Reality Check: My Kid’s a B**t!

(rhymes with cat)

Even as I start writing under that heading I feel a creeping sense of shame and betrayal.  Like I have broken the first golden rule of parenting: “Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Thine Own Offspring.”  A la booming voice from the sky.  As a parent your first call of duty is to protect your kids.  You don’t talk badly about them, you build them up.  You encourage them in every way towards healthy self-esteem, and give them limitless opportunity to express themselves.  But what happens when that “expression” becomes rude, obnoxious, embarrassing behaviour?  Well, it has come to my attention that my daughter is headed for the position as Mayor of Bratsville if I don’t get a handle on the situation right now.

We live in an era of helicopter, attachment, and tiger style parenting – the digital and information age, of self-help and how-to.  With the plethora of parenting books on the market, it’s like there’s no excuse for not having an honorary degree in early childhood development, if you want to call yourself a parent.  Beyond that, there is an unspoken pressure, whether we admit it or not, on social media sites, to post pics of our happy families-mid bliss, with proud commentary about  our darling offspring.  (I’m as guilty as the next gal).

But errrrrrrr…stop the record!  Parenting is exhausting.  Let me spell that out so it comes across really clearly, parenting is E-X-H-A-U-S-T-I-N-G.    I mean, yes yes, of course it’s a delight and a joy almost every minute.  But the rest of the time you are struggling to keep up…. How do I burn off all her energy?  How do I do it productively?  Did she get enough to eat?  Was it healthy?  Was it organic?  When’s that next doctor appointment?  Does she have enough friends?  Did she just say thank you? How’s her language development?  I need to sign her up for preschool… I need to do laundry…pay bills…do dishes..blah blah blah, we all know it never ends. And in midst of all that you have to mold and maintain behavioral control of  a sprouting, effervescent, intellectual, spiritual life!!

And lest we take the weight of that duty lightly- there’s a reason guns, whips, shackles and bars have historically been the tools for controlling human beings… Because its HARD!!! Humans want freedom.  We want to explore, be curious, be expressive, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the up and down, moment-to-moment antics of a toddler.  Yet parents ad educators have that duty every day, to mold and maintain control simultaneously.

In my own life I have always had an aversion to discipline. I battled it til I bled and in the end, having my children is what really forced discipline into my life.  I ran from my mother and her methods of discipline and I am utterly terrified of creating that type of distance between myself and my kids.  I live in the constant fear that my kids will run away from me like I ran away from my own parents.  So maybe I’ve been a little lax on the discipline.   Maybe one too many times I thought “Oh, it’s okay, there’s no harm, she’s only (insert age here).”   But on a recent outing Christmas shopping with my mother in law… my laissez-faire attitude came back to bite me in the ass.

While perusing a book store with MIL, my 2 ½ yr old and  5 month old (in stroller) I lost control.  I mean, I lost total control of my daughter.  I let her out of the stroller before we went in the store (first mistake) and while I was momentarily distracted, she took off like some kind of banshee track star.  She was up and down the aisles of that book shop faster than I could keep up, screaming in that high pitched Mariah Carey-esque squeel, that only toddlers can accomplish, for a solid 5 minutes.  It was an eternity.  I bounced between being mortified and just wanting to run away.  But I couldn’t.  I wrangled my child amidst the gawks of onlookers and we managed to get outside.

Once clear of the store I turned to my MIL, and exclaimed “I don’t know what to do with her.  She’s out of control!”  Accepting my invitation for counsel, she said the first thing needed was creation of boundaries and that those boundaries need to be consistent, because children respond best to consistency.  So I can only assume that if I am able to consistently, non-violently, create boundaries for my children, they will respond with appropriate behaviour.  But didn’t I just say discipline was hard for me?  So really in disciplining her I am disciplining myself… towards consistency.  Its clearly a learning process for both of us.

Now as I am in the midst of negotiating the ins and outs of disciplining my child, I’m asking, where do I begin?  When do I draw the line and how do I find the energy to do it?  How do I discipline with non-violence?  Also, how do I discipline according to the specific characteristics of my childrens personalities?  Ergo-Discipline perhaps?  I wonder if it might be best to not take a broad sweeping approach to discipline.  One size does not necessarily fit all when disciplining kids.

How about you, reader? Are you learning how to discipline? Have you already learned?  What works or hasn’t worked for you and your children?

We at Takes a Village would like to invite you to share your experiences with discipline or lack of it!  Your trials and triumphs will be posted as part of a continuing dialogue, the “Discipline Diaries.”  Feel free to respond anonymously if you wish.  Please send responses to contact@takesavillage.net or simply comment here.

I will also be reporting back with my own battles and hopefully victories, as well as the development of the Ergo-Discipline theory.