “you’ll die a million deaths before you get em raised”.
I often see mothers chasing their toddlers. The little guy is charging wildly toward the street and the mother has a frightened look in her eye. Once she catches Jr. she usually has some harsh words for him and in turn, he giggles and attempts to wiggle away from her. She might even give him a little swat on his diapered bottom to let him know she really means business. The mother then calms down because, after all, he is still a just a baby.
What are you supposed to do as a mother?
Let’s start with a question. What is your job as a mother? Is it to simply protect your child from harm? To feed him, clothe him and take care of his needs? Since the role of a mother is not clearly defined in our culture, we think mothers are supposed to love our child. Period. That’s it. Loving them means taking care of them and doing everything for them, right? Wrong! Get ready because I am about to define your real role as a mother and I want you to write this down! Your job as a mother is to…….TEACH. That’s it. Teach your children how to get along without you. God gave children a mother for this one thing in mind.
You are saying, yeah, but what about training? Isn’t it my job as a good mother to train my children in the way they should go? Yes and no. Training shows your children “how” to do something. Teaching gives them the reason “why” they do something. It is imperative to teach and not just train.
Jeffery Gitomer said it best when he said, “pretend you have a teenage daughter, do you want her to have sex EDUCATION...or...sex TRAINING? Yikes! When you put it that way, it makes sense, doesn’t it?
When you teach your children, you give them the concrete information they need to make wise decisions on their own. They have to think and decide for themselves. They have the information needed to embrace your reasons in a clear, logical way. It is even more imperative to do this with boys than it is girls because boys are usually more logical.
By now you are thinking I forgot about the toddler in the street. Well, I didn’t. My children never went into the street because I taught them “why” they shouldn’t go in the street. Now I will teach you how to teach your children the same thing.
A TRAINING statement would be, “If you go in the street, you will get hit by a car.” Haven’t most little kids been hit by a brother, sister, playmate, or cousin? If they haven’t personally been hit, they have seen people hit or they have hit others! The point is, no one died. No one wiggled around in severe paid and then disappeared. They know they WILL recover if the car HITS them. Hitting is not life threatening, is it?
Now, let’s do a TEACHING situation. Scare them. Does this go against your motherly instinct? Sorry. Reality is, if they run in front of a car, they are most likely going to die. This is scary. They need to fear the cars. How can you scare your own child you ask? First of all, I am not saying go out and rent a copy of Stephen King’s, “The Car” and show it to your child. I am saying fear is sometimes healthy.
What is a realistic way to make sure your child would have a healthy fear of cars? When my children were little I had a stroke of genius when I said, “If you go in the street, the cars will eat you!” Children know about eating. They know that chewing would have to hurt. Most have bitten their own finger hard enough to know it would hurt and hurt BAD. They also know that anything they eat is GONE FOREVER.
Once you learn to develop healthy fears in your child, your child will see that the world is a delightful yet scary place and it does have boundaries that limit all of us. After all, that is the truth. Doesn’t your child deserve the truth?
