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Drive-By Parenting

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It’s awfully quiet in the living room.  Yet you know that’s where your two kids are playing. Your first thought is to yell, “Everything ok in there?” Or rush into the room just to check up on them. But then you reconsider. You decide to do a quick drive-by instead.

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So why not just ask them what’s going on or run in to check? Why be sneaky?

#1 You want your kids to feel that you trust them

If every time they’re quietly reading a book, you interrupt them to ask what they’re doing, they’re going to quickly get the impression that you don’t trust them…even to read. If we always want to know what they’re “up to,” we won’t be allowing them privacy and autonomy. Telling them that they’re always answerable to us and not themselves is not the message that we want to send.

By inventing a chore that takes you into the living room, but doesn’t include staring at them or even talking to them necessarily, you can assess the situation without letting them know that you don’t actually trust them. Be nonchalant. Whistle while you look for that imaginary book. They might not even notice you’re there if they’re really involved in something, which means you can come back and check again if you need to without raising their hackles.

#2 You’d like to stop being annoying (to them & to ourselves)

Every time I hear myself saying those tried and true parental phrases (Don’t run! Don’t eat your boogers! Stop biting your sister!), no matter how necessary they are, I am appalled to hear how much of an adult I am. Our own voices can become annoying to us and to them. And when this happens, our words lose their gravitas. We become background noise. That’s why you have to say “Don’t run!” 27 times, because they’ve practically stopped being able to hear you.

When you become a quiet peruser of your kids, instead of a raucous interrupter, you catch them doing all kinds of things. And most of them aren’t even bad! You can quietly watch them try to figure out how to put a puzzle together. You can sometimes catch snippets of ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’ being exchanged among siblings. And sometimes even when they are doing something a bit naughty, you can watch the deftness that it takes to climb on top of the table to retrieve their lost crayon.

#3 Check-ins can be sweet instead of sour

If we’re always yelling from the next room for them to behave, keep it down or confess their current naughtiness, check-ins are eventually going to be instantly confrontational. When you enter a room, they’ll expect a lecture (that they can ignore). They’ll think that you’re looking to catch them doing something they shouldn’t be. Yick. Doesn’t sound that fun.

Instead, you can go into the living room to find your chapstick and give them a kiss along the way. Now you’ve checked on them and given them a little love. Or if you’re making dinner and you haven’t yelled out to them in a while, they just might come into the kitchen looking for you. Maybe they even want to help with dinner (What?!).

So next time you’re curious as to what those kiddos are up to, simply go to check on them without checking on them. A little drive-by parenting can be nicer than it sounds.

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Weathering the Storm: Public Temper Tantrums!

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Very few people care if your kid is sleepy or hungry or displeased with life…until that kid starts to make a scene in public. Then you care and everyone around you seems to too. It’s so much fun having stress sweats in front of strangers at the grocery store. So. Much. Fun.

Writing as one who has experienced this scenario many, many times, I can tell you one thing for sure: you sweat a little less after the 1000th public outburst. Like anything in life, temper tantrums (especially public ones) get easier with practice. Good news if you have a kid who lets you know that they really, really want those gummy fruit snacks…NOW! 

So what can you do to help yourself weather the storm of a public temper tantrum?

#1 Decide before it happens how you want to handle it!

Temper tantrums are bound to happen in young kids especially while they learn to navigate their seemingly overwhelming wants. So getting ready for it before it happens is probably a good idea.

If you know that you are unready to teach a life lesson in the cereal aisle, no sweat- decide before you go that if you encounter a tantrum, you will simply remove your child from the store. Poof! You might have to wheel the cart back to the front and smile apologetically at leaving it full of things, but you had a plan! And you stuck to it!

If you think that you’re ready to stand your ground amid the chaos and sideways glances, great!- decide before you go that if you encounter a tantrum, you will stick to your guns, not give in to your child’s demands and work to remain as calm as you can. Voila! You might still sweat, but maybe you thought to wear a shirt that wouldn’t show it. So there, another plan to stick to!

The essential thought of this is that there is no right way to handle a public temper tantrum. If you are feeling more fragile today than you were yesterday, then just figuring out what you can live with for this one outing should be as far into the future as you look.

#2 Decide how you will try to handle your stressed feelings before they arise!

We all know that it’s coming. That stressful situation that you think will put you over the edge- perhaps your kid’s temper tantrum at your local restaurant.

You can feel the color come into your cheeks. You can feel the urge to harshly whisper at your child to cut it out. You can feel your jaw tightening. Is there anything that you can do to calm yourself down before you feel like how your child is acting?

