I'm Not Your Friend, I'm Your Parent: Helping Your Children Set the Boundaries They Need...and Really Want

Praise for

I’m Not Your Friend, I’m Your Parent

Intelligent, insightful, interesting, and indisputably fun—just what you would expect from E. D. Hill.

—Dr. MEHMET OZ

VICE CHAIRMAN AND PROFESSOR OF

SURGERY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, AND

AUTHOR , THE YOU SERIES

There is a battle raging for the soul of your children. E. D. Hill clearly defines the fight and offers precise advice to protect kids from terrible influences. This book is a must-have.

—BILL O’REILLY

ANCHOR, FOX NEWS CHANNEL

E. D. Hill never ceases to impress me. Forget the cheerleader/prom-queen looks—this woman is a no-nonsense, uncompromising, wisdom spewing, sock-it-to-ya Socrates. I secretly wish I could send my kids to E. D.’s house for a week!

—KATHIE LEE GIFFORD

"I picked up I’m Not Your Friend, I’m Your Parent with the intention of scanning it and ended up reading it in one sitting! E. D. offers a compelling mix of common sense and practical advice from someone who’s been there, done that, and developed all the ‘right stuff ’ in the process. Nothing would strengthen America more than every parent reading this book."

—JOHN ROSEMOND

AUTHOR, PARENTING BY THE BOOK

"Who better than E. D. Hill—a mother of eight and a successful television news anchor—to present modern day parenting issues with both objectivity and passion. I’m Not Your Friend, I’m Your Parent offers tangible tactics to tackle today’s parenting dilemmas. Thanks, E. D., for being a parent’s friend and for your guidebook chock full of tips and treasures."

—JANINE TURNER

ACTRESS AND AUTHOR,

HOLDING HER HEAD HIGH

© 2008 E. D. Hill

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or any other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Page design by Mandi Cofer.

Thomas Nelson, Inc. titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hill, E. D. (Edith D.), 1964-

   I’m not your friend, i’m your parent : helping your children set the

boundaries they need—and really want / E.D. Hill.

      p. cm.

   Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-7852-2810-3 (hardcover)

   1. Parenting. 2. Child rearing. 3. Parent and child. I. Title.

HQ755.8.H55 2008

649’.64—dc2 2

2008010176

08 09 10 11 12 QW 5 4 3 2 1

Information about External Hyperlinks in this ebook

Please note that footnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication.

I dedicate this book to the biggest, most frustrating,

most unpredictable, and as it turns out,

most fulfilling projects in my life:

Jordan, Laurel, Matt, Collin, J. D., Wyatt, Sumner, and Wolf.

If you miss curfew, you’re grounded for life.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 P–T–E: Please, Thank You, and Excuse Me

Chapter 2 Spanking, Time-Outs, and Other Eight-Letter Words

Chapter 3 Ca-ching, Ca-ching: The Allowance Lowdown

Chapter 4 Fair or Foul: Sportsmanship

Chapter 5 The Dress Code

Chapter 6 Teenagers: The Alien Years

Chapter 7 Driving, Dating, and Other Death-Defying Feats

Chapter 8 The Not-So-Good, the Pretty Bad, and the Really Ugly

Conclusion

Appendix A Sample of Home Rules Contract

Appendix B Sample of Driving Contract

Notes

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Thank you to David Dunham, Debbie Wickwire, Scott Harris, Mary Hollingsworth, Paula Major, Kit Kittle, and a multitude of viewers for invaluable encouragement, information, assistance, and patience!

Introduction

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will

eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I’m not talking

about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

—BILL COSBY

You aren’t a perfect parent and never will be. Neither will I nor anyone else. Let that statement sink in. Deal with it. Your children will never, ever be perfect from birth to death. But, unfortunately, we live in a world that strives for perfection. It’s the ultimate goal. We believe we must have perfect children and, therefore, we must be perfect parents. Both are impossible!

Don’t give up, though, because what is possible is, through their own successes and failures, to teach our children the rules in life, how to behave, and why it’s important to keep on trying to do better so they can grow into happy, productive, loving adults. That’s our job as parents. It’s tedious, time-consuming, and it lasts a lifetime.

