If proper awareness of human psychology is available, training children is not a difficult task at all. Rather, it is the most interesting hobby that not only you but also your children can enjoy. For example, let’s look at the saying of the Arabic language: “Man is greedy for what is prohibited” which means that a person is greedy for something from which he is prevented. This quote reveals an important fact of human psychology very simply.
Using this same psychological principle, years ago one day when I entered the house, I had in my hands a small glass jar containing berry honey. My children looked at this jar carefully and asked: “what’s this?”
I replied with perfect seriousness
“This is honey I have brought for myself”
They asked: “What will you do with it?”
I replied it is eaten. The next question that came from them was:” Is it sweet?”
I said: “There is nothing sweeter in the world than it.”
After saying this, I fed both of them a little with a small spoon, and their eyes lit up. Before they were fully enjoy this small amount of honey, I said: “It’s not for you guys, I have brought it for myself.”
Hearing this, they went straight to their mother and asked: “Why will only father eat such a great thing?” Mother replied: “Perhaps because this great thing is so little.”
“Then why didn’t he bring more?”
After hearing this, their mother said, go and ask them. When they brought this question to me, I said: “It’s a daily thing, I don’t think you’ll be able to stick to a daily meal.”
They said, now we have eaten before you, we can eat. I said, it is only tasted, if eaten, it goes to breakfast. They said, then we will eat it for breakfast? I asked, really? So they both nodded enthusiastically. So the next day I brought three kilos of honey.
Do you know what it was all about? This was the psychological game we played with our children to make them have breakfast which they had skipped as skipping breakfast is a common problem with student children and also dangerous for their health as it is a mandatory meal. So this trick worked as per to psychological rule and never again did our children go to school without breakfast.
Now, from here, understand the solution to this serious challenge in the upbringing of children, which is called “restriction”. It is a problem in almost every other home that when parents impose restrictions on children, they resist and then rebel. In this case too, the role of the same psychological rule that was described in the Arabic quote. Whatever you forbid, the child will be attracted to it. You can start from here by asking a three- to four-year-old child that the solid food he is eating, why not feed a little of it to his infant brother or sister?
If the child is intelligent, he will tell you that his brother has no teeth, so how can he eat this? Your reaction might be:
“Oh yes! I didn’t care that he doesn’t have teeth yet, so we shouldn’t give him chips.”
Now you have to repeat the same thing these days with some pretext. For example, at some point, you can act by pushing solid food toward the infant’s mouth, from which your four- to five-year-old child will stop you. Through this experience of yours, both his conscious and unconscious awareness of the fact that solid food is “forbidden” in infancy is forbidden because this age is not suitable for him. The second installment of the same will be to explain the age difference required for a three-wheeler and a two-wheeler cycle after some time, the opportunity will arise automatically, you just have to use it. But the child becomes the real challenge when he crosses the age barrier of seven years. Now he is in the buffer zone of childhood and boyhood.
At this age, when you ask him whether it is correct to give solid food to an infant. So now his wisdom will most definitely reject this move. Then you ask whether it would be correct to give a two-wheeled bicycle to a child at the age of three-wheeled bicycle. He will also falsify this move with full confidence. Then you ask why it is wrong. So he will tell how I child will handle a two-wheeled bicycle at this age? His feet will not be able to reach the pedals. From here you just have to keep the philosophy of the difference between a bicycle and a motorcycle and the age required for it. He will convince himself.
According to the same rule, in every case, you will just convince him that you are not yet of the required age for such and such a job or such thing, so that is why these things are not available to you yet. And what is not available today will be available to you very soon. This matter will progress to the point that one day your thirteen or fourteen-year-old will ask you for his personal mobile phone. If you refer to age, he will say that now he has grown up. Then you can inform him of the interesting fact that boys three or three years older than him are not allowed to vote in elections, as the mandatory age of voting is eighteen.
This means that at the age of fourteen, you are really grown up, but you have yet to grow up more. Now you have to reach the age of mobile phone responsibility, and two years later you will reach the age of responsibility to vote. Did you know that twenty-five years of age is required for contesting the election? Thus, the child will continue to understand the responsibility and the philosophy of the age required for it at every turn of the age, so what is considered a restriction will never be felt him a restriction.
Believe me, the child soon realizes that he or she is not restricted by anything, the problem is that some things do not suit his or her age yet. We have tried this experiment with three of our children of different temperaments, and in all three the results have been so remarkable and uniform that after puberty they themselves have been defenders of the philosophy of “responsibility and due age.” Parents make the mistake of not explaining the principles and the philosophy behind them to the children, they just issue orders and expect the children to obey silently. It doesn’t work. Children have to understand life and its philosophy. When they understand something, then there is no need to give orders. They realize by themselves what is right and what is wrong for them.
