Cluttering And Your Kid's Self-Esteem
My goal here is to offer you some tools to take back your time, help you teach your children ways to feel better about themselves that will carry over into adulthood and bring peace to your family. But it’s going to take work on your part. It’s going to take parenting and relationship-building. It’s going to take understanding and loving. And sometimes it will take discipline.
Please note that I didn’t say “punishment.” Discipline is a positive experience. Punishment is negative. When you discipline a child, you teach him the consequences for his actions, but provide him with insight so as not to repeat the behavior. When you punish a child, you perform negative reinforcement of the behavior which is self-defeating and frustrating. Kids need attention. If they get more attention from their negative behavior, they’ll keep doing the negative behavior. If they get attention from positive behavior, that will be their preferred method. That’s behavioral psychology 101. It’s true, proven by rodents and people all over the world.
Yelling, hitting, making ultimatums all punish a child.
Taking away privileges, time-outs, taking away items or cutting back their
allowances are forms of discipline. They focus the penalty on the action, not
the child. Admittedly time-outs won’t work with your spouse, but there are
better ways to deal with a cluttering spouse than yelling, hitting, nagging and
ultimatums.
Understanding Behaviors Enables Us To Change Them, Not Use Them As Excuses
Understanding a behavior doesn’t mean making excuses for it. Your children may clutter just because they don’t know how not to. They may just be messy because they never thought of it as a problem. And some kids are just messy.
There could be deeper psychological reasons for the behavior, such as a reaction to anxiety, change in schools, divorce, death of a family member or friend or many more reasons. Yes, learn to understand that the behavior has a reason, try to treat the reason, not punish the person. Sometimes, all you can do is acknowledge the reason and then explain that cluttering isn’t the way to deal with it. Sometimes you have to be a parent and insist that rooms get cleaned up, toys and books get put away etc. Sometimes you have to take away a privilege to get your children to do something they don’t want to do.
It’s easier to teach your child how to “not-clutter” than it is for your spouse to learn to declutter. They’ve had more practice at it and have formed more deeply ingrained habits. Fortunately, one of motivators that really works for adult clutterers is that changing one’s cluttering habits is part of good parenting. Your kids learn from you. They imitate you. The biggest thing you can do to help them learn to live clutter-free lives is to learn to declutter yourself.