Parenting Off-Balance
benexdict.io
benexdict.io
The other thing you learn is that no plan survives contact with the enemy.
Or you learned that decades ago, modeled it for them, and they ran with it.
Parenting is really tough (Rather than a cranky toddler, I'm dealing with a freshman that gets behind, procrastinates, and lies about it to us!) and just when you figure them out, they change!
Hang in there and don't beat yourself over finding the "right" way.
My kids have long memories, unfortunately.
And if this was not enough, carrying them with a manduca on the back or front and walking outside was always working. Also sometimes in the middle of the night, giving the mother a rest.
Now that they are bit older (and heavier) I only do this rarely. The trick is to have been outside enough with them in the first place. And if their head gets hot - literally cooling them with some water on the head helps very much.
Great tip
Anyone who has been through this, does it ever get easier?
Just get through it one day at a time.
The good news is that at their age right now I’ve been noticing more and more moments where they’re nice to each other, help each other out, etc. Still plenty of rivalry, but it seems to be on the decline in the past six months or so.
Juggling those two ages is tough for us because there is no overlap…they don’t play, eat, or sleep in the same ways so it feels like there’s a negative economy of scale.
I have 13 and 11 year old boys which is pretty sweet at the moment. We talk about games, space, music, and other stuff. They’re old enough to have opinions and something to say but still young enough to see me as the most powerful being in their universe haha
To your point about 3 or 4 - again it gets easier because you get better. Going-out-bags get smaller. You discover kids are resilient. You learn to let go of some expectations.
When we (the parents) take one child each for a day, it feels so much easier than even having both of us together dealing with two.
We do the same for murderers, so why not?
Even the article nods to this - the author asked parents for their philosophy and was surprised when they were confused and didn’t have a clearly articulated parenting system.
Also, for parenting, it’s clear that there actually needs to be more structure because millennials are simply drowning.
The problem is lots of people haven’t figured out how to take/ask for constructive advice. And in all fairness, most advisors are quite bad at giving advice.
My middle take is, people should be sympathetic to parents, and parents should try not to get offended by random opinions. Caveat: I don’t have a good a answer for family.
The issue isn’t that people can or can’t give or take advice. The issue is that someone who hasn’t raised a kid doesn’t realize the complexities involved and how varied each and every child is. They come along with some totally reasonable advice that sounds totally solid, but is based on a set of assumptions that are reasonable and solid. But your child is anything but reasonable and solid. They’re little balls of chaotic good energy pinballing around trying to form a coherent personality based on some Monte Carlo method of personality development.
Parents are fine at accepting advice, and I would note that parents of the current generation are nothing like the parents of the millennial generation. This generation raised their kids through the pandemic and are late stage gen X. These kids were brought up with a much different style, focused intensely on personal responsibility to make the world a lot better place. There’s a lot of focus on building community, being kind, appreciating diversity, responsibility for your actions, and a kind of pervasive view we’ve broken the earth. (YMMV, rural Alabama is probably raising kids the “good old way” to be little psychopaths)
But it’s not about being open to advice or not. It’s about people assuming because they understand their context they can understand all contexts. Let’s take parents who give their kids an iPad or whatever in public, like at a restaurant. You will get no end of non parents (or worse of all, people whose children are long grown up - they forget somehow and assume everyone’s children are some idealized version of their child as remembered 20 years on) condescending to instruct the parents who gave the iPad what a failure they are.
They forget that when they had kids, or they were growing up, their parents would leave them with a baby sitter because baby sitters were really cheap back in the day. Now they cost more than the meal, and most parents can’t afford them - and even if they could, frankly, good luck finding one. The girl next door usually doesn’t baby sit any more for all sorts of reasons. And the reality is the goal is to teach the kid to sit calmly throughout a meal, even during the long stretches of waiting for menus and checks and food which is prime melt down times. By constructing a situation where the behavior is to sit calmly through those times rather than melting down and the parents struggling to salvage the situation, you create a learned pattern for behavior by engaging them with literally anything that is engaging. The quality of educational content for these devices is remarkable and engaging. I’m familiar with all the software (I play them through personally to be sure it’s good to go) and recognize what these kids are all doing on the iPad while the non parents sneer at the destruction of their child’s mind. In fact, they’re practicing phonics instead of bouncing off the walls and learning to bounce off the walls. Maybe learning phonics by iPad is only 60% as effective as 1:1 intensive with parents, but that’s not the alternative at that moment. Instead they’re learning to sit calmly in the restaurant - because that’s exactly what they are doing. The alternative is they’re learning to melt down because melting down captures the parents attention away from building a mutual bond during their date night (with kid because child care costs more than a college education). The child’s experience is calmly learning phonics and watching the parents build a grown up bond of love in a new context. Once they’re a little older then you take the iPad away and they already know what that time is for. It’s for calmly establishing a social relationship.