If you aren’t ready to acknowledge that kids aren’t perfect, including your own, then you shouldn’t have children yet. When my children were young, I began telling them, I love you more than the whole wide world, plus infinity. I still say it to them often. But I don’t believe that loving them means that all I should want to do is make them happy or even that it’s my job to make them happy. In fact, I remind them that the Declaration of Independence only guarantees the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Basically, it’s all there in front of you, but you have to go get it yourself. Permissive parents believe they are supposed to give their children happiness. They buy their children everything they want, let them do everything they want, then are floored when their children misbehave any way they want; so they ignore the poor behavior, since addressing it would make their children unhappy.

Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.

—PETER USTINOV

Confronting a problem means admitting a failure, at least temporarily. But Americans don’t like to admit failure. It’s considered a weakness. My best advice is, if you aren’t ready for that, you aren’t ready for the job of being a parent. Unfortunately, too many people take the job and either aren’t prepared for it or don’t really want it. So why do they have children? Some seem to think it’s an obligation.

I first became aware of the pressures adult women face when I watched Princess Diana marry Prince Charles. Everyone was talking about how soon she would have a child, an heir to the throne. Within a year she had a son, and then everyone started talking about when she would have a backup. No one talked about whether she and Charles wanted children. Society dictated she give birth to an heir and a spare. Admittedly, the example of Princess Diana is an extreme one, but think about how often we commoners ask newlyweds when they’re going to start a family, instead of whether they want children and are prepared for the daunting job.

Of course, every woman then thinks it’s expected of her, and she’ll be seen as odd if she doesn’t have kids. Several women I know shared with me that they were thrilled their last child was finally going off to boarding school or college because now they could have a life and do the things they wanted. I’m always baffled by that. It seems to me they should have determined the life they wanted before having children.

Peter De Vries said, A suburban mother’s role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after. Well, not forever, just for the first fifteen years after you give birth! Your family is your life. Permissive parents mistakenly interpret that to mean children should run the family. Everything revolves around the children’s ballet classes, soccer games, and cooking their own special meals each night because they don’t like to eat what the rest of the family eats.

Permissive parenting will eventually drive you insane unless you really don’t care how your children turn out. They will run you ragged meeting their demands. I think I actually had a bit of a break by having such a large family. Many people assume that since I have a large family, I must be making some kind of religious statement. I’m not. Oddly enough, when I was twenty, I didn’t think I wanted any children. In fact, we were surprised when we found out Laurel was on the way. In a short amount of time, I positively loved a child that hadn’t even yet been born. Then I couldn’t think of life without her. At that point, I didn’t think about the heartache and hard work that would accompany trying to be a good parent to her. Frankly, there was no one and no book that spelled out what real parenting is all about. Right after she was born I told my mother-in-law that I intended to have six children. She thought I was nuts . . . probably still does.

My work will be finished if I succeed in carrying conviction

to the human family that every man or woman, however weak

in body, is the guardian of his or her self-respect and liberty.

—MAHATMA GANDHI

While children will bring you the greatest joy God can possibly give you, they will also cause you the greatest anguish. Even if you shouldn’t, you will feel that somehow you failed them if they don’t turn out to be exactly the way you imagined. It’s that desire to do everything so they don’t fail that has become our parental albatross. It’s why we’re so vulnerable each time a newly minted child expert tells us we’re doing it the wrong way. You cannot give a child self-respect, and you cannot build a child’s self-confidence. Your job is to provide the lessons, the time, the guidance, the encouragement, and the role modeling so they can learn to create those qualities in themselves.

Thomas Edison once said, Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. So why do children and young adults give up? It’s because they haven’t learned how to deal with failure. The child experts told parents to focus on building their children’s self-esteem. You know what happened? That concept led to a generation of young adults who are told from the time they are born that they’re perfect. Every possible thing to build their self-confidence has been done for them. Yet many can’t function without medication and therapy. They don’t feel good about themselves, no matter how wonderful they’re told they are. They act out, dope up, and think the world owes them something. Why? The experts urged us to throw away judgment. The result: instead of having self-confident kids with unlimited self-esteem, we have a record number of children taking antidepressants, and we see a staggering increase in the number of schools for problem students. If the experts were right that unconditional acceptance was the key to happy kids, what went so wrong?

