When you’re choosing your most important parenting principle, put teaching the Golden Rule at the top of your list: Treat others the way you want to be treated. Just like gold, the Golden Rule has permanent, high value when fully refined. It ensures good mental health, joy, and life-sustaining quality relationships.

Children want to feel acceptable and lovable even when they mess up. Validate your child’s feelings at the beginning of a problem before setting limits and finding a way to improve their bahavior. That way your child feels accepted, and discipline works a lot better.

Validate your child’s strengths. Every day, strive toward making five positive comments for every corrective comment. Most parents fall into the trap of giving more negatives than positives.

Reinforce that mistakes do not make your child bad. Teach that mistakes are an opportunity to learn and grow emotionally, not evidence that a child is bad. The feelings-first-behavior-second corrective approach works really well. Put effort toward helping your child accept himself on the inside before you work on disciplining outside behavior.

Once your child sees the value in himself, use the following tips for teaching how to treat others.

Teach awareness and acknowledgment of others’ feelings.For young children, show and tell all aspects of feelings, including appropriate expression of feelings (tone of voice, facial expression), feeling words (sad, mad, afraid, happy, etc.), and how to deal appropriately with feelings—your own and others’. Demonstrating feelings is a powerful starting point. For example, “Your brother kicked the wall when he was angry. What would be a better way for him to handle his anger?”

Teach self-disclosure and ownership of one’s part in a problem.Closeness and successful problem-solving happen a lot more when people share feelings openly. Help your child learn to first own his or her part in a problem before pointing out what the other person did wrong. Start by showing your child how it works: “My yelling at you made you really upset. I’ll work harder to stay calm.” When siblings squabble, always get each child to own his part first—with a lot of support from you. And don’t forget the feelings-first-set-limits-second approach.

Teach and demonstrate humility and compassion for others. From one year of age on, continue the approach of modeling and then letting your child demonstrate a behavior, especially compassion. “You sister isn’t feeling well today. Let’s help by picking up her toys for her so she doesn’t have to do it later.” Make sure to show appreciation and kindness to your spouse or partner. Children want to be like you, and they soak in everything they see and hear.

Demonstrate and teach humility. When your partner or spouse disagrees with you, make sure your child sees you do three things: (1) seriously consider and kindly acknowledge, when possible, the other person’s point of view; (2) with assertive kindness, give your point of view; and (3) find a mutually satisfying solution (sometimes let the other person get his way). When opportunities come up, train your child to follow these steps, because humility is the life-blood of an emotionally healthy life.

Here’s the take-home lesson: Follow these tips and you will have successfully demonstrated how to treat others by treating your child lovingly. The Golden Rule will have been refined within your child, and your child will believe he is lovable and will acquire the ability to treat others with respect.

Maybe next month the platinum rule

Contributed by Author of Black Belt Parenting and master instructor of Action Karate -Solomon Brenner

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