Finally, parents can’t help but be offended by random opinions when they haven’t slept in four years.
This is really dangerous. For your sake and her sake, learn how to calmly walk away (as long as she is in a safe place) and let her tantrum run its course. Otherwise, her small violent waves at just the right moment may cause large, violent waves in you.
You are tying your emotions to her emotions.
I have read too many stories of shaken baby syndrome or other abuse that would have been prevented just by walking away.
For those where small violent waves still become large violent waves, yeah, this is probably not the safest approach for parent or baby. Those folks are going to have a tough time parenting to begin with, though.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, this isn't really how it works, at least with little ones. They start having these really big feelings, don't know what to do or how to handle them, and they _need_ an adult present to help them regulate. Walking away can help them learn how to self-regulate, but the better play (again, IMO only) is to first teach them the skills on _how_ to regulate (deep breathing, butterfly hugs, distraction, etc). Walking away is a tool, just like any other, but it's a big tool for bigger kids IMO.
Now of course this only goes so far, and if the parent starts getting to the point where it feels like they're going to explode, of _course_ leaving the room is the correct thing to do. Get up, say something like "I need to leave the room to calm my body down. I will come back in a little bit. I love you." and then follow through. Go scream into a pillow, punch the bed, deep breathe, whatever. The come back and try again, with the expectation that they won't have calmed down and may have accelerated. IME this isn't super successful at one but by the time they hit three or so they have enough awareness to understand what you're telling them.
Also, to clarify, I'm not talking about infants. Infants can be absolutely infuriatingly frustrating, especially when you're operating on very little or no sleep. Putting them down in a safe space and walking away for five minutes so you can primal scream in the garage is 100% better than the alternatives.
I mean, yes, its important to recognize where your limits are so that when you feel you are approaching them, you take the moment to walk away.
But as written, I understood this to be "if I haven't yet approached my limit, maybe being calm near her can actually help her". This syncs with a lot of what I've read and been taught by e.g. my kids' preschool teachers: kids need reassurance that their negative emotions are valid, and that its ok to express negative emotions. Consistently walking away from a child in the midst of expressing negative emotions past some threshold of intensity just teaches the kid that people who feel that strongly about anything should be isolated.
To paraphrase your own closing statement, I've read too many stories of neglected and abandoned children that would have been prevented by not "just" walking away.
I think more importantly, the GP was using the most negative possible interpretation of what, to me, sounds like a pretty healthy and self-aware approach to the new (to the author) phenomenon of tantrums.
A big part of tantrums in my experience is that a child is overwhelmed and has no idea how to express what they need. Usually the tantrum is not a great indicator of what the child needs. They say they need the iPad or fruit loops. What they actually need is layered under that, and they're likely unaware of it. Walking away from them won't help them uncover that, nor will it help them feel like these bad feelings are manageable.
Occasionally you need to walk away because none of us are perfect. I think if we want actual growth and progress though, we have to meet these things head on and help our kids learn better ways to live, feel, and adapt. This is a hard answer because this is usually non-trivial and arguably something many of us as adults haven't fully figured out, either. We've all got bad behaviours we still hold on to from our early days. Who are we to work these things out with our kids? And yet, this is why so many maladaptive behaviours propagate down through generations. It doesn't go away if you don't step up to it.
I have had success with "body scans" where I start at the top of their head and ask "how does your brain feel" and then proceed all the way to their toes (sometimes being sillily specific about, say, the tip of their left pinky finger or whatever). Usually this reveals something about their body that they were unaware of. Hungry, thirsty, headache, something else hurts, etc. Once we have some physical needs we can address them we can move forward, and if there aren't any then we move on to emotional needs.
Yes.
At those sorts of ages they literally don't know how to manage the emotions they're feeling. Hell, often enough they may be _entirely new emotions_--they don't even know the words to put to them to begin to express them or ask for help.
It is absolutely your job as their parent to teach them this stuff. Teach them what feelings are. Teach them to recognize the feelings. Teach them how to cope with the feelings.
If you don't, who's going to?
Walking away because they're overwhelmed by unfamiliar emotions and haven't learned any coping strategies is just throwing your kid in the deep end of the pool and walking away figuring "eh, they'll either learn to swim or they'll drown. they'll probably learn to swim.".
Reading is something very different from experiencing it yourself. My main take is pragmatically, if I have the energy and calmness, I am with them. Hug them if they want it. Ask them, what they really want, even restrain them (in a playful, but firm way). But if I feel I cannot do it calmly, I indeed let them have their tantrum and am in the next room. But if it is in the middle of the night and other people want to sleep, then this is not an option and you have to be creative (like I wrote above, going outside with them for example always worked, or a bit of water on their head, to literally cool them)