You should examine yourself daily. If you find faults, you should

correct them. When you find none, you should try even harder.

—ISRAEL ZANGWILL

To correct a problem, you have to find the fault. You must judge whether you have done something well or poorly. But judgment somehow has become a dirty word because of the free-to-be-you-and-me, permissive-parenting crowd. The inability to judge what is right and wrong led to a justice system with thousands of depraved killers. Hey, who are you to tell me that I can’t be a murderer, and by the way, you’re free to be my victim. I’m free to drink and drive, and you’re free to stay off the road. How did judgment die? We are told by the so-called experts that being judgmental is wrong and harmful.

Imagine this scenario: It’s the sixth-grade science fair. Sally crafted an intricate spring-loaded device that will automatically close a door if the wind blows it open. She spent hours thinking about the design and putting it together. Pam decided to illustrate gravity by rolling a marble down a triangular wooden block she took from her younger sister. In today’s society, both girls will get the same amount of praise from their parents and teachers. But what if Pam’s parents were to say, Sally really came up with a creative invention, and perhaps, if you had spent more time and effort, you could have come up with something more innovative? Experts tell us that Pam might feel so badly that she’d simply quit, not even try, pull back. News flash! She’s already quit and isn’t trying. She doesn’t have to try; she knows that good and bad are too often treated the same because the prevailing wisdom says if you judge children, they might not feel good about themselves, and that will lead to low self-esteem. Baloney! Self-esteem can’t be built into children. It comes to them when they accomplish things they know are right and good.

Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their

sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.

—SAM EWING

Across America thousands of games will be played this weekend. The score will be a tie. No, I’m not a psychic. I know the teams will tie because we’ve been told that having a winning or a losing team will cause some people to think they aren’t as good. Guess what? They aren’t! You know it and they know it. Yet at the end of the game, the teams are declared tied. But wait. Does your company always tie another company’s earnings statement? Does every architect who competes to design a building get to build it so that he or she feels talented? No. So how are we preparing kids to deal with the reality that sometimes they’re not number one? We tell them they are great soccer players even when they can’t even kick the ball straight. When they do finally develop the skill, we again tell them they’re great. Wait a minute, they think, I’m a great player whether I do a good job or a bad job?

What is the lesson? Today there are entire schools that don’t give grades because they feel grades force teachers to make judgments. Instead, they want each child to simply learn. They don’t have to learn anything specific, mind you. In fact, I’ve seen some children who were given the option of skipping math altogether for a year.

The following is certainly on the fringe, but some educators have even gone so far as to say that children who think 2 + 2 = 5 are doing well. They’re not wrong, you see; they’re just unique and creative. They’re not afraid to think outside the box because no matter what they say, think, or do, they will not be judged. They are perfect. Oops! Reality check: they’re only perfect until the time comes to get into college or get a job. You can tell an admissions director that computing the wrong answer on tests is the way you express yourself all you want, but it won’t get you into your university of choice. Yes, creativity is wonderful. But it’s just as important, if not more so, to learn how to operate within established boundaries.

The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want, said Ben Stein. Of course, children want everything. Left to their own devices and unsupervised decisions, they would eat candy and drink soda pop until their veins ran pure sugar. It wouldn’t be healthy for them though. Why don’t kids do that? Most parents won’t let them. Parents make the judgment that too much candy is bad for kids. So why are parents so reluctant to make judgments about much bigger and longer-term issues? The ultimate goal is to develop adults who can make good choices for themselves and society.

The New Haven Independent published an article describing a seventeen-year-old girl named Sherrell Willis. She was speaking at a government hearing about a proposed curfew:

Curfew, curfew, curfew! All we hear from you elders is curfew. Why do you think we shoot each other? To get attention. Parents, you need to understand that no matter how your life is going, you made us, you need to spend time with us; no matter how tough your job was or how bad a day you had.¹

Sherrell didn’t mind the curfew, but she wanted to make the point that a curfew alone, a government mandated and enforced policy, wasn’t going to change the real problem. Children need parents who care enough to tell them to come home, to study, to talk to them about their day, teach them, and be role models for them. Children need to be able to determine what is right and wrong, consider the consequences, and intelligently assess how to best run their lives. To be able to do that, you must do your job as a parent. Don’t just be their friend; be a parent. Raise your children. Love them, but judge them carefully.

