Reading at 3 AM Saves the Kidlet
Originally published at Welcome To The Dollhouse. You can comment here or there.
his has been a tough couple of weeks. A really tough couple of weeks. Weeks so tough I worried about whether we would all make it to Zara’s 3rd birthday on May 2nd with any sanity intact. To say she has been a challenge would be the ultimate understatement. I suppose she’s no worse than the average 2 11/12 year old, whatever that might be. Yet for her two parents who were raised in fear-based, dictatorial households, we found our arsenal of coping strategies to be sorely lacking.
My mother (God-rest her) was a control-freak fruit bat who would hit us if we looked at her wrong. “I saw what you were thinking,” she’d say after smacking me in the face for some imagined transgression. As a consequence of her, uh, approach, if I ever demonstrated any of the willfulness and insubordination normally found in the almost 3, I’m sure it was smacked out of me with the quickness. Mom tolerated no deviation from her need for total control.
Now I, after having spent the bulk of my life on the planet in therapy/recovery/healing from the wounds inflicted during my childhood, looked to find a different path when it came to parenting my kid. Bat-shit control freak? No thank you. Authoritarian? Absolutely. I see parenting as benign dictatorship. We are the shotcallers for the important stuff, but otherwise, the kid gets freedoms. However, I still kick it old school: manners, please & thank you at home and in company all the time! And none of this weird trend of calling adults by first names. (With this I do find myself channeling my dear mother with her, “Why’s she calling me by my first name? We didn’t pitch marbles together?!” I’ve actually said this to patients foolish enough to call me by my first name when I’ve never pitched a marble, nor would I even know how to do so under threat of death…It’s that deep with me.) Adults and children are not peers. It’s Miss, Mr., Mrs., Auntie or Uncle before their names. This is non-negotiable. There’s also respect for others and boundaries. We do not scream, yell or act the fool in restaurants or stores. We behave or we go home. Forget the kids will be kids foolishness. Try me if you think I’m not serious. I’ll be the one with the wailing toddler over my shoulder exiting the restaurant when someone has misplaced her listening ears.
However, the way I part with the old school is that I will not spank. There are myriad reasons for my having reached this decision (bat-shit mother notwithstanding) and they are a post in themselves. But the simplest reason is the one I’ll address here. Of all the methods of discipline one might use for children, spanking is the one that has no good escalation plan.
It’s something I pointed out to my dear friend and trainer Luda a couple of years ago when we had a discussion about spanking.
“I only spank my kids for things that are really major,” she explained. “It gets them to see that I’m serious and they stop.”
“But what if they don’t?” I asked.
“Don’t what?” she asked confused.
“Don’t stop doing whatever you want them to stop. Or what if they do it again the next week?” I clarified.
“Well that’s never happened,” she said quickly. “They always listen after I spank them.”
“And what if they don’t?” I pressed. “What would you do then? Spank them harder? For longer?”
“But that’s never happened!” she exclaimed.
“But what if and when it does?” I continued, “What is your contingency plan?”
“Well I don’t know because it’s never happened.”
“Just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it won’t happen. So what would you do? What do you think is the right thing to do to get the point across a little better with spanking?”
“I don’t know! You’re making me think about things I’ve never thought about before!”
“But that’s just the point, Luda. You don’t want to suddenly have to think about it right after the kid has pushed every button, driven you nuts and ignored your last spanking. That’s not the time to come up with your escalation plan.”
And that, my friends, is an illustration of one of the simplest issues I have with spanking. I don’t gravitate toward any escalation plan that will involve hitting my kid harder, more times, or more often. Moreover, knowing my kidlet, an escalation plan is essential. I’m raising an alpha. She’s yet to encounter the envelope that she won’t push. Thus spanking was out of the question. We had to find another way to bring the discipline home.
Early in her 2s when we were floundering searching for an effective strategy, I was given some great advice/direction by friends who had been there. We read pieces (because I’m too lazy to read the entire book) of
1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12 and struck gold. We introduced things like giving her the warning system so that she could consider whether she wanted to continue with her negative actions/behaviors and then sending her to the naughty corner if she didn’t comply. We were really thrilled about this method because for a while there, the idea of going to the naughty corner remained a very good deterrent. She’d often try to get me to put other misbehaving kids in the naughty corner as well (she’s such a narc). But somewhere around 2 ½ the naughty corner began to lose its deterrent value. She started getting so many extra minutes added for infractions while in the naughty corner that she could have ended up sleeping there in that chair.
