How to Correct Other People's Children

Correcting the Children of Others is Possible and Often Necessary

Nov 6, 2009

Most people who set clear rules for their children, will at some point have to deal with issues with other people's kids. A child's friend can be carefully corrected.

People do not want to be put in a situation where they have to correct someone else's kids, but in order to maintain a happy home environment, and maintain consistency when dealing with your own children, correcting a child outside your family may become necessary.

Every family uses different methods and applies different rules to rearing children. Even kids raised in the most permissive households can be restrained with the right words used carefully. Here are some suggestions to effectively modifying the behavior of other children.

Explain House Rules and Expectations

Children who visit for the first time may be coming from a more permissive environment, which allows them to do things that do not fit in with your home environment. It is imperative when during the first meeting to explain house rules clearly. This alone should help minimize problems with erratic and disruptive behavior.

Establishing the rules up front give you something to fall back to when those rules are broken. Your children, who know what you expect should be able help reign in inappropriate behavior as well.

Be Nice, but Firm when Admonishing

Correction should not be misconstrued as anger or lashing out, but done with the idea of restoring or maintaining order. A friendly reminder will typically be enough to get most children back in line, but it may be necessary to use a firmer tone.

Admonishment may need to be administered more frequently than is comfortable, but there would be no case that would allow any further punishment, except maybe banishment from the house.

Be Consistent

As with all child rearing techniques, such as learning to say no, be consistent when correcting someone else's child. He or she will quickly notice and utilize inconsistencies to their own benefit if possible. Inconsistency can often make visits nothing more than a power of wills.

Manipulative visitors can negatively influence your own children if inconsistent behavior is detected and seeds of discontent and discord may be sown. It is not worth being the "cool" mom or dad at the expense of seeming unfair to your own children.

Instill Empathy in the Child

A good way to discourage inappropriate behavior is to have the child relate to their behavior in a different light. Have them go through a role reversal and ask them how they would feel if someone were behaving the way they are. By taking them out of the acting role to the acted upon role, it may help them see that their behavior is unacceptable.

Obviously instilling empathy in a child takes a lot of time and effort, but even if you only see children outside the family sporadically, this method does get the child thinking and usually subdues them into proper behavior.

The copyright of the article How to Correct Other People's Children in Parenting Methods is owned by James Kinkade. Permission to republish How to Correct Other People's Children in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.