Brushing Teeth and Other Personal Hygiene Items

The following is a selection from the book Raising Children Who Think For Themselves by Dr. Eisa Medhus. From the chapter titled "Specific Child Rearing Challenges - How to Handle Them to Encourage Self-Direction", the following introduction is offered.

"The best way to make children good is to make them happy." - Oscar Wilde

Here are some inner-directed suggestions that will help with some of the most trying child-rearing difficulties we may stumble upon. All of these approaches are designed to preserve your children's ability to rely on internal dialogue instead of external influences to assess and correct their behavior. Using this section as a ready reference will help you raise a self-directed child, even if it means carrying the book, tattered and tear-stained, to the market, in the car, or at home. There are some challenges that, I hope you will never have to face, but others will be as inevitable as a pimple on prom night.

To get to self-direction, there are a few universal caveats for every one of the situations that follow. First, our children need to understand and agree with both the need for the furl and the consequence for breaking it. Only when they come to agree with our rules, through their own internal dialogue, will they become self-directed. Second, look to your own parenting strategy as the possible source of some of the problem. Are you over-controlling or over-protective? Either trait can elicit an externally directed response, as your children react to an unhealthy situation. Third, remember for all these parenting challenges how important it is for you as parents, to model the right behavior. If you're expecting your children to act one way and you act another, the double standard will throw a monkey wrench into their whole internal dialogue machinery.

And lastly, don't forget to laugh.

Why they try to get out of doing it

Hey, they've got better things to do, what can I say?
Do you really think washing up before dinner or brushing their hair gets their adrenaline going? Does clipping their nails make their spines tingle? I seriously doubt it. If so, you probably have a very boring family.

Logical consequences

If your children don't comb their hair or bathe regularly, they'll find out about it from their friends, eventually. Let them know how you feel about the way they look and smell, but never nag them.

No one comes to the dinner table without washing hands first. No cleany, no eaty. As for dental hygiene, it's not that easy. If they won't brush their teeth on their own, brush for them. If they're seventeen years old, they might squirm at the idea of you brushing their teeth while their blind date waits at the door.

Uncut nails will become annoying and deadly, unwashed hands will stink and gross them out when they pick their noses, and their clothes will walk out the front door on their own if they don't do their laundry. In other words, personal hygiene habits usually have a built-in consequence system that works pretty well.

Solutions toward self-direction

Teach your children why hand washing and teeth brushing are so important. Bring up some disgusting pinworm story or the specter of dental implants-if you're desperate.

Use impartial descriptions and give information: "It's already 7:00, and you haven't brushed your teeth, yet."

Use choices: "If you've finished washing your hands, then you can come to the table to eat."

Use humor: Put a sign near the toothbrushes that reads something like "Wanted, new home for neglected toothbrush." Look in their mouths and feign dismay, saying that the little sugar bugs are excavating a vacant lot on one of their molars so they can put up a new shopping mall there.

If your children don't brush their hair in the morning and look like a cross between Don King and a Pekinese, who cares? Sure, they might get a barrage of nasty critiques from their peers, but we hope that they'll make their decisions based on their own opinions. If it becomes important enough, they'll start combing, trust me. If they just forget to "do their do" but hate looking like a bed-head every morning, help them remember in a nonjudgmental way: "Lukas, you've gotten ready for school so quickly. Let's see. You're dressed, you've eaten, you've brushed your teeth, and you have your lunch made. All you need is to comb that hair of yours a little, and you're off!"