"A gardener doesn't MAKE things grow. A gardener just creates the conditions through which the power of the seed is released." --Timothy Keller
When I was going to college to become a teacher, the professors echoed something to me over and over and over again. If your students aren't getting it, consider the fact that YOU aren't teaching it well... or at all. This was repeated and illustrated so many times that it is now burned into my brain, and as a first year teacher, I lived plenty of my own "I never taught them how to" frustrations. They were high school kids that didn't put their names on their papers. They came to class with NOTHING. NOTHING. No book, no pen, no notebook. And while I nagged them daily, my professors had been right. I hadn't proactively taught them to show up with the appropriate supplies. I hadn't taught them to write their names in the upper right-hand corner of their papers.
There is a difference between nagging and teaching. Let's define them.
Nagging: Yelling, asking, commanding, and/or begging someone repeatedly to do something that they continue to not do your way.
Teaching: Walking with the other person through the thing you want them to know or be able to do until they can figure out how to do it all by him/herself.
And in that first year of teaching, I learned that teaching works maybe 50-75% of the time if you're REALLY good at it, and nagging works maybe 5% of the time, if that.
I KNOW that nagging is ineffective. But I still do it to my kids ALL.THE.TIME. I expect them to know all sorts of things that I think they should know, but they don't, and I just yell. I haven't taken the time to teach them. I am much too busy to stop everything I'm doing to teach them at that moment.
And I KNOW from being a teacher that I was supposed to plan ahead and teach them the "getting ready to go somewhere routine," but I just want them to do what I tell them to do when I tell them to do it so we can please, for crying out loud, just be somewhere on time for once.
So, when I realized that I was nagging and not teaching, I taught. I gave them a "get ready to go somewhere routine." And it worked. For one day. Maybe two.
Now, part of the problem of the routine not working is that I get bored with routines. I like rituals and traditions that make me feel happy and nostalgic and warm and cozy like drinking coffee every time I sit down to write or listening to jazz or blues when I cook a real breakfast, but routines for the sake of keeping things organized are lame to me. I just can't keep up with it. I try to break the rules of the routine instantly. I don't know why exactly.
The other part of the problem is that I have 4 different people that I'm trying to get to do something, and we are the way that we are. We struggle with the things we struggle with... For each of us it's something different, but we THINK my professors in college were right. We THINK that we can educate people out of their problems. We think we can control other people. oooh. We can't? We can't make people wash their hands after they poop? We can't make people pick up their shoes? We can't make people think what we want them to think and do what we want them to do?
Nope. But we THINK we can. And it's more frustrating to THINK you can control another human being, TRY to control another human being, and FAIL than it is to ACCEPT that you cannot control them and move on to things you can control. Like Tim Keller said, "A gardener doesn't MAKE things grow. A gardener just creates the conditions through which the power of the seed is released."
I cannot make my children do anything, but I can do my best to give them the right conditions to grow. Even if I've got a cactus, a broccoli plant, and an apple tree...
The difference in parenting through control or parenting by simply creating an excellent environment is like trying to farm Monsanto's (Genetically Modifying) way or God's (Organically) way. And I don't want to be like Monsanto, but sadly, many times I am.
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