RULE 64

Different children need different rules

Broadly speaking, I don’t consider this book controversial. That’s not my aim – I’m just trying to flag up some key principles, most of which are common sense but that are easier to follow once they’ve been put into words, and which maybe you hadn’t consciously thought about too much before. As I said at the beginning of the book – it’s not a revelation. It’s a reminder. But I suspect that if anyone wants to argue with me, this is the Rule they’d pick to dispute. It appears to contradict Rules 31, 40, 61 and probably several others we haven’t got to yet. But it only appears to.

Rule 13 was about adapting your expectations of your children to the reality of their individual character. This Rule goes one step further – sometimes you do actually have to have different rules for each of your children.

Your children are not the same as each other and it therefore stands to reason that a one-size-fits-all approach to rules simply can’t be right. Of course your children won’t appreciate this when they think they’re on the wrong end of things, so some rules must apply to everyone. Call them house rules if you like. It’s only fair that everyone has to go to bed when they’re asked to, or clear up after meals. But other rules will have to be adapted to your child’s personality.

I’ll be honest with you. When I first started out as a parent, I thought it was unfair to bend rules for one child and not another. It seemed obvious to me that you had to have the same rules for everyone. And then my children started to grow. And I realized that certain rules were asking far more of one child than another.

Here’s an example. I have one son who is pathologically untidy. He is messy on an industrial scale.^* He has no idea that he is, because he has a strange condition that renders him unable to see the chaos he leaves around him. Asking him to tidy up after himself is simply not the same as asking his siblings to tidy up. We’d be demanding 20 times as much of him because (a) he can’t see the mess, (b) he doesn’t understand why it’s a problem anyway (it’s not bothering him), and (c) it would take him several hours a day. So actually, applying the same rule to all of them would be hugely unfair on him.

Of course, we don’t let him off the hook. But we do settle for less than the others. He has to do some tidying, and we help so long as he’s genuinely working at it too. As he gets older, so the onus gradually passes to him.

This son, I should say, has a very good attention span, and is expected to sit down and work at his homework for a good half hour at a stretch, which he does with no problem. One of his (tidy) siblings, however, finds it really hard to work in more than 10-minute bursts, so he’s allowed to spread his homework over a whole weekend in shorter sessions.

In other words, sometimes the same rules for everyone is the only fair approach, but there are times when it can be unfair, and you have to look out for these. The important thing is how much you’re asking of each child.