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Show among the wind instruments you might have had better results. Musical instruments can be rented so you don't have to invest in various ones to find where your child's interest lies. Or, if you had interested her in singing in a choral chor-al group, music would at least have remained a part of her life. But no, you let her have her own way, immature as her judgement was, and perhaps without realizing it you got a kind of "she'll be sorry" satisfaction out of your act. This is the sort of childish quirk most of us carry well into maturity and parents, being young themselves, them-selves, must be on guard against them when dealing with their children. chil-dren. Choosing the proper punishment punish-ment for a child's misdeeds presents pre-sents many such pitfalls. For example, ex-ample, you've been told that a child must learn from his own experience, ex-perience, so when Jimmy is habitually ha-bitually late you make up your mind that you'll let him suffer from his tardiness. But some latenesses late-nesses are too high a price for a child to pay for a fault it sometimes some-times takes years to correct. So if it's a matter of being late to the movies, let Jimmy suffer the consequences, which in this case means missing the beginning of the picture. But if he sings in the junior choir at church and the price of being tardy is being put out of the choir, it would be pretty drastic to , leave his arriving on time entirely up to the boy. Sometimes a parent simply doesn't does-n't know which course to pursue. Take the painful experience of trying try-ing to get a boy to dress up during dur-ing those years when his untidiness untid-iness seems beyond your worst imaginings. You've been warned against letting your own pride in a neat looking family make undue un-due demands on your children in the scrubbing up department. Why use this guage? If Jimmy doesn't look any more unkempt than the boys he plays with, let cleanliness remain a matter of hygiene clean hands before meals and a bath at bedtime with no fussing about flying shirt tails and unruly hair. But if Jimmy looks like a neglected neglect-ed orphan among his friends, you may be sure he is aware of that difference. And the chances are he is uncomfortable un-comfortable over his rag-tag looks and merely pretends he doesn't want to conform. Then is the time to offer a gaudy new shirt or a pair of slick flannel pants something some-thing he can accept as not being too much mother's taste, yet becoming be-coming enough to make him feel at home with his friends. Legal Notice Do you ever find yourself giving a child his own way as a sort of revenge? You probably tell yourself your-self it is for his own good But is it? Remember when Julie stormed and stormed about having to practice prac-tice her piano lesson and so you said, "All right, if you hate so to practice we'll stop music lessons." Now Julie is 17 and has no interest in music, a sort of arid place in her life that may never he filled. Wouldn't it have been better, back when she was 12 to find out-why out-why she hated to practice? Maybe she had the wrong teacher; maybe the piano was the wrong instrument instru-ment for her. Perhaps if you had tried giving giv-ing Julie violin lessons or a choice |