This past week I hung out with my young friends as usual and, unusually, found myself forgetting how to have fun with them. As this forgetfulness set in, my patience got shorter & I perceived their behaviors to be a little worse than usual.

It can be dangerous to be good at shaping kids’ behaviors. My expectations of myself to always be doing the right thing and always having a ton of patience and stick-to-itness can hurt my self-esteem when I don’t think that the kids I’m spending time with are being as well behaved as I would like. I have some go-to techniques that I use when kids’ behaviors are approaching the need for a consequence. But when my patience is wearing thin, my creativity lessens and I rely too heavily on the same pat warnings and consequences, with a rather lackluster delivery.

So I was feeling a little down on myself for not being the super-est nanny around. I realized that I wasn’t having fun with the kids and I was becoming more inflexible and therefore more likely to break because of anger or frustration. I can’t say that I turned it immediately around and that the end of the week was awesome because I realized these things. But I can say that I decided not to be too hard on myself. It’s not the end of the world to have a stressful couple of days. Forgiving yourself for being a bit short-tempered is the first step to being more at ease the next time. So I’ll work on remembering that I can have fun with the kids and that if I don’t for a little while, it doesn’t mean that I’m bad at what I do. Fun will come again.