What I Learned As A Parent: Why You Should Never Teach What You Don’t Practice
Last Tuesday, I was leaning into the entryway, one hand on the doorframe, raising my voice at my 11-year-old Jax. “How many times have I told you?” I said. “You don’t get to leave your Lego bricks all over the floor for someone else to step on and clean up. When you’re done with a project, you put your things away. That’s the rule.” Jax just stared at me, leaning against the banister, half-chewing a granola bar he’d grabbed after school. I turned to stomp back to the kitchen to finish loading the dishwasher, caught my boot on the stack of library books I’d left stacked on the edge of the counter since Sunday, and went down halfway, books spilling all over the tile, one hardcover thudding right into my shin. Jax yelled from the entry, “When you’re done with a project, you put your things away! That’s the rule!”
I stood there holding my throbbing shin, and that old saying I’d heard from my grandma as a kid popped into my head: do not teach what you do not practice. I’d always written that off as advice for big, obvious stuff — don’t tell your kids not to smoke if you’re hiding cigarettes in your purse, don’t yell at them for lying if you lie about your age to get a cheaper ticket. I never thought it applied to the tiny, mundane daily rules I repeat without thinking twice.
But there I was, caught red-handed. For months I’d been frustrated that Jax never seems to follow the rules I lay down, no matter how many times I repeat them. I tell him no more than two hours of screen time on school nights, but I’m hunched over my work laptop from the second he gets on the bus until dinner, then scroll Instagram for 20 minutes while I wait for the pasta to boil. I got mad at him two months ago for missing the bus because he was binging Minecraft shorts before school, and I’d been scrolling my work emails at the breakfast table the whole time, too distracted to remind him it was time to leave. I subbed at his elementary school last semester, and I saw the same thing play out in the classroom. The regular teacher left a note saying the class was notoriously rude during read-aloud, because they never stopped talking. The rule was no interruptions while the teacher reads. But every two minutes, she’d stop to take a call from the office, chat with another teacher in the doorway, or grab a drink from the lounge without wrapping up the chapter. Halfway through the period, I put my phone in my desk drawer, told the class I wouldn’t interrupt our reading, and asked the office to hold any non-emergency questions until after we finished. The kids settled down in five minutes. No yelling, no extra recess taken away, just me following the same rule I was asking them to follow.
That’s when I started to connect the dots. Most of us think teaching is just telling kids what to do. We write the rules, we repeat them, we punish when they’re broken. But kids don’t learn from what we say. They learn from what we do. And when we teach a rule we don’t follow ourselves, we’re not actually teaching the rule — we’re teaching that rules are unfair, that only people with less power have to follow them. It doesn’t matter if we’re the parent or the teacher, we’re the boss, so we get a pass. That’s not the lesson any of us want to teach, but that’s the one that sticks.
I started making small, concrete changes after the Lego incident, none of which take a lot of extra time or effort. The first thing I did was stop pretending I don’t mess up. When Jax calls me out for breaking a rule I made, I don’t get defensive and say “because I’m the adult” anymore. I just own it. After the book spill, I picked all my books up, put them on the shelf, and said to Jax, “You’re right. That rule applies to me too. I messed up.” He didn’t gloat for long — he just turned around and picked up all his Lego, no argument, no eye rolling. That’s never happened before when I lectured him.
The second thing I did was check every rule I make to see if I follow it first, and change it if I don’t. I used to demand Jax clean his entire room every Saturday, but I let my home office pile up with old papers and empty coffee mugs for three months before I clean it. So we changed the rule: every Saturday, we each spend 15 minutes cleaning one messy spot in the house. I clean my desk, he cleans his Lego floor. That’s doable for both of us. For screen time, I got a wicker basket at the dollar store, and we both put our phones in it from 4pm to 6pm every weekday, that’s homework and dinner time. If I have an emergency work thing that can’t wait, I say that out loud, put it back when I’m done, no hiding it.
I still mess up, of course. Last week I got a panicked email from a client right as we sat down for dinner, and I pulled my phone out of the basket before I thought about it. Jax just raised an eyebrow at me, and I put it right back, apologized, and answered it after we ate. It doesn’t fix everything. Jax still forgets to put his things away sometimes, I still leave my coffee mug on the coffee table for three days. But the yelling and the arguing and the eye rolling has cut way down. He’s actually following through more than he did when I was just standing on my soapbox lecturing him from a pile of my own mess.
I don’t think I’ll ever be the kind of parent who follows every single rule I ask my kid to follow. But I’m slowly learning to stop teaching the ones I won’t. That’s enough for right now.
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