Last week I wrote about my idea of leaving your kids alone. When you need to do something during the day, or when trying to enforce their sleep, leave them alone. This is a way to build mutual respect.
This week I want to piggyback off this post.
I have talked to several moms who don’t necessarily buy into my ideas of leaving my son for a few minutes, or asking him to help me change his diaper. Other moms have tried, and tell me that it just doesn’t work. They try to go to the bathroom but their baby cries hysterically.
So they wonder, how can I be a self respected adult and go to the restroom? How can I teach my child to respect me and my needs, when they act like the world is ending if I leave the room?
Here’s the thing, this stuff doesn’t happen overnight.
I have been fortunate to stumble upon these ideas early on, and I have been working on each idea with my son for months and months now, persistently.
The ideas behind this respectful parenting approach take time. It takes time to implement, and it takes time to take effect.
So last week my advice was leave your kids alone.
Now I say if you want to be able to leave successfully, you have to first build a foundation of trust.
A foundation of respect and trust begins with communication. Before I was ever able to leave, I needed my son to trust me to come back. For him to trust me to come back, he had to believe my words when I say “I am going, but I will be back in a few minutes.” And he only began believing my words when I began asking him if I could pick him up.
Asking and telling him what I was going to do, before doing it, built trust and anticipation. I wrote about how anticipation begets cooperation. When you give your child the opportunity to anticipate what’s about to happen to him or her, they will more likely go along with it. More likely, but not always.
This means for months, I started with the idea “can I pick you up”. I asked him, occasionally told him, and waited. I did this for months. (Am I stressing enough how long this all took me? Because it took months!)
Only after I saw that my son was listening to my words did I begin to tackle diaper changes.
That’s because in order to transform our changing table experience, I needed my son to hear me. He needed to hear when I said lift your legs up, or punch through your shirt.
Months went by (yes months), and I was working on building more trust through communication. You see it takes time to build a relationship based on trust and openness. It takes time for him to trust me when I say that I’m going to do things but that I’m going to tell him first.
Only after I mastered the changing table, did I move on to telling my son I was leaving the room.
My point is, you can’t just jump into leaving your baby and hope it works. It doesn’t even always work for me. And you can’t just start talking to your child on the changing table hoping for a miracle.
This was always a big parenting aha moment for me, that to implement anything with my son takes time and commitment. I first realized this when starting a bedtime routine with him. It took several days before we got our routine down. The key was continuing every night, same routine, same time.
When I taught high school, I used to have teachers come and observe me because of the curriculum and methods I was using in my classroom. Afterwards, they used to tell me how amazed they were with my students. They couldn’t believe how well they worked in groups, tried each problem, self-advocated when they were struggling, and vocalized their ideas to the rest of the class. They were impressed. I was impressed too.
But what I told the other teachers when they began training with me was that what they saw takes time. I couldn’t stress it enough. Everything they saw was the result of months and months of preparation. It took months of me sitting with groups, literally showing them what it looks like to talk and share ideas. It took months of randomly calling students to get them to actually listen to each other. It took months of celebrating mistakes for students to feel comfortable making them in front of each other, and their teacher. Basically I spent the first semester building this culture in my classroom.
So I have experience putting a lot of time in, knowing the results will be worth it.
Is it daunting? Of course it is. Everything about being a parent is daunting enough, without the pressure of also trying to build a respectful relationship with your child. But if you truly want your children to be raised a certain way, any way, you need to set up the foundation first. And it’s never too late to start. Start now. Just remember, it won’t happen overnight. And that’s ok too.