Both children and adults are in a continuous process of growth. Both must learn many lessons the hard way — through trial and error. And both can learn some lessons the easy way — from the experiences of others. We don’t all have to lose our life’s savings to shady investors; we can read about what happened to those who didn’t investigate enough and acted impulsively with large sums of money.
Of course many of us have a resistance to learning from stories examples and news reports; we think we are immune to the natural laws of life. Only our personal experience can make a dent on our thinking processes and even then we may need many repetitions of the same lesson before the message penetrates to a part of the brain that can affect our future behavior. Adolescents are particularly prone to believing that they have special exemptions from normal consequences (“it won’t happen to me because I am invincible”) but many older people also suffer from this common delusion.
Preventing Disaster
Parents believe in natural consequences when it comes to teaching their little ones not to climb on stools (“just let her fall off once or twice and she’ll stop doing it”). However most parents work valiantly to prevent natural consequences from kicking in on the larger issues in life. They don’t want their youngster learning that laziness in learning shuts the doors to the desirable yeshivos. They don’t want their daughter finding out that ten or twenty extra pounds may affect her experiences in shidduchim. And they certainly don’t want their teen discovering that driving under the influence of alchohol can result in someone’s death.
In order to prevent disastrous natural consequences from occurring parents need alternative strategies. Although there will always be some children who learn only through their own painful experiences many others can be positively affected by one or the other of the following popular parenting interventions.
Create a free account to keep reading.
