Golden Nugget
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Pediatrician Lawrence Kagan, MD, shares his Golden Nugget of parenting advice on the importance of being consistent when parenting your children
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I think the most important thing that we can do for our children is be consistent. Our job as parents is not to be a friend, but to be a parent and I personally don’t think that it’s right to send mixed messages to a child. It creates a child who’s undisciplined, not respectful of their parents.
If, for example, if you go to a party and you tell your child, “If you misbehave, we’re going home.” “3-2-1, no really, if you misbehave, we’re going home.” And you don’t follow through in your actions, then that’s a problem. If you don’t want to leave the party, then don’t suggest that you’re going to go home if they’re bad, because at the end of the day, if they are bad, you need to follow through with what you’ve said. So being consistent is very important.
I don’t think that a pediatrician or anyone else should tell you how to parent. Now, they should support you and teach you and help you to make informed decisions for yourself. But whatever decisions you make, you stick to them. If you decide that tonight is the night that I’m going to stop feeding my child at night, then that’s it. Don’t feed them at night again. Because the minute that you backtrack and you feed them again, then the only thing that they have learned is, “If I cry hard enough, I’ll get my way.”
Pediatrician Lawrence Kagan, MD, shares his Golden Nugget of parenting advice on the importance of being consistent when parenting your children
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Lawrence Kagan, MDPediatrician
Lawrence Kagan, MD, FAAP, is a UCLA honors graduate, with a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry. He received medical training at USC Keck School of Medicine, and completed his internship and residency in Pediatrics at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. In addition to passionately studying neonatal, general pediatric and adolescent medicine at CHLA, he had the opportunity to train under some of the greatest minds in subspecialty pediatrics, diagnosing and managing the rarest and most complicated childhood ailments. Prior to opening Westside Pediatrics, he worked as an attending physician at the CHLA Emergency Department as well as at Cedars Sinai Urgent Care. Dr. Kagan is a native of Los Angeles and is happily married with two children.
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