Now that I think back on it, I realize that the failure of the naughty corner had more to do with our inability to maintain composure while enforcing discipline than anything else. Every book I’ve ever read on the subject and what I know in my brain and my heart is that we need to remain calm and composed when meting out discipline. Yet as time went on our ability to follow this rule became less and less. (Remember how we were raised.) I’ll admit it. We were angry with her when she opposed things we needed her to do. What we didn’t take into consideration was that this is a smart little girl. She mirrors us easily. So if we escalated, she’d escalate. While I, as a child, would be smacked, beaten, yelled at and controlled into submission, I soon learned my famous pleasing behavior. Anything you wanted me to do, I’d do, as long as it would make you happy (and keep you from going to the anger zone). Zara, however, wasn’t and isn’t afraid of us. That is both a fabulous thing for her psyche (and something we want) but not a great thing to gain the kind of compliance that we hope for in the moment. No fear means that she has to have another reason to comply, like what we’re asking makes sense, or it makes us happy or whatever else goes through that 2 year old brain.
We found other methods like taking away things that she loved when she was naughty and rewarding her when she did things well. But in the last few weeks we had moved to a phase where little seemed to be working and she seemed to be getting off on pissing us off, something several books warned us about. Getting your parents angry gives the toddler a strong feeling of control and power. But it can also make them feel like a bad person for being so unmanageable. And sadly she has said to me at time, “Mommy, I’m bad.” Not only does it stun me because we have never said those words to her, but part of my childhood trauma was feeling like I was inherently bad and deserving of all the beatings and abuse/discipline given by Mommy Dearest. It just breaks my heart to think that she feels that she is bad. I correct her immediately telling her that she does some naughty things but that she is good and loved completely. Yet I know that our failure to find the best way to manage her is contributing to her feelings of being bad.
Both of us began dreading our mornings where we were responsible for getting her dressed, fed and transported to daycare. The battle was nonstop from her not wanting to make her morning pee to running away when she needed to get dressed to going back in the bed when it was time to leave. The only thing I said that seemed to have any effect on her was “are we going to do this the hard way or the easy way?” Once she experienced the hard way one or two times, she did her best to avoid it. But even still, we never felt good about these escalations. I’m ashamed to admit that it even got to the point last week where I followed the advice of a mother on another blog who mentioned that she throws water at her child when she is out of control. One night while dealing with a kicking, hitting, flipped-out Zara who was refusing to get her pajamas on for bed, I stopped the struggle and got a small bathroom cup of water and sat it near me. I then tried to continue to get her into her pajamas without success. When the kicking and hitting continued without any response to my “nos” I picked up the cup and threw the water on her chest. She immediately stopped, looked at me like I was a traitor, and began to cry. It was not a fine moment in parenting for me. But at least she’d stopped and I was able to get her ready for bed with the threat of doing it again if she didn’t comply. Later I spoke to AdoringHusband about it and we acknowledged that though the intervention was effective, we both felt crappy about it. In addition, the last thing we wanted her to do was to model this type of behavior with the other kids in daycare. Yes it was a solution, but not the solution.
Thus, at my wits end during another of my overnight episode of insomnia, I found myself reaching for another book that I hadn’t yet cracked open but had been suggested, Love and Logic Magic for Early Childhood: Practical Parenting from Birth to Six Years
. My speed reading the premise of using empathy, offering choices, and teaching consequences made me scoff initially. It seemed like yet another of those feel-good parent books where you don’t tell your child “no” and you become a helicopter parent. But as I read more I realized that this initial assessment was not at all accurate. The actual approach was essentially the same as the one I employed with my adolescent patients: offer options, have them deal with the consequences of their choices, and having the parents employ consistency and commitment to follow-through. I just hadn’t thought it could work with a child this age. This is where I was wrong.
