There’s plenty of literature out there, telling us how to raise our children but nothing beats good old fashioned experience… but what if you’re a first time parent like me?
We’ll a friend of mine (another dad) once said to me… ‘parenting is all about distraction… master that and you’re three quarters done‘.
I’m two years into fatherhood and sure enough, ‘distraction‘ has been a valuable tool but I would like to augment those early wise words with another two… ‘deceit‘ and ‘deception‘ giving us the three D’s or my
3-D approach to raising children.
OK, before you go off on a tangent, let me explain.
Distraction makes sense to most early parents. The slightest distraction will cause any young child to forget their original premise and follow another and when used cleverly, a parent a can ‘steer’ their child precisely how they wish and without much hindrance.
Ramping it up a bit, we get deceit. At first glance this is NOT something you would want to teach your child but take a closer look at it’s meaning ‘concealment or distortion of the truth for the purpose of misleading‘. Essentially it’s all about trickery…
Let your child believe one thing yet in reality it’s another.
…and before you get all ‘high and mighty’ with me, all parents are deceitful towards their children at one time or another. Just take a look at any nursery rhyme or kids book and there will be a ‘bear driving a car’ or ‘talking dogs’ or any number of fictitious characters doing all kinds of impossible things and we all encourage our children to believe these distortions of the truth for the purpose of allowing them to indulge in a fantasy world of make believe.
You then round it all off with deception. This requires a subtle approach but is doable and achieves fantastic results when done right. Essentially it’s the ‘falsification of evidence to induce the child to react in a manner prejudicial to the child’s interests‘.
eg. “choose between the red and the green shirt.., that’s all that is clean!” when in reality there are also other clean shirts. This is a classic example of deception and we all do it and it works well (unless of course your child decides to inspect the wardrobe and sees the other shirts).
So there you have it, my 3-D approach to raising children.
Tags: children