Kathy Slattengren

Parenting Using Promises Instead of Threats



Posted: Monday, September 22, 2008

by
Priceless Parenting

One mom was exasperated with her preschool daughter after she pitched fit for 45 minutes upon learning that her little brother was going swimming while she was at preschool.  When mom was completely fed up with the whining and crying, she threatened to let her daughter sit in her room all day missing both preschool and a dance class.  Her daughter stopped crying and got ready for school.



In this case, the threat got the girl to stop her tantrum.  But what if she would have continued the tantrum?    Does mom really want her daughter to have the choice of skipping school?  Probably not.



The problem with threats is that we often make them when we are angry and therefore threaten things that we really don't want carry through on.  Instead of using a threat, mom could have used a promise when her daughter started protesting like "I'll be happy to take you swimming next week if I don't use up that energy listening to you whining and crying."



The benefits of this promise over the previous threat:

We want our children to be able to trust that we will follow through on what we say.  Therefore, we want to avoid threats made in anger since those threats tend to be extreme and not well thought out.  It is far better to choose promises we'd be happy to fulfill rather than angry threats that will deteriorate our relationship with our children.

Kathy Slattengren is an internationally recognized parenting educator and founder of Priceless Parenting, http://www.PricelessParenting.com. Priceless Parenting provides an online parenting class, parenting presentations and parent coaching.

While raising her own two children, she learned many wonderful parenting techniques from classes, seminars and books. Through studying research, she discovered a universal body of knowledge about how effective parents do their job. Her Masters of Education degree from the University of Washington combined with her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Computer Science from the University of Minnesota has enabled her to pull together parenting research into a course that is easy to understand and apply.

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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)
» left by Michelle Mackin
 3 years 138 days ago.
96 fans.
Excellent suggestions Kathy,
 
I have often found that threats have nothing but negative impact on anyone, especially my children.
 
God bless
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