Encouraging Your Children to Solve Their Own Problems

As a parent, we feel an inherent need to protect our children. If they are in trouble or worried about something, we want to step in and immediately fix what’s wrong. While this is necessary at certain points of their lives (especially when they are very young), learning to let go and allowing them to solve their own problems is one of the best things you can ever do for them.

That said, it’s a painful lesson for parents to learn. Your children’s solution might be imperfect or be entirely incorrect, but their effort is what’s important. This also goes for when they make a mistake. Rather than immediately punishing them, it might be wiser to make it into a learning opportunity. The trick is figuring out when to step in and when to encourage them to come up with their own solution.

A Case Study: Twins!

Often when a fight or disagreement breaks out with my kids, I can hear and feel the tension building in the situation. It may not be time for discipline yet, so instead of telling them to “knock it off,” “stop it,” or make an empty threat, I point out that that they are in the beginning stages of a conflict and suggest that they start working towards a solution. 

Keep in mind; I have twins! I always try to make sure they had two of everything of equal value. That said, there are always a few things, like watching videos on the TV, where they can only do one thing at a time. My strategy is this: when they can’t agree on what to watch, I turn the TV off until they come back to me with a solution. This works on simple disagreements, even as early as four-years-old. 

Instead of throwing my weight around as a parent by making decisions and solving their problems for them, I always hold the space for them to practice coming up with a solution themselves. If they cannot come up with a solution, I remove the object of conflict until they agree with each other. 

By taking me (the parent) out of the situation, I am conditioning my kids not to come to me to solve every individual problem. The pre-discipline of teaching them to solve problems themselves will reduce the total number of problems you will experience with your kids. It’s like a conflict vaccination against bigger conflicts that will require more drastic discipline in the future.

Give Your Kids a Voice in Discipline

One of the most frustrating parts of being a child is feeling like you don’t have a voice. No one listens to you, or even when they do, it’s always with an air of condescension. 

When I am in doubt about how to handle a particular situation, I will ask my kids what they think I should do about it. This is a true coaching model of problem-solving. Sometimes, I feel like a cop asking a driver, “Do you know how fast you were going?” But rather than entrap them, my goal is to see if we are calibrated to an appropriate amount of discipline for a situation. 

If the kids choose something more harsh or drastic than what I had in mind, I tend to be more lenient. But if they come up with an excellent plan to make the injustice right, I will let them try it and see if it works or not. 

Having twins gives me some unique parenting situations. For example, one of them once forgot a page of homework in his desk at school. His brother was given the same assignment, so he asked me if he could make a copy of it on our printer. I said sure, so he grabbed the page from his brother’s folder. One problem: he forgot to put it back, and it was due the next day. 

So, my other son was sincere when he told the teacher he did his homework, but literally “didn’t know what happened to it.” It was like it vanished from his folder (and it did!). He got off with a homework warning. Later that day, he told me about it right away when we got in the car. 

I stayed calm, as the first order of business was to find the missing homework. We looked everywhere with no luck. After about an hour, my other son showed up with the missing homework and was also honest in telling me that he found it on the copier. He had forgotten to put it back in his brother’s homework folder. 

Instead of disciplining him in the moment and removing privileges, I asked them for a solution together. The “offending” son came up with the idea of writing a letter to the teacher asked them to move the homework warning from his innocent brother to himself to “make the situation right.”

The next day, they were both happy when the homework warning was removed once the teacher saw it was an honest mistake. She even let it go without switching the warning to the other brother. I was proud that my son was willing to make it right and face the consequences. I was also happy to see the teacher rewarded this simple, honest handwritten explanation and apology.

Now, of course, this is just one example. There have been plenty of times when my kids made a mistake and weren’t able to come up with a satisfactory solution to the problem on their own. At times like that, you need to step in as their parent. But the more opportunities you give them to solve their issues, the better they will become at problem-solving. Helping them with this when they are young will make a huge difference when they get older and are faced with more morally-complicated choices and decisions. The mark of a good parent is learning when you need to help them with their conflicts and when to let them handle it themselves!