Your responsibility as a parent is to teach your child how to become a good person and a well functioning adult. One of your most important roles in doing this is to teach your child how to be good at problem solving.
Let’s say, for example, your child is called to the Principals Office because he hit another child. You could lecture your child and tell him it is the wrong thing to do, it is not nice, and that it makes people not like you. All of these things are absolutely true.
However, that does nothing to teach your child how to solve the problem. The reason is that your child did not respond in a vacuum. Something happened that caused your child to have the response of hitting. Your job as a parent is to find out what that was and coach your child on how to deal with that problem in a more effective, socially appropriate way.
Knowing whether the other child called him a name, hit him first, or any of a number of things a child could have done, is not as important as teaching your child the proper problem solving techniques. Your job is to find out what type of thing set off your child and to give him appropriate responses for the next time something like this happens.
So if a child called your child a name, you could tell your child to tell the teacher. It is hard to tell him to ignore it. You could even have the child tell the other child, “please do not call me that, it bothers me”. In many cases the other child will stop.
Again, your job is to teach your child appropriate responses to the things that happen to him. This is so your child can grow up to be a well functioning adult. The way you do this is to identify the cause of the inappropriate behavior and then teach problem solving skills.
Show your child the proper way to address things that happen to him with the appropriate responses. These are the best examples of teaching problem solving techniques to your children.
