When my first child was a toddler, I read an article that suggested writing down every time you said no to your child and what you said it to. I wasn't very far into my day before I realized I said no a lot, and often for no especially good reason. My long-term goal was to raise well-behaved children, and somehow I had gotten it into my mind that this meant saying no a lot. The article suggested writing down your rules and dividing them into three categories: those things you will not tolerate, those things you don't like but can live with, and those things you really don't care about but think you should be making rules about. I realized there were only a few things I really cared about, and those were put into the categories I described in an earlier article. For a toddler, things I didn't like but could live with included putting peas in a glass of milk. I realized there were a lot of things in the final category, including bed making. If you don't share a bed, then whether or not it is made is a personal issue, but not a health hazard. My list of official rules began to shrink.
Another good way to narrow down the rule list was to ask myself, "Will my child still do this when she is eighteen and in the company of a date or good friend?" With this in mind, I eliminated the battle over my two-year-old's current habit of dumping her drink over her food. I was pretty sure that habit would disappear eventually. One day, she dumped the drink, tasted the food and said, "Yuck! It doesn't taste good with milk on it." Calmly, I suggested, "Then don't do it any more." She didn't. It didn't even take until she was eighteen!
When our children are teens, the decisions get a little more challenging, but the process still works. We have to decide which issues are worth fighting over. Is a teen's behavior simply a matter of being different from the parents, or is it an issue of morality, safety or long-term success?
Clothing is a common battle ground for parents. We have a few clothing rules. The clothing has to meet the dress standards of our church, which keeps them from dressing immodestly. The clothing should also not suggest you are someone less than you are. This is a value judgement and sometimes leads to debate. Clothing only worn by rough girls in my teen years are worn by perfectly respectable girls now. If the clothing is modest, I back off.
