Dangermond.org

When Tin came home, a lot of mothers told me that parenting is the most rewarding and challenging thing they have ever done in their lives and literally, bite my tongue, I thought to myself “challenging?” – how could anyone say this is challenging as I moved deftly from having lost a parent, acquired a son, and changed my life radically in a space of a week. I really thought challenging was because perhaps those parents had difficult children. Ha!

Ha! Ha! Ha!

As Tin started coming into his own, he seems to have developed a huge desire for independence, an intolerance of missing the window of sleep or food, and a real frustration at not being able to get and do exactly what he wants when he wants. Challenging – ha! Ha ! Ha!

A friend told me that after her kids were grown she took a course in the philosophy of a Christian woman that said when you tell a child to do something like pick up their room, you have to make sure you look them in the eye, communicate exactly what you want them to do, and have them repeat back to you what they are intended to do, and then if they don’t do it, you don’t repeat, you go into the room, tell them they have not done what they are supposed to do and give them a spank (not spanking).

I told her I wholeheartedly agree except on the hitting part – I believe in a no-hit child rearing policy – but definitely on the, I’m only telling you once part or else there are consequences.

The challenge here is that Tin doesn’t understand truth or consequences YET and so now it’s more like trying to be understanding, discerning over tired, over hungry from irascible and unreasonable and introducing no and boundaries and you do all this while you are figuring it all out yourself, and your partner is doing the same thing but coming from a different thought process, and you just say, why I oughta…. but then your nanny (his Mary Poppins) sends you an iPhone pic she took at Storyland and you think, what a cutie pie!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.