Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck, and I teach parenting and family communication
all over the world. And in this video, I'm talking about how to show mercy to your child.
For sure things our children do can really rub us the wrong way that can be annoying.
Children can make mistakes, we absolutely have to show mercy to our children. It's important.
It's one of those tone elements that make our homes feel like safe places to make mistakes.
But some people struggle with knowing the best way to show mercy to their child without being
indulgent, or making the child not have the opportunity to learn the lesson that they
need. So in this video, I'm going to be talking about mercy, what that means, and give you some
ideas for how you can better show mercy to your child. Years ago, I did treatment foster care for
troubled teens, they were all between the ages of 12 and 18 and when they came to my home,
they had a myriad of different things that they were dealing with. There were some processing
differences, as well as some trauma that they had experienced and some abuse in their past
circumstances. So they had a lot of things going on. And guess what, they made a lot of mistakes.
But honestly, every child makes mistakes. There's no such thing as a perfect child. That's not what
being a child is about. I've had four children of my own, as well as many, many foster children.
And I've never met a perfect child yet. There's always something that can be adjusted, right. But
these particular youth that came to my home, they had multiple things that they were dealing with.
And it made it so that there were lots of circumstances where I needed to do correction.
In fact, sometimes I felt like I was correcting, and then it was minutes later,
and I had to do another correction, just because we wanted to maintain consistency so that they can
learn cause and effect, which was a big part of self government. So speaking of self government,
self government is understanding the cause and effect of any given situation, and possessing
a knowledge of your own behavior so that you can control them. So what that means
is that you understand cause and effect, and then you change your behavior so that you get the
outcomes that you want. So these particular youth that came to my home really needed to learn cause
and effect, they'd had a lot of hard experiences in their life and they weren't hooking the
dots together, sometimes because neurologically what was going on. So they needed things to be
very structured, very secure. And that's what I put together. In fact, that's what started people
asking me to teach about parenting in the first place. So because I had to do so much correction,
I didn't want it to be a downer all the time. And it all of a sudden hit me one day,
I need to have a tone of mercy with me all the time. If I can carry a tone of mercy with me,
then no matter what happens if I need to do corrections, or if things go wrong,
I should be able to be okay. This meant that I could not take their behavior personally, I had to
make sure that I accepted whatever their behavior was, and that I prepared myself to have merciful
interactions with them. So what does a merciful interaction look like? Let's talk about that.
You'll probably be surprised about some of the examples that I share for merciful interactions.
The first one shouldn't surprise you too much. So when a person does something wrong, let's say
they make a mistake, something that they should be corrected for and a person decides, you know,
I don't think that you need to accept the consequences for that correction yet,
maybe we'll postpone that or maybe we'll even just kind of wash that clean so that you don't
have to accept it at all. That would be very, very merciful. And I think that's what people think of
when they think of mercy. They think, okay, well, so they did something, but they don't
actually have to suffer the consequences of their behavior. That's not great mercy,
though because that mercy is going to now rob the justice, is going to rob the teaching.
So I love Shakespeare in Shakespeare's play, Merchant of Venice, he talks about justice
and mercy, he has his character, Porsche, give this big speech about mercy and justice and how
the only way for mercy to actually work is for there to also be justice, and that if
mercy is really a thing, then justice is a thing too. It is possible to tell a person that they
don't have to follow through on whatever negative consequence that they earned, potentially,
if the justice is maintained. And one of the ways you would have to maintain the justice is
by saying now, this is what you earned, you earned this negative consequence. Here's why. You know,
and do you understand Didn't let's practice, you know, doing this the right way or something so
that we remember, and we don't have this problem again in the future. And then you could say,
I think you've got it enough. So I'm not going to say that you have to do the negative consequence.
But next time, you will, you know, or something like that, that would be a merciful way of letting
someone out of a negative consequence and seeing, making sure that they still understood the lesson,
which would then preserve the justice. And I think that's what a lot of people think of
when they think of mercy and being merciful in your parenting. But you do have to be very, very
careful. If someone earns a negative consequence. And then you just forget about it, or it doesn't
happen, and you just decide on well, I don't have the energy to handle that, or it was two days ago,
I'm not going to worry about it. Now. That is not mercy. That's not mercy. That's actually neglect,
basically. So you're neglecting to do the teaching that you're supposed to be doing,
the person is not getting the lesson that they need, which means they don't, they don't have
the opportunity to learn the cause and effect and actually make the change. So that doesn't them
any good, that would not be mercy. So keep that in mind. Some people will see something happen,
and they don't address it, whatever it is, and then they assume that they're being merciful. But
is it merciful to leave a person in ignorance? Is it merciful to not address a problem that a
person really should have addressed because you told them that you would address it in the future?
I would say no, that's not merciful. Again, that's just you saying I don't want to deal with it at
the time, or maybe I don't want to deal with their emotions that could come from it at the time.
But in reality, true mercy is a thing because the justice is already there. So in order to
show your children mercy, you have to have a very solid system in place to begin with.
