EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
|
| ||||
|
Advertise
With Us
Click here to request more information.
OC Family reaches:
- Active & educated parents
- Growing families
- And more...
Early Years (2-6)
|
||||
|
My sister thinks it’s all over. There’s no use. What’s done is done. She’s talking about her daughter. She’s talking about her parenting style, and about the disappointing fact that her 5-year-old otherwise a bright, capable child has developed habits, behaviors and expectations that challenge, frustrate and worry those around her. Other people use words like spoiled, difficult or the more kindly, if clumsy, high-spirited. My sister is determined to put up with it because, after all, she helped create it. She feels guilty. Only five years in, she already feels, at times, like a failed parent. She’ll wait it out, she thinks, rolling her eyes as her daughter launches into a revival of her ongoing opera: defiance. When I am on the telephone, I hear her in the background issuing demands. When I am present, I see it in action and wince. Waiting will take years, I tell her, emphasizing the years part. Your daughter is 5 now, alive 60 months. What is she going to be like at 10? Fifteen? And how much are you willing to endure? I don’t want to think about it, she says. I’ll deal with it, she says, but she’s not happy. She should be, but she isn’t. Children shouldn’t only be “dealt with,” but this mother doesn’t know what else to do. Her attitude not only punishes herself it’s punishing her daughter and both deserve much better. Some of us carefully adopt parenting styles and approaches culled from professionals in offices and from books, on talk shows and magazines, while others wing it, doing what works when it’s needed, trusting our instincts and experiences rather than somebody else’s table of contents or list of do’s and don’ts. Some, like my sister, do a bit of both. But she, like many, is often mostly influenced by the crisis of life itself doing what’s expedient, not really what’s best. For every action there is an opposite reaction, in this physics of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants parenting. In her case, both parents work long hours. As a result, early bedtime is abolished in order to guarantee some kind of “family time.” Of course, that comes at the expense of sleep, at the expense of routine. Those same vital family hours interfere with meals, so there’s lots of pizza and take-out. This leads to poor eating habits, hard to challenge in a Chuck E. Cheese meets Pringles world even for stay-at-homers. Indeed, parents who feel guilty about being absent (out making a living) may overcompensate by indulging a child itself a problem pattern that hurts both child and parent. Tired moms and dads give into requests they don’t have the energy to resist, even though they know better. So what to tell my sister, other parents, and even myself? Take baby steps: Adopt reasonable expectations. Choose one aspect of your parenting you want to change. Concentrate on that. Perhaps it’s communication style, the rapidity with which you both choose to use raised voices and dramatic displays of frustration and exasperation. Maybe it’s TV or video time or shared meals. Think about your own struggle to learn, change, adopt an exercise regimen, get through school or learn to play the xylophone. Involve the child: This is an opportunity for a kid to learn about self-control and improvement. Parenting is about more than behavior control; it’s about teaching children to be responsible for their own behavior. Children this age should be active partners in the process instead of passive receptors to a course of action imposed upon them. Talk to your child about what’s going on. Let them know that, say, staying up until 10 o’clock isn’t really working for the family (“We’re all tired and cranky!”) and that you’d like to try an earlier bedtime, with the promise that mornings will be brighter. Or that sugary cereal in the morning is fine on very special occasions but you’d like to try oatmeal with bananas and honey tomorrow, or scrambled eggs and biscuits. Take time to explain why. Introduce a little science here: blood sugar, energy, calories. Ask for help and suggestions, and embark on the shift with an adventurous attitude. Think “Magic School Bus,” and the frankness of teachers and adults on that terrific show. Help your child develop a self-interest, responsibility to the process, and thus cleverly reduce some of the anticipated adversarial reactions. Be patient: It took my sister five years to get where she is now. Making real change will require more time, practice and patience, and a sense of a worthwhile goal. It will require me and others around her who care enough about her family to help out. Be honest: Change requires we parents to admit that we were wrong. That’s hard. My sister was willing to do so but she’s always been like that. Most of us might be too proud, too stubborn to look at the problem and see what created it and our part in that. We may feel that admitting our fallibility will undermine us in front of our children. Think of it as an opportunity to teach a second language, in this case Latin: mea culpa. The risk of waiting it out till they go away to college or reform school, tolerating the intolerable or even dangerous is just too great and our children can learn a valuable lesson from our own willingness to confront what went wrong and change it. Lisa Alvarez, an English professor at Irvine Valley College, lives in Modjeska Canyon with her husband and 3-year-old son. |
||||
RSS SubscribeSEARCH THE SITE
