One of Great Britain’s most famous art historians, Anthony Blunt, was exposed in the mid-60’s as a spy for the then-Soviet Union. He had been a spy since his recruitment in the late 30’s, and while his recently-revealed memoirs discuss his regret at having become a spy, it’s difficult to understand what exactly he regrets.
Clearly, his sentiment doesn’t come from any acknowledgement on his part of the betrayal of his country that he committed for those decades as a spy. Other than writing that his acceptance of the position was ” … the biggest mistake of my life,” it doesn’t seem that even then he does he come to terms with the magnitude of what he’d done.
All this may be a roundabout way to ask parents to forebear from over-emphasizing to their children that they’ve done wrong, when they have. No matter what the problem turns out to be — from drawing on the walls with crayon, to stealing money from one’s wallet — there is a point at which continued scolding ceases to be meaningful, and enters into the realm of diminishing returns.
It should be obvious when a child or a teen “gets it”, and when they’re tuning you out. In the first case, to keep hectoring will only produce a child who is fearful of making any kind of mistake, even those that are beneficial to learning; in the second case, you ensure that you are being perceived as someone who would rather have a faultless child than an average one who makes mistakes as we all do. If you must scold, keep the actual dressing-down brief, and proceed directly to trying to understand why the fault was committed, and then to what the consequences will be. Your child will respect you more as someone who gets to the point quickly, and knows exactly where the line between right and wrong is and is able to explain it simply and efficiently without much ado. If they don’t understand why they’re being told they’ve done wrong, then they never did, and you have a much bigger task on your hands — and at that point, the fault is yours.
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