Commitment

A mother pulled me aside after a lecture I'd given and asked if I would answer a question for her. "I feel like I'm caught in a bind with my daughter," she explained. "I enrolled her in an after school sports program that she said she wanted to sign up for. We're not even halfway through the semester though, and she's telling me she doesn't like it and wants to drop out. I'm confused. She's only six, and I hate to make her do something that she's really unhappy with, but at the same time I think she about the right age to start learning about commitment."

The question of commitment is one I hear frequently. Caring parents are often caught in this bind between listening to their child and responding to her distress in a compassionate way, and teaching her responsibility, follow-through and commitment. Having an understanding of your child's developmental capabilities can be helpful.

Until your child is about five or six years old, the idea of commitment should take lesser precedence than your child's distress in a particular situation. Children in this age group aren't developmentally ready to learn about the kind of long-term commitment that an after school activity represents. Thus, if your child is regularly unhappy in a particular activity and you feel that your child has had adequate time to adjust (four or five classes) it's important to respond to your child's feelings by taking them out of the class instead of trying to teach them about commitment.

Between the ages of five and nine or ten, children begin to develop an idea of what commitment means. In order for a child to fully commit to a class, he must have an understanding of time (a semester is long!) and an ability to weigh the length of the commitment with the pleasure he will receive. This doesn't happen all at once! It is a process that spans these years. For parents, it means compromise. I told the mother of the six-year-old, for example, that she should sit down with her child and really listen to what was going on. Recognition on the part of one's parent that the situation feels uncomfortable is particularly important for children. Oftentimes it is simply the acknowledgement of the child's negative feelings that will make the situation bearable for the remainder of the semester. In addition, I recommended that she ask her daughter if there was anything that would make the situation feel more comfortable. Sometimes this question leads to more information from the child about why they're unhappy, other times it empowers the child to take responsibility for turning the situation into something more positive. If the child is still unhappy in the class, Mom could compromise by saying "I hear that when you took on this commitment you didn't really realize what it would involve, and that you wouldn't like it. I believe it's important to keep our commitments, but I'm willing to compromise as well. I'd like you to give it a little longer (and here Mom should