Teaching Children Self-Government

Beginning when my kids were around 4 and 7 years old, I implemented techniques from the book A House United: Changing Children's Hearts and Behaviors by Teaching Self-Government, by Nicholeen Peck. These techniques made a profound difference in our household.

With the skills and understanding I gained from this book, there was an obvious positive shift in our family dynamics and the contentedness of our day-to-day lives. 

Begin With the End In-Mind

When I first started reading the book,  I was a bit put-off by the fact that almost half of the book focuses on "Finding Your Family Vision" and " Establishing a Family Government".  I was reading this book with an eye towards practical tips for day-to-day parenting, so I was tempted to skip these first sections and go straight to the section on "Teaching Self-Government".  However, I decided to stick it out, and I was immensely glad that I did.

Those first two sections of the book allowed me to step back and look at the big picture of our family. They walked me through the process of thinking about our family and the type of family culture we were trying to create. A House United gave my family the guidance we needed to develop very specific guidelines and goals for our family life, including our Family Standard and our Family Mission Statement.

While I had never thought that my family needed to have a Family Standard or Mission Statement, in the following months and years, those two things were extremely useful in creating the type of family culture we wanted.  They gave us common goals to work towards and benchmarks for what we wanted our family to be.

For instance, one of our family goals was for our children to create lifelong friendships with each other.  Because the children agreed that this was a goal they wanted to work towards, we were able to refer back to that goal when assessing their day-to-day interactions and behaviors towards each other.  When one child was behaving rudely towards their sibling, or when they were bickering, we would talk about whether or not they were furthering or harming their longterm goal of being friends-for-life. Of course there were still some times when they did not get along very well, but overall I could see that they were really taking this goal to heart and working towards it.

Teaching Our Children Self-Government

Once the foundational steps of finding our family vision and government were accomplished, I was ready to start teaching our children self-government. In A House United, there is a strong emphasis on teaching children that they are responsible for their own actions and that they have the power to choose how they want to be.  By very clearly defining my expectations and the consequences for my children's behaviors, they were able to learn that it was their own choices which determined how their lives would be.

Whenever possible, natural consequences were used. For instance,

• If a child forgot to take their dirty dishes to the sink, that child was then responsible for washing their own dishes.

• If the children bickered over a toy, that toy was taken away from them both.

Synthetic consequences, such as earning chores or losing privileges, were used whenever there wasn't an obvious natural consequence. For instance,

• If a child chose to throw a temper tantrum rather than talking to me calmly about an issue, they earned a chore. 

• For more serious transgressions such as lying, privileges (such as our once-a-week video game time) were restricted. 

Keeping My Cool: Improving My Own Self-Government

Teaching my children self-government could only work if I was able to control my own actions. If I lost my temper and yelled at my kids, the lessons of self-government would fall apart. Hard as it was to admit, in the past sometimes I would get so frustrated that I would impose consequences to "get back" at my children, such as taking away a beloved toy. These instances would always end in lots of crying and/or screaming, and the overall mood in our home would be negative and unhappy.

Through the process of teaching my kids self-government, I worked on learning to keep my own cool.  By having well-defined consequences for the children's actions, my own emotional outbursts were lessened significantly. Instead of trying to think of a consequence on the spot (and possibly getting pulled into the cycle of choosing a harsh consequence), I could focus on calmly telling the child their consequence and maintaining a positive (or at least neutral) tone. 

When Chores are Used as Consequences, Won't They Hate Doing Chores?

One aspect of Teaching Self-Government that I was a bit nervous about implementing was assigning chores as consequences when the children have behaved inappropriately. I was concerned that my children would start to hate doing chores, but I was very pleasantly surprised.

Before we started using chores as consequences, my husband and I sat down with the children and discussed our new plan. We talked about how chores are a great help to the family and how we all do chores just as part of being a family. [We also increased the number of daily chores for each child over a period of several weeks, with the understanding that it kept any one of us (usually me) from having to do an unfair amount and feeling overworked]. Then we very clearly explained to the children that, when they chose to behave inappropriately, they would earn chores to help them learn to make better decisions. 

Rather than balking at the idea that they would earn chores for misbehavior, my children actually seemed relieved to have a well-known system in place. Over the next several years of using chores as consequences, I observed that doing chores often changed my children's moods: when I inspected and praised their work, they were happy and felt like they had accomplished something that benefited the household.

We emphasized that the chores were being used as a tool to help the children learn to make good choices, and over time the number of chores they earned as consequences dwindled considerably. Their self-governing was working!

Family Activities

In A House United, family work and family play are also given a high priority.  Peck writes,

"One part of building a family who respects and loves each other enough to be best friends is spending lots of time together. The person who spends the most time with your child will have the most influence upon your child's decisions in the future. If your child is mostly with friends, or mostly with teachers, then he will be influenced most by friends or teachers, and the family will grow less and less important to him. By contrast, if your family often has cool, fun experiences, then your child will feel the most accepted and nurtured by the family, and likewise become an adult who values family above all else... Having these fun times together shows my children that even though I have to correct their negative behaviors, I don't want the corrections to influence our relationship."

Given that we homeschooled, I already spent a lot of time with my kids. However, after reading A House United, I made a more concerted effort to have more fun times with my kids. That helped us make many joyful memories together and allowed us to enjoy each other's company more.

A Book Worth Reading

Reading and implementing A House United was quite beneficial for our family.  (A House United also covers much more than I've mentioned here, including specific tactics for teaching children to weigh the negative and positive consequences of their decisions, ways of mentoring children, and problem solving for specific behaviors.)  While we did not follow everything in this book precisely, overall it was well worth reading and made a positive impact on our household.

Peck also has a series of picture books that aid in implementing the strategies for Teaching Self-Government.  My children enjoyed reading and re-reading those books; they seemed to find inspiration in seeing the children in the books learn to make good choices.

Does this book sound useful to you? What are your favorite parenting books? 

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