The world is full of women blindsided by the

unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted

by how a job can be terrific and torturous.

—ANNA QUINDLEN

Judging your children means you must own up to the fact that they aren’t perfect. Granted, that’s one of the most difficult things to force yourself to do. I can be critical about myself, critical about my husband, critical about my mother, father, and siblings. But something happens when my kids err or someone is critical of them. I instinctively want to jump to their defense. I know them. I know their hearts. Each of my children is kind, caring, and empathetic. But every so often—and sometimes pretty frequently—they mess up. When they break a small rule, it doesn’t bother me much. They’re human. They are punished, and life moves on. But when they break a big rule or do something I didn’t even dream they might do, and so I’m unprepared for it, boy, I feel as though I’ve been socked in the gut. As Elizabeth Stone said, Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

Something happened yesterday that, frankly, is still so sensitive to me that I can’t write about it yet. Of course, I hadn’t made any rule about it. I never expected it would be an issue. It never even crossed my mind. I was in quite a funk all day yesterday, and it was hard work to try to think of something else. I woke up this morning, and as I lay in bed, my mind continued churning. It’s so easy to give up. It would be so simple to tell myself that lots of kids have done this, it’s not the end of the world, and I shouldn’t address the problem so that I can keep a comfortable relationship with my child. I could ignore it. Pretend it never happened. Never tell my child I know about it. But if I do that, I’ve given up on both of us. This action won’t ruin my child’s life; no one else may ever even learn of it, but I know that it indicates there are issues that must be worked out for the child’s own good. I unconditionally love my child. It’s exactly that love that mandates I parent instead of pretend everything is rosy. I am a nonpermissive parent. As John Shedd pointed out, Simply having children does not make mothers.

If your greatest desire is to be your children’s best friend, if you want stress-free relationships with your children, if you find it impossible or uncomfortable to admit that your children will be disobedient, sneaky, or deceptive sometimes, don’t read this book. It’s not pretty. This book is the antidote to permissive parenting.

The first step is to take a large spoonful of reality. No one can be a perfect parent, but anyone can be a very good parent if willing to take the time and make the sacrifice it requires. Be strong, have faith, and if you need a little help, turn the page.

1

P–T–E: Please, Thank You,

and Excuse Me

Bad habits are like a comfortable bed,

easy to get into but hard to get out of.

—AUTHOR UNKNOWN

There was an uproar a few years ago in Chicago. The owner of A Taste of Heaven Café posted the following sign:

CHILDREN OF ALL AGES HAVE TO BEHAVE

AND USE THEIR INDOOR VOICES.

I wouldn’t think anyone needs a sign to state the obvious, but in this age of permissive parenting, they do. Offended mothers mounted a boycott! They were shocked that anyone would dare insinuate that their children didn’t have every right to climb onto the counter and start waving saltshakers over their heads. Their contention? Perhaps it’s a display of their individuality through creative dance and, besides, it makes little Taylor happy.

People make a big deal out of the lack of manners in children today, but have you taken a look at the behavior of many of the adults around them? A recent survey by the Public Agenda indicated that 79 percent of Americans feel lack of respect and courtesy is a serious national problem. An ABC News poll in 1999 showed 73 percent of Americans thought manners had declined in the past twenty to thirty years. And who do people blame? Parents.

Too often we expect others to do as we say and not as we do. Dinner service in a crowded restaurant is slow, and you snap at the waiter. You’re running out the door when the phone rings; so you grab it and say, What do you want? I’m busy. Do you treat friends and strangers with equal consideration? Even if your manners are generally good, everyone slips from time to time, but that, too, offers parents the chance to highlight their own mistakes in front of their children, own up to them, and say how they will change their behavior in the future. If we model good manners, our children will be quick studies although some people question whether parents are even capable of handling this responsibility anymore.

Teach love, generosity, good manners, and some

of that will drift from the classroom to the home, and

who knows, the children will be educating the parents.

—SIR ROGER MOORE

RIGHT IN FLIGHT ?

If you’ve flown in a plane recently, you’ve probably experienced the persistent nudge of little feet as the child in back