I’ve tried to learn not to let whatever someone else says affect me, but when someone criticises my child it does hurt in an insidious way, that being that I don’t let it immediately affect me, but I do think about what they said and if there’s any substance behind what they said or whether someone was just being malicious.  Regardless of whether I let it affect me or not, it does bring into question my parenting style, the example I am setting to my kids and most importantly the time I am able to dedicate to them.  I’m a firm believer that children are a reflection of their parents that if someone criticises my child they are directly criticising me.

Whether or not I taught my child a negative behaviour or whether they learnt it from elsewhere I am directly responsible for it.

It is something I need to take onboard, address it and try to prevent it from happening again.

Of course being criticised for something that a child does naturally, like snatching a toy or not sharing a toy says more about the adult doing the criticising than it does about the child being criticised.  I think we as adults should be more critical about ourselves than we are about other people’s children.

Our children are learning directly from the example that we are setting.  A lot of parents that I meet are burying their heads in the sand, ready to blame everyone else

These parents either believe or prented that they are perfect and if the child is behaving badly than it must be somebody else’s fault, like the five seconds they saw someone swearing across the street or a child they saw throwing a wobbly.  These parents seem to lack basic maths principles, that they spend 150 plus hours with their child a week, yet it’s the five minutes that thier child spends with yours that seems to be the problem.

Doing a self assessment

At work the full time staff are having their annual self assessment whereby they fill in a form, meet with their superiors to discuss the form and set some goals to achieve before spending the rest of the year ignoring the goals – but hey they ticked the box in the form so the beaurcrats are happy.

When I was a full time employee some years ago, we had a fortnightly one-to-one with the head of the department.  While we didn’t fill in any forms it was the frequency of the mini assessment that would keep us on track and checking our own performance as we knew that in two weeks we wouldn’t want to have an akward converstation again.

Some of the best parents I know are those who are continually self assessing themselves and trying to improve themselves and are open to learning new things.

It’s okay to get things wrong, there’s no shame in that, don’t beat yourself up over it, it happens, we all do it, none of us is perfect.  But better parents take responsibility for their own mistakes and try to learn from them rather than those parents who are ready to blame anyone else except themselves.

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I’d really like to know if and how you coped with someone criticising your child, what actions you took to address it and how your relationship with that person differed afterwards.  Please use the comment boxes below to share your stories.

As always thanks for reading.

Farhan