How many times have you sat in a restaurant and watched a child under the age of six receive a scolding for not sitting still during a meal? Or heard a three- or four-year-old admonished for not sharing?
Or observed an eight-year-old punished for having a meltdown when asked to take out the garbage? Or witnessed a 14-year-old get grounded for freaking out when told they couldn’t hang with friends on a Friday evening?
The parental response of punishment and consequence for such actions is not an uncommon occurrence in our world.
Yet each one of those examples represents a child with an underdeveloped brain responding exactly as they should according to their stage of development.
Many of us fall into the trap of expecting a child to absorb and adopt adult behaviour even though the human brain doesn’t fully mature until sometime in the mid to late twenties.
That six-year-old fidgeting… Read the rest