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| Teaching Children Respect |
 If you want to learn to treat children with respect, be ready to change a heart, it can come only from a major shift in consciousness of how we view children and how we define respect. Child is born with human dignity. To treat a child with respect is to acknowledge and preserve their human dignity. Treating a child disrespectfully is to attack their human dignity.
If you treat children with disrespect, it is like using physical punishment as discipline; it only "works" as long as we are bigger than they are. Every adult who wants to be treated with respect, must treat children respectfully. Children live in the same world we do, whether children grow up under our roof or not, and their behavior can and does impact our lives. However adults treat the children, the children will treat the world.
If we treat them with less respect than we give our peers, how can we expect children to understand and practice the Golden Rule? Children deserve the same respect we would give our friends, but it does not mean that we should treat children like adults or that we should never get angry. There is nothing we ever have to say to a child that we need to say in a disrespectful way.
Screaming out, "I'm angry, I don't like this behavior" is not disrespectful. If you want to know whether or not something you have said to a child is disrespectful, you can ask yourself, "would I say those words, in that tone of voice, to my good friend?" If not, it was probably disrespectful. If we model disrespect, it is a nice idea to model apologizing.
If you are sincere about teaching respect to children you must expose, acknowledge, and work on eliminating all the ways that we model disrespect. Even if you do not model the terrible disrespectful behaviors of criticizing, lecturing, shaming, ridiculing, giving orders, screaming, threatening and hitting, there are probably a lot of things you do and say to children, that have been said and done to children for so long, you aren't even aware that they are disrespectful. Yet, if these same things were said or done to us we would identify them as disrespectful.
Children always hear, "Shut the door. Were you born in a barn?" "I didn't work over a hot stove all day to have you nibble like some bird." "Sit up straight or your spine will grow that way." Most adults roar with laughter at the thought of speaking to their friends that way, then realize it is just as disrespectful to say those things to children.
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