I’m after some help and advice from you all tonight – How do you teach your children the difference between telling tales and telling a grown up something important?
My children on the whole are very close and up until recently they could quite happily spend the afternoon playing happily together. Lately, they’ve been having more and more petty little squabbles and some of the tales they tell on each other are ridiculous….
He stuck his tongue out at me!
She rolled her eyes at me!
He wrote in my notebook!
She added a piece of Lego to the Lego house I’m building!
He keeps humming that stupid song!
She’s just smiled at me funny!
On the other hand, there’s some quite important things that have happened that I haven’t found out about until way after the event:
She just hit me at the top of the stairs and I almost fell down them!
He just rode his bike so fast that he almost couldn’t stop at the road!
So how do I teach them the things that I need to know as opposed to the things that they need to learn to sort out between themselves? I think it’s important for them to learn how to deal with little arguments without the need to come running to me. At the same time, I need them to tell me if there’s something I should know about, where safety’s concerned for example.
Any ideas?
