This is what’s wrong with kids these days!

Carbosly @Carbosly

Parenting is 80% making empty threats & 20% picking up miniature toys on the floor.

I was flipping through my facebook feed and came across a post from HuffPo with the “funniest parenttweets”.  Some of them were funny, really funny, but I saw this one and it pissed me off.  No lady, that’s NOT what good parenting is about, that’s what bad parenting is about. 

If your parenting like this twit … errr twitterer, then what you’re doing is teaching your children that their actions do not have consequences, and that they can be lazy, because someone else will clean up their mess.  I’m not saying I’m the perfect parent, or that I have all the answers, but while some people are trying to be funny, or get followers, they’re failing their children and our collective future.

The empty threats are really what bother me.  I don’t make threats; I simply state the consequences to their actions, with a warning (which isn’t an empty threat, just a chance for them to self correct) and then I execute the consequences.  I used to give the youngest gift a ton of warnings, and what I learned in that exercise was that I was delaying the inevitable, and no one appreciated that.  If his actions are going to send him to his room, I explain that, give him the opportunity to stop the action and if he doesn’t, it's off to his room for him.  Or, if it’s, really bad, and he’ll lose the iPad privileges (this is really his currency) and that makes for miserable time for all of us.

The empty threats just teach your children that their actions don’t have true consequences and they can’t trust what you say.  I want my children to believe what I say when I tell them what I’m going to do, or that I love them, or that I’ll always be there for them.  I want them to trust me.

Seriously, I stopped picking up their toys when they turned 3.  They know where the toy chest is, they can return their own toys.  I’ve got my own crap to clean up!