
If you have kids who are bad, obnoxious, or abusive to others the last thing that you would want is to be blamed for their bad behavior. When it comes to the art and skill of disciplining your children, parents should always be on constant alert because they are usually the ones who get blamed for their kids’ faults or shortcomings. Bad children love to blame, manipulate and condition their parents into thinking that everything is their fault. Parents are always the easiest victims around.
Even at an early age, our kids can already start to become pretty perceptive about themselves and their surroundings. They start to think for themselves but are still shrouded by faulty, poor or immature reasoning skills. This explains why the normal case for them would be to blame you, the parent, for almost all of the things he/she fails at. It comes natural to them to manipulate or condition you into thinking that you are doing a bad job because they donít want to take the blame for themselves. When faced with the situation to take responsibility for something bad that happened, they would rather blame others because it is easier for them. This leads the parent to committing disciplining errors such as setting up the Why Trap.
There are lots of classical parent disciplining errors that parents can make and one of them is called the Why Trap. This disciplining error starts out when you, the parent, start to ask your children “why” they did the mistake. This explains why it’s called setting up the “Why Trap” because you ask the kid “why”. It is considered an error though because unconsciously you are actually sending out the message “who are you going to blame for this?” to your child. Both you and the child are unaware that this is actually happening and this error catches up on you without you even realizing it.
Making excuses or blaming others would be the natural reactions that these kids will do. It is because of the inadequate feeling they get that they resort to blaming others because for them it turns out to be much easier. Ultimately, children with behavioral problems turn fault finding and blaming into a habit of their own whenever they’ll feel inadequate. And the ones who get the blame the most are the parents because for kids they are the easiest target.
Children can also start blaming others if they want to like their siblings, other elders, their peers. As long as they donít face the consequences they would do just about anything to get off the hook. If you don’t want to start questioning your disciplining skills or your parenting abilities then you should learn to never fall for the boy-who-cried-wolf routines your children might play on you. Because making you question yourself is what they would want to accomplish.
Disciplining children is not an easy task and there is never an assurance that we cannot make some disciplining errors like the Why Trap. But it is good to always keep a close observation if we mean the best for our children.
Katherine Thompson, the author of this article, recommends that parents who want to learn how to avoid making disciplining errors such as the Why Trap should check out http://kidsbehaviorproblems.com/.
