Monkey See, Monkey Do
Posted on 06.16.08 to Clare, Family, Parenting by JoanLately Clare’s been copying the things that we do. As always, we parents don’t realise how much our little ones are absorbing till we see them mirroring us. Sometimes, Clare would be cleaning the furniture with tissue or cloth, and now, she copies me when I am in the department store’s changing room!
I collapsed in laughter yesterday (even though I was highly annoyed with the SA at Warehouse in Vivocity) when I saw Clare stripping down because she saw me taking off my clothes. The SA wouldn’t let me bring all the outfits I wanted to try into the dressing room because of their ’3 outfits only’ policy, even though the place was very empty and had loads of empty dressing rooms. So when I made the trip out to get the rest of the outfits, Clare picked up her dress, underwear, shoes with her socks very nicely stuffed into them, to walk out with me. At that time, she was in the midst of pulling down her diapers too!
Everyone was laughing too when they saw her in her undressed state!
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I had lunch with Sharon on Saturday. We had a scrumptious sushi buffet at International Building. Naturally, we talked about parenting and all that and then I asked her: do you hit your children to punish them? Her reply was, never. She believes in the time-out method, and I must say, her three boys are living proof of how effective her parenting skills are.
They are extremely well behaved and even reject sweets and chocolates not because their mummy says no — they know the effects of sweet stuff and are really afraid of tooth decay.
Anyhow, Sharon also brought up an important point — by not hitting her children as punishment, she can also teach them that it is wrong to hit others without contradicting herself. It was an important lesson for me to learn too. While I do practice the time-out method, I admit that I sometimes smack Clare’s hand if she does something wrong, like batting my hand when I’m trying to feed her, which ends up causing a huge mess as food is flung all over.
The lesson hit home even harder last night, when I saw Clare trying to hit my niece’s hand because she felt that my niece was doing something wrong too! Aiyah! Classic bad example of monkeying something wrong that I do. Apart from that though, they had a lovely time playing together and conversing in baby language. It was quite funny, I say.
Kids. They are the one of the best educators of life and self-reflection.
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Comments ( 1 Comment )
Eh. What happens to timing out when your kid tries to run across the road with active traffic? Or play on the escalators, or do generally dangerous things when you’re out with them? I don’t think smacking at every wrong thing is right, but then the method of punishment has to be appropriate to the situation, no?
What do I know. I don’t have kids. I just have nephews/nieces..
areya added these pithy words on
Jun 19 08 at
3:35 AM