We're going to talk about the solid system. And I'm going to share with you some surprising other
ways to show mercy. But before we do, click that subscribe button now. There are so many great
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So how do you create a truly just environment, let's talk about that before we get to a couple
of other surprising ways you can teach your child and show your child mercy. When you create an
environment that teaches cause and effect, then you're going in the right direction, because we
want to definitely show our children that when we teach them something like this skill and if they
don't follow through on the skill, then this will be the negative consequence, they need to see the
cause and effect follow each other, that helps them make better decisions. One of the biggest things
you'll want to do then is make sure that you teach the children ahead of time, everything that's
expected. So if you teach your child this is our system, we have these skills. So in our family,
we have four basic skills, they are following instructions, accepting "no" answers and criticism,
accepting consequences and disagreeing appropriately. They each have skill sets
attached to them. If a person does not do one of the steps of one of those skill sets in a
particular moment, when they're told they need to, then they will be corrected. That's consistency.
So that consistent correction is actually something that establishes the justice, right?
And me teaching them ahead of time, these are the skills that you need and this is what I will do
if you choose not to follow or use the skills so that I can help you get back on track, then this
is how I will handle it. These will be the types of negative consequences. So everything's laid out
on the table. That's pure justice, no surprises. If you're surprising your children on a regular
basis to try to shock them in some way. That is not justice, it's manipulation and we want to
stay away from that,. What we do is we lay it all out, we practice that ahead of time we teach them
and then when the moment arrives, we actually do the correction. That's justice. Now we could see
that maybe there is a circumstance from time to time when a person does not need to follow through
with something that they earned. And this is when some mercy might come into play. So maybe
it's somebody's birthday, you know, maybe they lost their privileges, they went out of control,
they were selfish, it was their birthday, and I want them to have a really good birthday, then I'm
going to tell them, you know, you've earned this negative consequence. But I want to show you a
little bit mercy for your birthday. And so we're gonna have you do your negative consequence of
missing privileges or whatever tomorrow, and today, you're going to have your birthday the
way it is. This also teaches cause and effect in the family vision. So our family's created a
picture of who we're becoming as a group. And what that does is shows the child cause and effect that
this particular picture of who we're becoming as a group is more important
than this one little mistake that was made. Who we are together as a group is much more valuable. So
we set those priorities in place and teaches the children, you know what we value most that said,
if you undermine your system too much, then you've got problems. As soon as I
stopped correcting a problem at my house, now, my children are all grown and gone now. But,
if I ever stopped correcting a problem, or allowing someone to talk back, there would be more
talking back and more of that problem. That's just what happens. That's the natural cause and effect.
So we can't let the mercy you know, get in the way of that justice. So what else can we do to show
mercy? Now, this next one really might surprise you. Many people, when they think of mercy,
they think of removing something from someone, or taking away a responsibility.
But actually, when you do certain things, it's also very merciful. So one big merciful
thing that I do for my children, is I pre teach them ahead of time what's expected,
I just spoke about that. But then there's another thing that I do that's super merciful. And that
is I correct the children. That does not seem merciful, does it, but it is massively merciful.
I have seen multiple situations with children going out of control, where if you just leave
them alone, and you don't actually correct them, or help them or try to get them to a place of
calmness, they spiral deeper, deeper, deeper, and it gets worse and worse. In fact, they've done
studies on this now and they know that when you leave someone alone who's going out of control,
they actually get to a rock bottom place before they bounce up. And oftentimes, they'll get deeper
each time their rock bottom gets lower, and lower. So they get to a place of self loathing,
of hatred, of you know, really dark, bad feelings, if you do not help them get to a place of calmness
first, so is that merciful to allow a person to get all the way to that place when you know,
you could say something or do something that could possibly help them get back into their front
brain? What you do is you correct them, and this is a merciful thing, now especially it's merciful
if you're calm, and if you're loving, and you're connected to them when you do the correction. So
if you've got your correction down just great, so that you can maintain the bond and the positive
feeling or tone and the connection with a person while doing the correction, then you really have
something that will be merciful for them. So when my children needed to be corrected, I saw that it
was a good thing for me to do to correct them. This was a kindness, this was helping them not
make the same mistake again. And if they started going completely out of control, I knew that I
was helping them in the future not have to get to that place again, right, or at that time,
being able to get to a place of calmness, stopping themselves from going completely out of control,
so that they could think clearly, be understood and have a good communication. All parenting is about
is having the right conversations at the right time and teaching the right lessons. And we can't
do that if people are going out of control and not being calm. So getting them to a place of calmness
prepares the environment so that the parenting and the teaching can occur. I can teach you so much
more about correcting in fact I'd really like to so if you've enjoyed this video, I'm pretty sure
you'll like the next video, which is called the not so known secret for parenting success.
It's actually a full length class where I am teaching a lot of the nuts and bolts of teaching
self government. Of course, it's not everything but it's really going to get you going on what you
need to start working on being more merciful with your tone and your structure. So click on the link
to that video now and I'll see you there.