Parental Conditional Sentences

On the road to parenting, the most common sentence patterns used by parents must be conditional sentences.

"If you make trouble again, I'll call the police to catch you."

"If you can't finish this bowl of rice, you will be fined not to watch TV for a month."

"If you help with housework, I'll give you twenty yuan."

"If you test a hundred percent, I'll give you a new toy."

Do parents particularly like to talk to their children about conditions? Not so. If the child is well-behaved and obedient, all behaviors meet the requirements and expectations of the parents, and the parents do not need to tell the child any conditions at all, everyone can get along in harmony. The problem is that children are all independent individuals. Don’t think that the authority of the parent is equivalent to controlling the child’s remote control. If you want him to read, he will read seriously, and if you want him to put away his toys, he will even clean the bathroom.

In the face of children who do not listen and do not speak, parents are often angry. In order to make their children obey as soon as possible, they have to restrict their children's behavior with conditions, either rewarding or punishing, in order to coerce and induce the children to obey.

Threats of punishment may have an immediate deterrent effect, but at the same time, it can also stimulate children's resistance, especially when parents use things that they can't do to intimidate their children. Inert lie loses any effect. Under the intimidation, the child did not dare to make trouble, but he did not understand the reason behind it, and he returned to his old ways as soon as he turned around.

If there is no punishment, what about the reward? Parents think that giving rewards can make children continue to perform well, but rewards, like punishments, only have short-term effects. Once children associate good performance with rewards, in the absence of rewards, they will lose motivation to maintain good performance. To make matters worse, the child will unconsciously think that the parent is offering the reward because the thing is hard work, and the parent's attempt to encourage the child to do chores/study hard with the reward backfires.

Parents’ conditional sentences are said every day, no matter whether they are positive or negative, they are all conditional on their children, so that children gradually forget that their parents’ love should be unconditional. One day, when the child took the initiative to talk about the conditions, the parents were shocked to feel that they were cocooning themselves. There are no shortcuts to teaching children well, and conditional sentences are best avoided.

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