If taking deep breaths works for you, give it a go! If closing your eyes and picturing being anywhere else works for you, do it! If singing your favorite song in your head (or outloud) can relieve some tension, try it out!

Needing to have a plan to deal with your own behaviors and reactions is just as important as having a plan to deal with your child’s.

#3 Applaud yourself for returning to the scene of the crime!

After an especially loud (albeit baby) outburst that my daughter had at a class, I was scared to go back for a little while. What if it happens again? What will the other moms think of me? What if I can’t get her to quiet down again? What if I get embarrassed again? But a little bit of time passed and I felt strong enough to try again. And might I just say, way to go me!

Moving on from the little traumas of public embarrassment should be celebrated. They might have a little meltdown again, but maybe it’ll be after 20 minutes instead of 5? Whatever the outcome, give yourself a real pat on the back for trying again. Brag about it to your partner. Put it on Facebook and get some likes.

Building resilience in ourselves will only make those other 999 public outbursts that we have to live through a bit more bearable.

It’s OK to be wrong

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Have you ever caught yourself making a mistake and said aloud to no one in particular (except yourself), “Don’t be so stupid, Katie!” I know that I have. It just comes so naturally. Make a mistake: chastise yourself for it. Right now you might be thinking, “That’s dumb. Everyone makes mistakes.” Indeed, we all do.

My brother is an expert at this self-admonishment. If he makes a mistake that he feels ashamed of, he’ll smack his palm against his forehead, berate himself no less than 15 times and have some trouble moving on from the site of his mistake. Maybe he has heard other people (including me) do this to ourselves often enough that he’s picked up the habit too. I would argue that this isn’t a really useful way of solving problems or of making yourself feel capable of solving problems. So how should we change this “Doh!” attitude?

#1

Difficult as it may seem, we first need to police ourselves and how we narrate our own mistakes. If our kids hear us berating ourselves for doing something wrong, then they’ll think that that’s the usual response to forgetting to pack a snack or going in the out door.

#2

Try to replace your usual sarcastic, “Nice one, Katie,” with something a little more forgiving. When trying to bring my brother back from the edge of “I’m so stupid,” he can sometimes reframe his thinking into the much nicer, “It happens to everyone.” Having another phrase at the ready for those knee-jerk face palms can help you say something that you’d like your kids to hear you say to yourself.

#3

When you do make a mistake that affects someone else, apologize and move on. Whenever my patience gets short with kids and consequently, so do my words, I almost always try to apologize to them for my infraction. It’s up to them to forgive me, but I try to forgive myself after the incident. I try not to dwell or let any feelings of guilt affect how I treat them immediately after.

The same is true of kids apologizing for something they’ve done. Once they’ve apologized for whining or yelling at me, I work to forgive them and move on from it. I don’t want them to feel that they have to carry it around and show me that they feel badly for whatever they’ve done by calling themselves names. We don’t want them to do it to others, so why would we want them to do it to themselves?

Remember, it’s ok to be wrong & being kind to ourselves is an important example to show our kids.

 

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A look is worth a thousand words?

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Last week, I had the fun-fortune to attend a continuing education class (for my social work license) on non-verbal communication. We watched little dialogues and assessed the unspoken messages that were sent. We communicated nonverbally in small groups. We looked at micro expressions and tried to distinguish what whiff of emotion was coming through. It was kind of fun as well as informational. And it got me thinking, as many things do, about how parents can use non-verbal skills with their kids. I’ve written about keeping quiet, but want to take it a step further and actively communicate with kids while being quiet. Impossible? Not with a little practice.

Though I do think about staying quiet with kids, I still wrestle with when to and when not to open my mouth. {Sometimes I even say to a child, “I’ll just close my mouth. Too much talking from me.”} I try to respect their ability to solve problems on their own and to know what steps to take next. I’d rather teach them to do something by themselves than find myself always in the position of telling them what to do next. So, first things first:

#1) If you have explained how to do something or when to do something many times, try not doing that and see what happens.
Don’t ask your child to put their shoes on every time it’s time to leave the house. Just say that it’s time to leave and see what happens. Try to limit your verbal directions to them on things that they know how to do.
Ex. “Don’t forget to clear your plate from the table.”
“We have to hold hands to cross the street.”
“After your bath, you have to brush your teeth.”

#2) Try prompting these known activities with non-verbal cues instead!
When it’s time to cross the street, I simply beat the kids to the curb (though they are now great at waiting on the sidewalk since we’ve practiced this) and then stand with my hands out waiting for them. This has done a couple of great things. First, it’s made me less annoying in this one situation. Yay! Second, it allows the kids to enforce the rules themselves. Since I don’t mention holding hands, sometimes they do. They police each other and have taken more ownership in the activity of safely crossing the street. Awesome! That means that someday they’ll be ready to do it by themselves.

