RULE 16
Treat your child with respect
I know a mother who is always issuing her children with instructions: ‘Eat your lunch’, ‘Get in the car’, ‘Clean your teeth.’ The other day I heard her complaining about how hard it is to get her children to say please and thank you. Now you and I know exactly what her problem is, but she can’t see it.
It’s frighteningly easy to do, though. Children are supposed to do what you say, whereas other adults don’t have to. So you ask the grown-ups nicely, but you just tell the kids what to do. The problem is that the kids don’t see it like that. They don’t notice how you speak to everyone else (after all, kids never listen). They just speak to you in the way you speak to them.
If your children have any sense ...
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