tiny grass

M & J in Costa Rica

Ah - the joy of other people’s kids.  People who managed to make my son feel like he was punished because they are unable to give their son the tools he needs to deal with his anger productively.

These neighbors are relatively new - they’re in the house behind ours, and our backyards meet.  They moved in about a year ago, but we only made contact a few months ago.  They seemed nice enough, but like other experiences with mainstream families, the differences eventually come to light.

M is 6 months older than their son but is much more mature.  He’s also had issues with anger and how to express himself and it took some work to teach him to be angry without calling people names.  The other kid is treated like most mainstream boys - somehow his parents want him to express himself, except when he cries and they tend to ignore him.  Or if he’s angry, which results in a timeout.

For every instance of conflict, the other parents react with punishment for their son.  It could be a timeout, or it could be going home.  If the kid gets angry, he’s punished by not being allowed to play with other kids.  There’s no attempt to discuss things or come up with productive ways to resolve differences.  This, we now realize, is what M has witnessed and learned from.

Early this spring the two kids would tend to get into arguments over toys and activities.  Over the course of 2 months, M showed an amazing capacity to learn and went from selfish argumentation to honest attempts at talking through differences.  The kid amazes me - at 5 I would’ve been happy to throw something at another kid and run away instead of speaking logically.

The other kid is less mature and more anger-filled, and M’s attempts at discussion and compromise rarely go anywhere.  (I say rarely because I *hope* the attempts have been productive at least once, but I haven’t actually seen it.)  We seemed to take it in stride - until we parents had a difference in opinion about something.

They got a trampoline a few weeks ago.  After research & consideration, we decided not to allow our kids on it.  At the kid’s birthday party, the horror of witnessing 8 kids jumping & shoving each other, barely supervised, was too much.  Not to mention the kid yelling at M that he didn’t want M at the party and to go home.  The last interaction between Trish & the mom was tense as it was very obvious that we were aghast, and upset at how the kid had treated M.

Since then, their kids have rarely been in our yard when they used to come every day.  I was pretty happy about this since that kid required constant supervision and guidance, more than all the other kids combined.  But in the past two weeks, the kid has come over a couple of times and they’ve actually been very good together, having fun with little conflict.  Things seemed to be improving.

The kid does not come over on his own though - only when M heads down and invites him.  We’ve gotten the feeling that the other parents were discouraging the kid from coming over, an inference confirmed by some of the surly looks that sneak onto the mother’s face the couple of times we’ve spoken.  Or maybe from the last time the kid was over, when the first thing he said was Hey Trish!  Your family’s craaaazy because the kids in your family call you ‘Trish’ instead of calling you Mom & Dad! I’m sure he came up with that on his own…

This past week the kid has declined to come over, and while M has been seemingly cool, that’s not really the case.  Today he finally revealed that he felt that it was because of an unspecified fight and is blaming himself for it.  I’ve done my best to make clear that he is not at fault, but it bothers him.  It’s obvious that he’s feeling like he’s been punished for something he’s done.  After all, he’s seen how the other parents deal with conflict.

Beyond talking and explaining things to M (he’s already aware that our tolerance for risk is much lower than the other family’s), there’s not much else to do.  M’s been making the occasional choice to not be with the kid, who’s actually taunted him from the trampoline.  It’s just a lesson that has to be learned, but even knowing how capable my son is, it’s hard when he needlessly feels bad about himself.

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This is my entry for the May 31st 2008 edition of the Thinking Parents Wiki.

The topic for this edition was: What Would You Be Doing Right Now If You Had No Kids?

It seems to me that one way to rephrase that question would be: What would you be like today if parenthood had not changed you?

I guess there are probably a few parents out there that were unchanged by parenthood. Although I think they are few and far between, and probably they are just resisting the change or denying that it is happening. Most parents that I talk to seem to be utterly changed by parenthood. After kids, your outlook changes and your values change. Look at this old post of mine to see the huge changes that occurred in me.

So the question becomes, what would I be doing right now if those huge events of having children and giving birth had not happened?

