Is It Okay to Say Okay to Your Kids? Crappy parenting advice.
Being a libertarian who seeks out activities and organizations that have decentralized power structures like we have here on the Steem blockchain, I have a slightly different approach to parenting than your average parent. Most parents are either authoritarian in nature (high demand / low support), or sort of hands off (low demand, low support). I'm what you would call a peaceful parent, or at least I try to be. Peaceful parenting for me is an extension of the Non-Aggression Principle, or NAP, to children by their parent.
So peaceful parenting doesn't mean parental pacifism like a hands-off approach implies, it's more libertarian in nature. The child is taught that they can do what they want unless they infringe on other people's rights. Now, there are some adjustments that have to be made because of the child's incapacity to judge for themselves what might be best for their own well-being. For example, if I let my toddler do everything he wants that only effects him, he would surely run right off some high cliff and kill himself or dump boiling hot water on his body from the stove, not understanding that these would be consequences of those actions. In other words, as parents, we have to judge for our children what's best until they're old enough to judge for themselves. The trick in all of this is to only do so when it is absolutely necessary, which is admittedly a struggle to discern at times.
Now that I've got that explanation out of the way, I can tell you what the title of this article is about. As part of the whole peaceful parenting process, I'm trying to break the chain that began thousands of years ago which consists of violent and coercive parenting methods by all of my ancestors all the way up to my own parents. Given the fact that I had no internalized frame of reference for what peaceful parenting would look like in practice, in spite of my commitment to practice it years before becoming an actual parent, I spent and still spend lots of time reading books about the various facets of parenting throughout the many stages of child development.
Lately I've been potty training our son, and I dug up a book that I used to potty train my daughter as well with great success. It's called Oh Crap! Potty Training by Jamie Glowacki. I consider this to be an excellent book on how to potty train a child. The method is very straightforward, relatively quick, and much more effective than anything else we as parents have come across on this subject. It just works, and I commend Jamie on developing such an effective way to train the most difficult to train of all people, toddlers. Go out and buy it if you want to potty train your kid, you won't regret it. I did however find a bit of crappy parenting advice in this book as well that I encounter a lot from other sources on parenting who aren't on the whole peaceful-parenting bandwagon.
The advice goes something like "don't ever ask your child if it's okay" to do something. The reasoning behind it is that you as a parent are somehow in this perpetual win-lose war situation with your child and that the only options are: you win the fight or they do. As such, you are in effect asking your child permission to go ahead with whatever you're trying to accomplish, and turning the whole parent-child relationship on its head by saying "are you okay" with a, b or c. It's a very authoritarian perspective on parenting, and it is wrong on many levels in my opinion.
For one, with my children at least, asking a child if they're okay with something isn't about asking them permission, it's about checking in with where they are at on their confidence level and understanding of something. In other words "are you with me or did I lose you along the way somewhere?" or "are you paying attention?" If I'm trying to accomplish something with one of my children, I'm not going to try to erase their thoughts and feelings in the process. In fact, that's sort of the opposite of what I'm trying to do. I find asking my children "okay?" at the end of a sentence to be a very effective way of gauging whether they're going to be on-board with the plan or if they're going to flip out and throw a tantrum. Not only that, but it's their body we're talking about here. They damn well better be okay with it if that's what we're talking about.
Hint: it's also a good idea to head off tantrums before they happen than it is to fight with your child. Fighting with a child and winning in the moment will only get you a win for the moment, but over the long term, it will alienate your child and put them at odds with you, seeding later rebellious behavior. Seeing if something is "okay" with my child is an artifact of how we use language, it's not asking permission, it's harmless, and I'm going to keep doing it. I think if that's how you talk, you should keep doing it too. Don't follow this crappy parenting advice, because I'm sure you'll come across it in a lot of places, and it's just silly. Oh, and other than that part, Oh Crap! Potty Training is pure gold.