Teaching Children to Be Gentle

This post will deal with helping children to self-regulate and learn when it is okay to be loud and rowdy and when it is necessary to be gentle.  It seems to me that children in today's society only have one gear and that is loud and rowdy.  Our society seems to have completely given up on the concept of teaching children to be still and quiet at all.  However, children in every other century that children have lived on this planet have learned to be calm when necessary.  Therefore, children in this century can learn this as well.

The Definition of Gentle
Webster defines gentle as follows:  to make or become mild, docile, soft, or moderate.  I like that Webster uses the word make as well as become in this definition because a child will not become gentle until that child is made to be gentle.  When someone makes something out of clay, for instance, the making involves creating boundaries and shaping the sculpture through both force and guidance.  Too much force ruins the sculpture as does guidance without any force.  It takes just the right amount of both to bring the object desired from the lump of clay.  Children will not become calm and gentle until they are made to calm down and directed as to what that looks like.  How many times have you witnessed an adult telling children to calm down without instructing them as to what that means?  That scenario usually ends with the adult giving up and just letting them run wild.  On the other hand, how many times have you witnessed an adult saying to a child, "Now honey, we use our soft hands when we play with our friends" while the children are completely ignoring the adult and smacking one another?  This scenario plays out even if the adult is demonstrating how to use our soft hands because she has no firmness in her speech.  If no one has ever told you that it takes both negative and positive reinforcement to truly train children, let me be the first.

The Overindulgence of Children
Before I tackle training children to be gentle, I want to touch on some aspects of our culture that complicates this process.  These aspects must be addressed before you will be able to see results in the training of gentleness.  The first aspect is overindulgence of children.  Gentleness involves a great deal of self-control.  Overindulgence robs children of most or all of their self-control.  When a child gets their way all or most of the time, that child does not have opportunities to develop self-control.  Sometimes I feel like C. S. Lewis when dealing with the ideals prevalent in this culture.  He often stated in the Chronicles of Narnia that certain people have read all the wrong books.  Books from before the mid 20th century often portrayed people that always got their way as selfish and lazy.  However, nowadays the "experts" would have you believe that children should never hear the word "no" in order to be normal human beings.  If you force them to do anything, you will damage their self-esteem and inhibit their ability to develop in their own way.  To that, I say hogwash to use a good old-fashioned Southern term.  These "experts" have read all the wrong books.  If you want to curb overindulgence, you must rain on children's parades from time to time.  They must learn to deal with not getting their way in order to develop into fully functioning adults.  That is just a simple fact of life.

Overstimulation
The second aspect of our culture I would like to address is overstimulation.  Many children in our culture are so hyped up on adrenaline that being gentle is completely out of the question.  The causes for this vary, but the main causes are not enough good sleep, way too much additives and chemicals in the children's diet, and no emphasis in our culture in providing downtime for children.  Many people do not know the true value of nap time for children.  Most people in today's society think nap time can be optional for children not knowing that the reason their children do not sleep well at night is because of overstimulation.  When children do not have rest during the day, they become so wired they cannot calm down enough to get good sleep at night.  I always have a hard time with new parents and my nap policies.  They freak out because I really put a lot of emphasis on training children to take naps during the day.  Usually these are the ones that have children that do not sleep well at night, and they think a nap will only complicate matters.  However, after a couple of weeks, these same parents praise me as a genius when their child begins to sleep through the night for the first time in years.  I shut down the vicious cycle of overstimulation, and the children are much happier for it.  I will not dwell too much on diet in this article, but it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that chemicals and additives in food just might cause hyperness in children.  At my facility I have the three pillars of well being for the children.  One is a good nap.  One is good food, and the last is good instruction.  All three of these components depend on one another.  Good instruction without the other two does not garner anywhere near the results that it does with the other two.  I also really watch for overstimulation in my facility because I have children in my care with ADHD.  These children can launch into orbit without much notice at all.  Therefore, I make sure all the children here have times of quiet play along with rowdy play.  The quiet times help the brain reset itself.  It is absolutely necessary.

Teaching Gentleness
Once you have ensured that your environment is conducive to teaching gentleness, it is time to begin the actual instruction.  As I stated before, it takes both positive and negative reinforcement to truly train children to do anything.  The positive reinforcement comes through modeling.  For this one I have many books and stories that talk about how and when to be gentle.  I also use puppets for this.  Puppets give children an opportunity to be gentle with something they feel is alive but really is not.  It is a great precursor to learning how to handle pets.  The negative reinforcement comes when you call them down for being rowdy, and yes, I did just advocate calling the children on their bad behavior.  It is absolutely necessary.  Sometimes the only way to truly get a child's attention about his/her bad behavior is to call it out in the heat of the moment.  Does that embarrass the child?  Possibly, but sometimes shame that leads to repentance is a good thing.  That type of shame deals specifically with the behavior and not the worth of the child.  If your correcting deals strictly with the bad behavior and not belittling the child, then that is appropriate.

I hope you have enjoyed this post.  Goodbye and God bless!! Check out Natalie's children's books at:  https://www.amazon.com/author/nataliewade7457