Immediate obedience is a fear response.
There isn’t immediate obedience when you’re committed to parenting your children without making them afraid of you.
Sometimes your kid just needs a second to process what you asked them. They’re not afraid of you, so they don’t fearfully freeze while they process, or override their logic brain that wants to understand what you said.
Sometimes your kid wants to explain to you what support they need to comply with what you’re saying, or suggest an alternate idea they had. They’re not afraid of you, so they don’t inherently believe that advocating for themselves will result in being hurt.
Sometimes your kid disagrees with your idea and won’t do it. They’re not afraid of you. They don’t believe that they must do whatever someone bigger than them says they must do.
There isn’t immediate obedience when you’re committed to parenting your children without making them afraid of you. There is cooperation, collaboration, negotiation, discussion, suggestion, support, help. There is reconsidering values and coexisting and protecting humans’ right to self-determination and just protecting humans when they’re unable to understand all the factors that they’d need to understand to protect themselves. There is occasional shouting when they’re about to run into the road or climb out a 2nd-story window or whatever, yes, we’ve all been there, and we also all know that that’s not 98% of parenting: don’t get distracted by the hypotheticals that don’t represent your actual day to day relationship with your child.
There isn’t immediate obedience when you’re committed to parenting your children without making them afraid of you. All the fear that lives ingrained in my adult body earnestly believes that this is a good thing.
This is a good thing.
