Instituting tough-love is a difficult parenting tool that is essential at times to enable your child/children to prepare themselves for the tough, enjoyable, cruel place that is life. A child needs tough-love because of the obstacles of peer-pressure that they will have to overcome during their teen years; and the choices that they will have to make to determine their growth and contentment in their will have to reach in their adult years. Parents can at times become too compulsive in instilling moral values, which they themselves find hard to practice, therefore filter values of hypocrisy towards their children to append in their destructive immature immoral ways. When is tough-love needed?
When implementing tough-love as a parent, it is important that you have your own moral foundation intact. It does not help implementing something that you, yourself does not believe in. Playing double-standards with your own life and the lives of other people, particularly your child/children can and will produce dreadful consequences. Discipline is not just plain and simple discipline.
There are two constituting types of tough-love: The first is referred to as ‘loving tough-love’ and the second is referred to as ‘destructive tough-love’. Loving Tough-Love is the type of a parental disciplinary mechanism that enables your child to reflect at their surroundings, home environment and their parents’ behavioral pattern, attitude towards life and how they treat others; meaning friends, neighbours or strangers and their next of kin. When implement tough-love as a parent your words must be in queue with your actions, to enable your child to learn from you. Tough-love means, knowing that your child has flawed and knowing when to reprimand their errs in the right time and place, appropriately within character building means.
Loving Tough-Love understands that their child’s characters is different from theirs or others children, thus tries to view things from the eyes of their children. It does not help shouting at your child/children when they do something wrong - all they will know is that problems are solved by playing the shouting game, which will most likely lead to violent means. Be the acting-love, talk to your child and understand what they want and why they want it, show them the ways of acquiring without destroying others and themselves, because you should provide all they need until they are matured enough to take care of themselves. Loving Tough-Love understands the way of the world – it is informed.
Destructing Tough-Love is the type of love where parents do or act totally, morally incorrectly and expects their children to not emulate their destructive ways. Destructive Tough-love expects a child/children to bring themselves up without any parent acting-love and essential nurturing support. Destructive Tough-Love does not monitor what the child is doing, how they do it, when they do it, with whom they do it with, at what cost they do it in. Destructive Tough-Love disciplines violently without any meaningful conversations with its child/children. Destructive Tough-Love always blames the child and kills their inner Self. Ultimately, Destructive Tough-Love, destroys your child’s self-esteem, self-worth, self-consistency, self-love and their transcending growth. Destructive Tough-Love does not understand the ways of the world – it is ignorant.
There is no guide in being the perfect parent, everyone does morally err, as a result no one is perfect in this world. At times parents themselves are children that were not given ‘Loving Tough-Love’, therefore have no expertise in implementing that type of love to their own children. Playing the game of tough-love becomes a dangerous affair to both child and parent.
It does not help implementing something that you, yourself does not believe in. As parents we need to teach our children to be morally viable, by doing morally viable things right in front of them. This aids in the proficiency of being the right parent and implementing the right type of Tough-Love needed to bestow character building, Growth and Transcending-love to your children.
WORD TO A NEW TOUGH-LOVING ENVIRONMENT REVOLUTION
By Linda Sakazi Thwala
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