Павел Эрзяйкин - Your children are not your children

I think if we listen to what the children want, indulge their desires, they will ride their bikes the whole days. What do you think?

What is wrong with riding the bike the whole day? You envy, don’t you? Do you have any other ideas? Then pronounce them, suggest your plan to children, ask about their plan for the day, then you will be in contact and will be able to deal. Don’t be afraid of children riding their bike the whole day. Try doing it yourself the whole day – you won’t cope. Olympic champions can’t ride a bike the whole day without a break. Don’t scare yourself, children will ride for an hour or two and will get bored. But if you wait for them to get bored, they will never get bored – they will ride a bike until a complete breakdown.

It’s quite clear that goofing off is more pleasant than working. I taught MBA students; they were adult, smart and serious business people. I suggested, "Let’s have some rest and have a barbeque party!" Everybody was for, I didn’t have to talk anybody into it. However, they were not extremely enthusiastic about doing some work. Why do children have to have enthusiasm? Don’t take away their bikes, better involve them in something. Start with what they want and what their dreams are. If you wake children up in the morning because you have to go to work, they don’t want to wake up – they don’t have to go to work. Don’t impose your plans upon children – help them create their own. Wake them up not because you need it, but because they will go to the kindergarten, bring their favorite toy there and play with friends there.

Would you agree that some children need to be guided, even pressed and forced somewhere?

To guide means to make the direction clear. Some children need to be guided – I agree, but you can press and force only in case you want to get their resistance and protest.

Delegating is the only way to operate in management. Related to upbringing, it’s the main instrument to form the responsibility for one’s life. The first thing we delegate to our children is their baby potty, then a spoon, then let them get dressed by themselves and so on. Delegating finishes when we see that our children can fully be responsible for their lives and can live independently. It may happen when children are under twenty, but it may not happen until they are over thirty.

The only way to effectively delegate is to make it a game. If parents force children, parents get resistance, hostility,

avoidance and protest. But if, for example, you turn tying shoe-laces in an absorbing game, children will never refuse it. At some moment, children will decide that they can do it without you, and then you have to be patient and leave them, face to face, with a new skill. My friends told me about their three-year-old son, who announced that he will go to the kindergarten by himself. The way he said that made it absolutely clear for parents: they can do nothing about it. Beginning with the next day their son got dressed, left the house alone and went to the kindergarten. His parents followed him behind the bushes, so that he would not notice. They were following him for three months, until they realized he could go to the kindergarten alone.

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"Dead" meaning "having lost their uniqueness, spontaneity, initiative with respect to the moment of life." Meaning children who do something to seek other people’s approval of their actions. The statistics are true for Russia.

The data is true for Russia.