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Each of us is unique, so why try so hard to fit in when you can stand out and differentiate yourself, right? But when do you start crossing the lines between being unique to mark your difference and being unique to implore that you are above others? For kids, uniqueness can mean a lot of things. But bad, obnoxious and abusive children take uniqueness as a characteristic that gives parents an awful message. For these bad kids, being unique in other words means you don't understand something. Particularly, they are sending out the message that you don't understand them.
There's no harm in treating your children as special. But be wary of letting them use the idea of uniqueness against you. Parenting coaches and child therapists can identify once such practice as the uniqueness assumption where a child may claim that his/her uniqueness separates them from doing certain obligations. Along with this assumption is that the parents' misunderstanding is the real problem. Their premise is that parents' misunderstanding is the cause of the child's bad, obnoxious and abusive behavior.
These claims are not true. You as a parent have every right to enforce disciplinary actions to your child especially when they display bad, obnoxious and abusive behavior to other people. You can consider them to be special but that should not justify the way they should respond to your requests or modes of discipline.
We can agree that kids will always see themselves as unique therefore they should be held to a different set of rules, different set of accountability and different expectations should be made of them. But when kids try to justify work or tasks because they think they are unique and should not be doing them then that is where intervention should be done. Uniqueness is a quality, but equity and fairness are values. And values precede character formation.
Bad, obnoxious and abusive kids try to impart to parents that if they had understood them better then there wouldn't be a problem to begin with. But to set records straight, the first thing a parent or any guardian for that matter can rebut about that justification is that it doesn't even support the notion of solving the problem.
The irony of the uniqueness assumption is that people who employ it are those who think nobody understand them because of their uniqueness. These individuals, mostly kids because they are the more immature and have faulty reasoning skills, use that sense of uniqueness as a springboard to be often called inconsiderate to others in order for them to justify that they are being misunderstood. But no matter how much you try to deliver the same tiring speeches, it's all just lecturing again and that there is no demand made to remediate the problem.
What is sad about the development of this characteristic or practice, and including all other things obnoxious and abusive children do, is that they learned it first-hand from our bad and awful culture. We live in a time frame that has been labeled as the culture of victimization. Today, everybody excuses their behavior for something or some reason. And that kind of realization is not helping us parents treat our children's problems. In fact, letting that culture teach the way our children should behave and respond is like the act of resigning from our responsibility as parents.
Bottom line here is that parenting is and should be done by parents. You should not let culture dictate how your child should end up with. Part of that responsibility of being parents is to secure that their children do not get dragged into bad, obnoxious and abusive behavior and also not let them cause or engage in practices and display characteristics that harm such as the assumption of uniqueness to avoid disciplining practices.
About this Author
Parenting is not easy. If you've got obnoxious and abusive children and would like to read more about them and how to solve related problems, you might want to check out my blog to get helpful parenting tips and resources.
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