When you are about to become a parent or are thinking of starting a family, you look at how other parents around you treat their child, how they handle their tantrums, how they bring them up and you sort of mentally jot down what you will do when you are their place and what you wouldn’t do.
The most common thing that has been noticed amongst most parents is lying to your kids. Specifically about how the world operates. For instance: if your kid is demanding a sandwich instead of French fries, you go and tell him some story about what will happen if he doesn’t finish his French fries. That is definitely lying. You somehow hate doing that, you hate watching your kid getting upset, you wish you could give in to his demand and you also know that giving in to his demand can spoil him.
According to a family and marriage therapist Hal Runkel, who has written a number of books on relationships and parenting, said that by lying he means, “What spoils kids is not letting them taste the natural consequences of their mistakes. When we give them the impression that their choices don't have natural, logical consequences and we rescue them from those - when we say, 'Hey, you do that one more time, I'm going to take that thing away,' and then we don't take that thing away - that's actually what spoils kids." Like when your kid is given a toy but he uses it to hit another kid, you give him a warning that if his action is repeated, his toy will be taken away. But you don’t do that even when his action is repeated. This is definitely lying and it also spoils your kid.
Runkel said, “The world is not going to allow them to continue to depend on us forever. Our job is to prepare them for life without us.”
So if you are in a similar situation at a restaurant, let your kid have a sandwich that he first ordered instead of ordering a dish of French fries. This is because in the real world, the restaurant won’t allow you to change the dishes you ordered as per your mood.
In the situation where you think you are being too harsh with your child, Runkel says that you should listen to your gut feeling. This is because according to him, “Your gut gives you a good indication of when you're being too harsh or depriving them.”
Basically, what Runkel is trying to say is you should be guiding your child in every phase of their transition into an adult rather than being their keeper or the one who holds their hand in every situation.