Disciplining Other People’s Kids
Sunday, May 24th, 2009
Ever had the situation where a friend visited and her little darlings turned into monsters the minute they walked through your front door?
They climbed over furniture, continually interrupted your conversations and were generally obnoxious and rude yet your friend did nothing about their behaviour! It’s left up to you to pull them into line.
Disciplining other people’s kids is tricky these days. Despite the rhetoric of ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ that you hear in parenting lectures child-rearing is a very private activity.
Parents can be very protective of not only their own children but their own way of raising them. Disciplining of children in public by someone else can be taken as a personal affront to their effectiveness as a parent.
Disciplining the children of a friend or relative is easy if you are on the same parenting wavelength; both with similar expectations about behaviour and matching approaches to discipline.
But it’s really challenging when your standards of behaviour are postcodes apart or the other parents’ idea of discipline consists of a few feeble requests for some cooperation, which the kids routinely ignore.
The key is to communicate with the other parent and be clear about who is going to do the disciplining and reach agreement on acceptable behaviours.
The following guidelines may help with this process:
1. House rules apply. If children are visiting your house then the rules of acceptable behaviour that you normally expect should apply. Don’t be afraid to pull children up with an appeal to house rules such as: “We don’t play on the furniture here. Climbing is for outside in this house.” Then enforce your rule and lead them outside if they continue to play roughly inside.
2. Deal with misbehaviour directed at you. Respond to children’s cheeky behaviour, poor language, or lack of manners that is directed at you or impacts on you. Kids need to learn that different people accept different standards of behaviour and they should adjust their behaviour accordingly.
3. Check with the other parent if you are unsure. If you see inappropriate behaviour check with the other child’s parent about who should deal with the misbehaviour. Ask about their normal way of disciplining and get some agreement about handling it if they won’t or don’t see the behaviour as an issue.
4. Keep discipline methods reasonable with other people’s kids. Stick to behavioural consequences that are reasonable and respectful to the child. Avoid smacking or verbally criticising another person’s child no matter how poorly they behave. This is acting outside the realm of acceptable adult behaviour. Keep your discipline in line with what is generally acceptable in child care centres and schools and you can’t go too far wrong.
Working with parental differences takes some tact and diplomacy and a willingness to make a stand about children’ behaviours that you feel are outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour regardless of who their parents are.
