Practise what you preach
This is one of those perennial parenting gems that get passed out all the time with the ginger nuts and the cups of tea. It’s a good solid theory - it makes sense, it’s true and, like most things to do with raising children in the real world, most of us struggle to attain the gold standard for this one.
Actually, very few people do practice what they preach, particularly those who preach the most. There are a few individuals who do have sufficient moral fibre to get there - people like Gandhi, for instance - but the rest of us just have to fudge our way through the uncomfortable moments when our fundamental human inconsistencies shine through:
“Dad?”
“Yes, son?”
“You know how you said that we have to listen to the police and that it’s wrong to break the law?”
“Yes, son?”
“So, why are you going over the speed limit now?”
“What?”
“Why are you going nearly 60 when it should be 50?”
“Uuhhh…well, even though the limit is 50km per hour, the police don’t mind too much if you go a little bit over that.”
“But isn’t it still breaking the law?”
“Well, technically yes, but it’s not like really, really, breaking the law.”
“So, it’s alright to break the law a little bit?’
“No, well I mean, it’s complicated son. Big people stuff. Hey, you want to get an ice cream?”
Tricky stuff this ‘practicing what you preach’. The problem is that what we try and do with our kids is set them up with the concrete ideals and then hope that as they grow older they’ll learn to accommodate a greyer shade of things.
Perhaps one of the most common and most glaringly obvious examples of not practicing what we preach as parents is when we yell at our kids for yelling. Logically it doesn’t make much sense, does it? I yell to try and get my point across that yelling is not acceptable behaviour.
If I’m being completely honest, the thing that I yell the most at my two dear sweet boys is to, “Stop Yelling” I’d love to be able to say that I always take them aside and have a reasoned discussion with them about the issues but, more often than not, I bellow.
So, let’s not pretend for a moment that we’re all going to practice what we preach all of the time. That’s an impossible standard for most of us.
In fact, this ‘practice what you preach’ stuff is one of the things that many parents today often agonise and wallow about in because we worry that our all-too-obvious hypocrisy and lack of consistency will somehow damage their young and fragile psyches. If you’re totally inconsistent and chaotic, and you work really hard at making your kids miserable and confused, then you probably will.
For the vast majority of us, however, a little dose of double standards usually doesn’t result in any long-term harm. If it did, we’d all be in trouble because our parents were just as human as we are.
Having said that, abandoning any attempt at modelling decent behaviour is both lazy and inherently bad for your kids. Our children look to us to see how they should behave. You can’t say mean things to other people all the time and then expect your kids to speak nicely to you. You can’t tell your kids to share their things if you refuse to do the same. You can’t tell your kids to be patient and to wait their turn when you lose your cool waiting in a queue at the supermarket. You also can’t bad mouth their teachers in front of your kids and then expect them to behave in school or at kindy (although I am constantly amazed at how many parents don’t seem able to grasp this fundamental fact!).
We are their most important reference material when it comes to designing their own policies for navigating through the world. They watch us and they copy what we do, both the good and the bad.
So, how do you successfully be a real person and a role model at the same time?
The answer, as with most things in life, lies somewhere in the middle ground. We have to set the tone for how to behave and how to treat other people, yet we also need to teach our kids that not everything in life is always 100 per cent consistent. If you can’t learn to deal with a little hypocrisy, then you’re going to spend much of your life outraged, writing letters to the editor and hanging around with other wildly outraged people.
Here are some suggestions for how to find that bumpy middle ground:
Stay on the message. Figure out what it is you’re preaching about and try and work as hard as you can to stay on that message. If you’re preaching about talking nicely to people, then try as hard as you can to talk nicely to people. A bit obvious, I know, but sometimes we miss the simplest and most obvious steps.
If you do slip up, then acknowledge it. If you do something wrong, or that goes against your sermon, then say it. Again, don’t do this all the time for every last little thing, because that gets boring pretty quickly, but you should openly fess up when you’ve crossed an important line.
Tell your kids that everyone makes mistakes, even parents. The important thing isn’t that you’ve messed up but rather what you learn from it and what you do about it. This helps them begin to understand that the world isn’t really very black and white about anything, and that coping with greys, inconsistencies and unfairness is part of the deal.
Teach your kids that none of us are perfect. Tell them that what really matters is striving to make things better rather than doing the same silly thing or mistake over and over.
It’s also my firm view - and part of my own parenting practice - to point out to the little person that occasionally the reason dads are sometimes allowed to yell and kids aren’t is because, “I’m a grown-up and so the rules are different! If you don’t agree with that,” I usually point out, “You’re more than welcome to get a job, buy your own house and make up your own rules!”
“And, if it’s close by, I might even come to visit.”
Nigel Latta, NZ Registered Clinical Psychologist
