The Conscious Parent

they feel secure, familiar with the rules, and confident that new ones
aren’t going to be imposed every day. Whatever rules may be required
need to guarantee that our children enjoy plenty of room to roam
carefree and worry-free.
There’s a difference between main rules and flexible rules. Among
main rules, I would list respect for the parents’ authority around
bedtime, homework, mealtimes, wake-up time, and so on; respect for the
parents’ authority when they say “no”; respect for self, including staying
warm and safe; and a respectful tone and attitude toward others.
Unfortunately for us and our children, the window for learning the
foundations of how to behave isn’t very large. Shaping behavior carries
the most weight between the ages of one and six. These are the formative
years during which schedules for homework and other routines such as
bathing and bedtime are consolidated. Unless we seize the chance to
shape our children’s behavior during these years, we will have children
who act out in serious ways when they enter prepubescence. If a child
hasn’t learned to respect its parents by the age of eight, it will be
extremely hard for it to respect its parents at the age of eighteen. If a
child hasn’t learned how to sit in one place and work on a project in
silence by the age of nine, chances are it will forever encounter these
problems.
If we want our rules to be followed, we need to be serious about
communicating this. All too often, parents are inconsistent with rules or
simply don’t follow through with them, then wonder why their children
ignore them. The rules of respect for self and others need to be set early
in the game. When we fail to teach our children to absorb our will and