For one thing, I’d probably be like most of the childless people I know and I’d have absolutely no clue what life with children is like. I’d spend time talking to other single people about how parents should really just take control of their children. Enforce the rules! Be consistent! I’d sit in some coffee house or restaurant rolling my eyes at all the horrible parents with their scrubby-looking children. (Actually, I do that now, but mostly I do it with the emotionally abusive parents, and the kids that are literally eating their own boogers. And only in family restaurants. If I didn’t have kids, I’d dish out the criticism to parents with kids that do anything other than sit still and smile.) I’d practice saying, “Why don’t they just get a babysitter?” regularly.

As far as careers, I have no idea where I would be right now. Before kids, I hated working at most every job I have ever had. I have gone through many stumbling career paths. I lasted about 7 days at Wendy’s and 3 days busing tables at a local restaurant. I hated publishing, and the 2 years I spent on that endeavor were wasted. Teaching was OK, but I always felt that most days I was just wasting everyone’s time (an inkling of unschooling even then!).  Oh! I know what I would be doing! I’d be a chef. I would serve fancy, pretty little meals, hardly enough to count as a bite, to people in small snooty restaurants. And if I ever came out to mingle with the masses, we would all roll our eyes in unison at all the snotty little kids and their inept parents. “Why don’t they just get a babysitter?!”

If the current me saw the me without kids, I don’t think I’d like myself much. But then again, on one of those hard days of parenthood, I dream of escaping to that world of pre-parenthood. “Why don’t we just get a babysitter?” Ah well….there’s no going back. My kids are by my side to stay, and overall, I am better for it.

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It’s not the poop, vomit, early rising, late nights, lack of sleep, lack of time, inability to get stuff done, the inability to go wherever whenever or the reduced time for sex. You get acclimated to most of that, and some things preclude other things - consistent lack of sleep makes sleep much more desired than sex (at least for awhile). At least that changes as children grow older. I hope.

What doesn’t change is the daily threat that some horrible, insipid song will weave it’s way into your brain and take away what little peace of mind you have. I thought it was bad in high school when I couldn’t get Ashford & Simpson’s Solid as a Rock out of my head for days. Or Living Colour’s Glamour Boys (I’m fierce!). That was nothing in the face of children’s music that is insipid yet digustingly catchy. Read more »

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Judy Apicella is an idiot. She directed a documentary on childhood vaccinations, entitled, “Shoot ‘em Up, The Truth About Vaccines”. I saw her speak at a meeting last night, run by the local Holistic Mom’s Network, that aimed to give information on vaccination to parents. After sitting through 2 tortuous hours of the most unscientific information, I came to the conclusion that Judy Apicella should definitely not be a speaker for the anti-vaccine lobby. I’d imagine that if parents had attended who were sitting on the fence about childhood vaccination, they might have actually been swayed to vaccinate if they were listening to this woman. Which is incredibly sad. It was the biggest waste of two hours that I have spent in a long time. Read more »

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Before we left for Costa Rica, we were playing Uno and Yahtzee pretty often at home. Sometimes M was really happy and complimentary when he lost and other times he was a REALLY sore loser. Unfortunately, losing happened more frequently, and he seemed to get really worked up about winning and would often change or attempt to change the rules to aid his cause. I sometimes lost on purpose and did my best to model good behavior. Games can be fun, they can exercise the mind, they can be social - there are lots of good reasons to play games. I’m not keen on promoting the fact that the sole purpose of a game is for one person to be the winner and to lord it over everyone else.

But he he seemed to get competitive about drawing or building with Lego and other activities. At the last Unschoolers Support Group another parent pointed out that younger kids may need the finite, black and white resolution. That makes sense, but I wondered if there was anything different. I was, for most of my life, hypercompetitive, and I do hope that he doesn’t follow that path. Not being judged and compared to others based on grades for years on end should help, but I needed to find something that expanded the horizons and started searching online. I thought I could find a game whose object wasn’t to win, but to my pleasant surprise, I discovered a game genre called Co-Operative games, where the goal is to work together. This was better than I could have imagined. Read more »

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