How to Teach Children without Wounding Them

So, the best we can do is train our children with an awareness to minimize wounds. Here are some things I’ve discovered help reduce wounds while effectively teaching children.

1. Love your spouse. Let them see it. Hugs, kisses, gifts, taking time to be together alone, etc.—when your children see these things it teaches them and makes them resilient. Talk about how much you love your spouse with your children. Always treat your spouse respectfully.

2. Talk positively about your spouse. Say good things about your spouse to your children. They need to know their mom and dad are good people.  Even if a child has an abusive parent, they need to know there are some redeeming qualities in that parent. Be honest about their failures, but make sure failure isn’t their only impression of their parent. If the parent is so abusive that the child can’t live with them, they should still be told something good about this person they feel linked to, otherwise the link is nothing but a wound.

3. Be real. It’s good to acknowledge flaws in yourself and your spouse, and your child’s parent who may not be your spouse. You don’t have to sugar-quote anything. Even if the child has a parent who is abusive, neglectful, criminal, whatever—acknowledge the truth honestly, but make sure you give them something good too. (See above.)

4. Love and respect your child. Every child needs to feel loved and part of loving children is treating them respectfully. Don’t tell them you love them then turn around and sarcastically ridicule them. Tell them you love them and show it.

5. Reward and praise your child. Make it meaningful, but plentiful. Every child needs to know they are valuable and gifted. Every child needs to feel their parents are proud of them.

6. Discipline your child. Everyone needs boundaries. Sometimes parents need to impose consequences to teach those boundaries. They need to be as consistent, as immediate to the action, and as logically connected to the action as possible. It will hurt, but it’s necessary. When children need correction, make sure they understand what they are doing is wrong. Try to help them understand the reasons for doing good. If you impose consequences for misbehavior, help them understand why.

7. Be creative. Don’t just spank, send to time-out, or take away privileges. Use a variety of disciplines and rewards.

8. Be united. Children need parents who work together. You can occasionally discuss differences in front of your children. It’s good for them to see how you work through disagreements, but if it starts to turn heated, stop and work it out privately. Seeing parents fight deeply wounds children and compromises the parent/child relationship. It can even turn them in to rebellious manipulators who pit parents against each other.

9. Start young. From birth children sense love from the way you hold them and look at them. Make them feel love a lot. Before they can talk, they respond to rewards and consequences. Crawling infants can be trained not to play with electrical power cords if you pinch or slap their hands whenever they encounter one. (It needs to be gentle enough to never bruise, but firm enough to feel unpleasant.) They don’t yet understand why, but as soon as they are old enough, explain it.

10. Adapt. Parenting starts at birth and never ends. Love and train early and often. The methods change as they grow to adulthood so you need to be on your toes, ready to adapt to your constantly changing child.

11. Have Fun! Be sure to laugh and enjoy life with your children. Help them to have fun, but make sure you have fun with them. Joy not only builds resilience; it makes life worth living.