The child is not the behavior

Don't find fault, find a remedy.

Henry Ford

3. Objecting to the behavior, not the child, when a child's behavior needs to be corrected. Never tell a child that he/she is bad. The behavior may have been bad, but the child is not bad.

Love the sinner, hate the sin.

All of these quotes circle around an issue that I really struggled with.   I grew up with my NM not holding us accountable for some behaviors then punishing us for slight differences in how we behaved.  Examples, will illustrate this better.  When I was very young but old enough to be going to a friend's house alone, I walked into my friend's house without knocking.  I was totally bewildered when my friend's mom scolded me.  I had no idea that this behavior was not socially acceptable.  I apologized and I didn't do it again.  I also didn't go to my friend's house without feeling uncomfortable.  My parents house people were allowed to come in without knocking once they became familiar with the family.  Many behaviors are about social protocol and expectations in behavior.  Another experience that I had; my brother had a hamster.  I wanted to play with it while my brother was at school.  I asked my mother and she got it out for me.  In my enthusiasm for holding the little critter, I hugged it real hard.  Hamsters do not do well with small children hugging them very hard.  Instead of coming clean about what had happened, my mother took me to the pet store and found a hamster that looked just like the one I killed and placed it in the cage.  She had no intention of telling my brother.  What she didn't know was that my brother had trained his first hamster to follow a maze.  The new hamster couldn't do that.  I don't remember if I finally confessed or not but I remember feeling terrible that he didn't know what was wrong with his hamster.  I wasn't held accountable for my behavior and harming my brother's hamster.  Contrast this to being spanked for not cleaning the kitchen fast enough.  I had cleaned the kitchen but taken too long over each of the tasks.  I was called names like "Ding-a-ling" because I was barely functioning some times from health problems.  I ate slowly and was punished for being lazy and had to do all the dishes every night.  After almost a year, my mother found out that my tonsils were enlarged, I could barely swallow food and they needed to be removed.  I was defined by what I did.  The behavior would become how I was identified.  Lazy, mean, bad, stupid....I tried to do things differently with my children.  I knew about this concept but never saw it in action until I was in counseling with KavinCoach.  He lived this principle of objecting to my behavior but not to me.  Many a session when I felt consumed with guilt over something I had done he would reassure me that I could not say anything about what I did that would change his opinion about who I was.  He clarified how often I felt I was bad when all it was is I did something age appropriate for a child.  He also clarified when I infringed on the rights of others or pushed at his boundaries.  He taught me by example by setting appropriate boundaries and protecting them.  Unfortunately, you can't teach what you don't know.  My children would have benefited from me knowing this sooner.  Eventually, I learned to protect my own boundaries.  I learned to define my own list of human rights.  I learned that who I am is not defined by what happened or what I did in my past.  I learned about the difference between objecting to a person's behavior and defining a person by that behavior.  I learned that I could change my behavior.  Sometimes it is very difficult and takes a lot of practice but I define who I am and what I do.  He taught me that I can not control how someone else perceives me to be.  Their opinion of me is their opinion and often I can not change that no matter what I do.  Now, when I catch myself calling myself stupid over a choice, I sit back and think, am I really stupid or did I not know.  At school, the students are taught to observe the children and write down what they do.  If Lily hits Johnny, they are instructed to write exactly that.  They may not add Lily was justified because Johnny took her toy nor that Lily is mean and beats up on anyone close to her.  Learning how to do this takes time and effort to do.  I am going to alter this a bit for my understanding, "The behavior may have been bad, but the child is not bad.  There are consequences for poor behavior."  This one is a work in progress.