Today we are going to discuss something that is very important for all parents to understand how to do, and that is walking away. What I mean by that is when your child is gearing up for an argument with you, being abusive to you, calling you names, being rude, and being disrespectful.
One of the things that parents get sucked into is talking back, fighting back, and arguing back. Parents get stuck in these battles of power and will by arguing with their children instead of just simply walking away.
What that does is it elevates you to the child’s level. It drops you to the child’s level where you are arguing as peers back and forth. This is not appropriate for you and it is bad for your child. It is something you cannot and should not do as a parent.
You cannot get sucked into an argument.
What you want to do when your child talks to you inappropriately or disrespectfully is say to your child, very clearly, “I am not going to accept that behavior from you, I am not going to accept that language from you”. Then you turn around and walk away.
Do not take two steps and turn back and argue again. You just need to completely disengage and walk away. Go somewhere else and leave the scene of the argument. Your child can not argue with you or talk back to you if you are not there to argue or talk back to.
What this does is it establishes that you have certain standards you expect your child to live up to. If your child fails to live up to those standards, you will not engage him anymore in a conversation. You just walk away and walk out of the scene.
That really empowers you and gives you much more strength in the relationship with your child. Your child will have no alternative, but to stop arguing. He can yell after you but basically it puts you in power.
Power is the position you have to be in because you are the parent.
A lot of times we feel that our children are abusing us and disrespecting us, and this is because we let them. We give them the ability to do this to us as parents. We empower them to give them that ability to argue with us by engaging them.
When you disengage and you walk away, you are claiming the power back from your child. You, the parent, are in control. You must be in control because that is your role as a parent.
