Don't mollycoddle your kids, suggests expert

Melbourne, May 15 (ANI): It's not always right to mollycoddle your kids, instead, they should be allowed to hurt themselves and punished with boredom, just for the sake of some fun, says an expert.

Nigel Latta, the clinical psychologist and author of 'Politically Incorrect Parenting' gave the above suggestion while speaking at a bookshop in Hobart at the weekend.

"Everybody's trying to do the best for their children, the problem is there is all this information from all these people saying 'if you don't do it my way your kids are going to be a complete mess' and parenting is hard enough," the Courier Mail quoted Latta as saying.

He believes mollycoddling children robs them not only of valuable life lessons but also of the chance just to be children.

"Telling your kids to go away and play isn't bad parenting, you're just teaching them to be kids and to amuse themselves, you don't need to entertain them constantly," he said.

"If my kids come to me and say they're bored I say to them, 'well I'm not because I have a cup of coffee and the newspaper, so go away and leave me alone' -- they amazingly find ways to amuse themselves," he added.

Latta said it was often helpful to think of toddlers as drunken rugby hooligans and approach them accordingly.

"They have the same reasoning skills and wisdom of the average drunken yob. Some of them are mean drunks, some are happy drunks, some just go to sleep," he said.

Latta said he was not necessarily opposed to smacking but he believed there were much better options.

"The only thing kids fear more than smacking is boredom," he said. (ANI)