#3) If they need a lesson in your non-verbals, give it to them.
You can do this in everyday situations or during a specific “game” to test their knowledge. Sometimes if I want to guide their behavior in a small way, before saying something, I’ll just look at them. If they don’t seem to get whatever message I’m trying to convey with my body and face, I’ll ask them what my face is telling them. Even if they don’t get it right, this still allows for us to talk about how I’m feeling. Rather than me telling them to stop something this gives them room to figure out what they should be doing instead.

#4) Try praising with your expressions.
Just as with other verbal cues and responses, praise can become something that kids feel like they need. Verbal praise should be used a lot when kids are first getting the hang of something. Yay you! You took some steps by yourself! You put your clothes in the laundry basket all by yourself! Once your child knows how and when to put their clothes in the basket, you naturally don’t praise them for it anymore. You come to expect it instead. So when they’ve got something down and you’re ready to take away your verbal praise, you can scale down your enthusiasm with non-verbal praise. It’s also so much fun to give your kid some “secret” praise or attention when other people are around. Instead of yelling “Great job!” across the playground, you can get their attention and then silently cheer or give them a thumbs up or jump up and down.

So, what is my face telling you? (Besides that I’m a goof…)

What is ‘spoiled’?

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The date on the milk says 9/4/12. Just two days past “good.” You sniff it to check it’s viability. It’s smells just a tiny bit funny, but you pour it on anyhow. Is it spoiled?

Milk metaphors aside, what does it mean for a child to be spoiled? Is it the age-old idea of giving them “too many” material things? Can it be something else? Is it something to be proud of? Is it something to dismiss? Is it an outdated term? Does it mostly happen for kids of wealthy parents? What is it? And if a child is conventionally spoiled, does that automatically mean that they’ll be a jerk as an adult? Once spoiled, are you spoiled forever? Does anyone believe that in the aftermath of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory that Veruca Salt grew up to be a nice person?

I don’t know the answers to all of the questions that I posed, but I have a few thoughts on spoiling and what it means today.

#1 Too many material things?

In our current American culture, acquiring things can seem like second nature to us. Even with economic troubles and worries, objects can “make us happier” and serve as status symbols. For many middle class parents, providing a rich and entertaining environment at home is a strategic goal of parenting. By flooding a kid with new and varied toys and objects, a child may come to expect that a) their wishes will be granted all the time and b) their toys should be entertaining them, with the real possibility of getting something new when they lose interest in something.

Besides giving kids an unrealistic view of the world (that material things are simply to be gotten, used, replaced and thrown away), providing them with too much doesn’t encourage long attention spans or imaginative play. It negates having a favorite object or toy, which can bring such comfort to kids. It also gives them very little sense of money. Kids don’t need to know all of the particular stresses and concerns that go along with money making and spending, but having an idea that it exists and that it’s not infinite will begin to give value to it.

Finally, buying buying buying simply makes more waste for the world. If we teach our kids that consumption is key, then the world of their adulthood will be littered with discarded and unwanted things.

#2 Spoiling in other ways

How do we spoil our kids without buying them things? And is this a real problem? I think that the overall idea of “spoiling” is that we are conditioning kids (or people) to expect immediate gratification and to expect that their environment will change to fit them rather than the other way around.

Parents contribute to these skewed ideas in a number of ways. First, by being too readily available to our kids, we give them the impression that being on the phone or talking to another adult is no reason for them not to have their wants attended to right away. Eh. Second, when parents work to control/change school or social environments for their kids when they meet an obstacle, kids are shown that if something is hard or unpleasant, they should simply give up or leave. If cries of “I’m hungry!” are immediately met with a snack, then we are teaching our kids that all they need to do is raise their pleading voices to get what they want. When parents create these expectations in their kids, they are setting themselves up to disappoint their youngsters when eventually they can’t control the environment or do need their kid to wait for something.

#3 Are you spoiled forever?

It seems to me that the answer to this is pretty straight forward: If you continue to expect the world to change for you, then you will continue to be “spoiled.” If you continue to expect attention to be paid to you on your terms, the same is true. The way to undo this is to come up against a real life situation when a teacher won’t let you do a make-up assignment or when you can’t continue to be the first in line. The world generally works to combat spoiling. It doesn’t work to change for us, it expects us to change for it.

So a little spoiling might not be the end of the world. It’s fun to break the rules sometimes or splurge on something at the toy store. But hopefully it’s not an everyday occurrence, else real spoiling could be the outcome. And once milk is on its way to being spoiled, it’s hard to stop it.

I want the world,
I want the whole world,
Give it to me now!