Have a New Kid by Friday - Dr Kevin Leman [91]
Showing Off
Boys will always be boys. They’re forever flexing their muscles in front of each other. But there’s a difference between flexing in a group of boys on the playground and doing it in front of your business guests who are over for dinner. There’s also a difference between boys having a burping and farting contest among themselves and doing it at the family dinner table. Kids are kids, and they’ll do dumb things. And the dumbest of all are boys who are trying to show off for girls. But eventually they too will grow up, become adults—and still do dumb things.
Let’s say you have company over, and your daughter runs into the room, trying to do somersaults to get your attention. What should you say? “Would you come back and do that again so I can give it my full attention?”
That would stop most children in their tracks, because most kids, contrary to how they act, shy away from the spotlight.
You could also say, “Honey, would you mind showing off outside?”
By saying either of these things, you’re acknowledging to the child that you know she is trying to get your attention. However, the way she’s doing it is not appropriate in the situation.
“Dr. Leman,” some of you might be saying, “how could I do that? Why, it would embarrass my child to say those things.”
Now, let me ask you. You came to this book because you wanted to see things change in your home. I’m telling you how, in 5 days, you can change them and not let these behaviors linger. Will one embarrassing comment ruin your child—or propel her into behavior that will make her acceptable in society for the rest of her life?
If you are the kind of parent who says, “Well, I could never do that to my child,” you’ll be facing these same sorts of dilemmas—and many more—down the line because you didn’t follow through on disciplining your children earlier in life. And later the stakes will be much higher than doing somersaults in your living room.
For a number of years I taught teachers who were enrolled in grad courses. I told it to them straight: “If you have a child who is disrupting your classroom, ask everyone to put down their work and stare at that child for 5 minutes so he has the entire room’s attention. When the bell rings, children are conditioned to run out the door. That’s when you say, ‘Now we’re going to make up the 5 minutes we wasted watching Timothy today.’ Hold the class in for 5 minutes from recess. Let the peer pressure take over.”
A lot of tree-huggers and social do-gooders got mad at me for saying this, but the teachers who tried it raved about how well it worked. And amazingly, it took only one time to curb the behavior.
When kids show off, you can surprise them by saying, “Would you mind doing that again? I can tell you’re looking for attention, so I want to give you my full attention.”
I was a child who loved getting attention, but that approach would have stopped even me in my tracks.
Shyness
“She doesn’t have any friends because she won’t talk to anyone. She’s really shy.”
Did you know that an extremely shy child is an extremely powerful child? Shyness becomes a way of making sure the adults in that child’s life do things the way thechild wants to do them. It’s actually a form of manipulation.
Perhaps little Annie says she’s too shy to go over and play with other children at the park’s sandbox. What is she really saying? “Dad, I don’t want to go over there by myself. I don’t know what to say, and I don’t want to go out of my way to even try it. I want you to walk over there and break the ice for me.” But does that do any good for little Annie in the long run?
To become healthy adults, children need to learn how to relate to others. That means communicating with others. Your child will never learn to do that if you’re always putting yourself in the middle and snowplowing her road in life.
What should the father do with his little Annie at the park? “Oh, that’s too bad, Annie. I thought