Word: children
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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From foolish permissiveness to foolish repressiveness, too many American middle-class parents careen downward from the joys of birth to the final whimper, "What did we do wrong?" The hard answer is that failed parents tend to be failed people who use children for their own emotional hang-ups. They never stop, look or listen to the kids; they never grasp that parenthood is a full-time job, perhaps the most important job in a chronically changing America. They never see the challenge: teaching a child integrity-the self-respect that makes for strong, kind men and women...
...communication, the widely neglected art of engendering openness between generations. Many parents have no idea what their children really think because they never give them a chance to explain. "Can't you see I'm busy?" is a put-down that ought to be banned from the parental lexicon. "Listen" ought to be tattooed over every parent's heart. Regular "time alone" with parents so that children can unburden themselves is vital. As Educator Clark Kerr advises: "Spend time, not money." There is no better investment in a day when children are often better educated than their...
Basic to communication is the art of helping children (or adults) to express, and thus handle, their inchoate feelings. It seldom pays to condemn or reason with an angry child; strong feelings vanish not by fiat but rather by the clarification that occurs in a child's mind when a parent "mirrors" or states his problems for him. To spank a tot who says, "I hate you," is to store up his anger that will augment future misbehavior. A skillful mother listens, says, "I know just how you feel," and the child's feeling that someone understands shrinks...
Limits certainly require reasons, but once clearly stated, they should be enforced without exception. Letting a child get away with something that he knows is wrong or dangerous makes him feel that his parents don't love him-and rightly so. Old-fashioned as it may seem, children still need discipline, guidelines-even the supra-self imperatives of religion. In Seattle, a permissive father's 14-year-old daughter who had been slipping out at night to date a paroled convict was straightened out only after a community-relations officer bluntly told her father that...
...Discipline comes from being a disciple," says Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim; both words come from the Latin word for pupil. Children become disciples of parents who enjoy and back up one another; whose mutual respect and ungrudging praise for work well done makes children draw a positive picture of themselves. But the approach must be genuine; the young mind is quick to spot the phony...