Without completely summarizing the points of the book, I will share the four principles of the Love and Logic method:
- Build the self concept
- Share the control
- Offer empathy, then consequences
- Share the thinking
Now while I was essentially on board with all of these principles, there were two that I struggled with based on how I saw myself as a parent: numbers 2 and 3.
Sharing the control was difficult for me because I felt that as the parent I am the shotcaller (something I have said to Zara many, many times). I’ve seen so many of the more laissez-faire parents who seem to be constantly negotiating with their child as if the playing field between them were level. While I felt it was important to give her some choices, I didn’t want parenting to turn into a constant negotiation with a two-year-old. That’s like attempting to negotiate with a terrorist.
Yet that is not what sharing the control was about. The authors state quite rightly that no one likes being told exactly what to do and when to do it by even a benign dictator. We like to have some say in the matter. So giving the kid a choice of two options is sharing the control and those options are chosen by the parent. So the parent does get to control the choices after all. Thinking on this I had to remember my old saying that even a choice between a rock and a hard place is a choice. Yet for the kids, these choices are like deposits in the bank of trust and love and they work to offset the times you have to make withdrawals (make the choice for them) since there will be myriad more deposits than withdrawals.
The next trouble was in changing my anger to empathy. When the whining occurs because someone didn’t finish her breakfast but then wants candy and I have to say no, my blood pressure soars to about 9000/1000. I have to admit that in those moments, I don’t feel much like giving empathy. I feel instead like shrieking my head off! Thus I was worried that the empathy requirement would prove difficult for me since anger and annoyance had been a go to for so long. But, as this was going to be an experiment, I felt I could go along with the program enough to see how it played out. I crept back to bed silently determined to try anything at this point since at the rate we were going, it wasn’t clear that Zara was going to make it to her 3rd birthday!
Love & Logic in Practice
The morning officially began with Zara running in to wake me up. Despite my lack of sleep I greeted her with smiles and kisses and began making deposits.
“So sweetie, do you want to start the morning by making morning pee or by brushing your teeth? What’s your choice?” I steeled myself for the whining I knew was about to start.
Instead she gave me an elfin grin and said, “I want to brush my teeth first.” And off we went to the bathroom.
After she finished brushing her teeth, I turned to her and said, “You chose to brush your teeth first and then make morning pee. So now that you’ve brushed your teeth, it’s time to do what?”
“Make morning pee!” She finished, excitedly. She went to the potty with no struggle or fuss and did her business. By this point you could say I was a bit surprised.
While she was finishing, I went into her room and chose two outfits for her. When she came in, I asked her which one she wanted to wear. Unfortunately for me she wanted to wear a different outfit entirely. She wanted to wear one of her new summer dresses with sandals. I tried to do some gentle convincing that the dress she had chosen was for the summer heat and I worried that her choice would leave her feeling cold. But she was immovable. This was the dress for today. Now I had a decision to make. How important was it for me to have her wear what I had chosen and not be cold versus having her wear what she had chosen and possibly have the consequence of being cold? Then I had an idea.
“Honey, I’m worried about your being cold in that summer dress, so why don’t we do this? We’ll get you dressed in the dress and sandals you want to wear and then we’ll go outside to see how you feel. If you’re cold we’ll pick one of the other outfits to put on and if you’re not cold then you’ll wear your dress. Does that sound like a good choice?” She was all for it. For once we had no struggles over putting on her cream or getting her clothes on. She was eagerly cooperating. I was now reaching the state of being stunned with how this was going.
We came down the stairs on our way to check out the weather. We passed by AdoringHusband who was sitting in the office. He looked at her and what she was wearing and immediately started to say, “Honey, don’t you think it’s too cold…”
I started flailing my arms and shaking my head behind her. “Zara chose this outfit and now we’re going outside to see how she feels in it.”
“Yeah, Daddy!” she added.
We stepped out the front door and walked down the front path where she immediately proclaimed, “It’s nice and warm!”
“Well Mommy is a little chilly,” I said hoping she’d take the bait. She didn’t. I asked her five more times during her time outside if she was okay and she said “yes” each time. Now it was my turn to back off, let her make this decision, and handle the consequences. She did consent to carry a sweater with her in case she was cold in school. But she made her choices that day. (Even when I picked her up that evening, she was running around the playground wearing only her dress and sandals telling her teachers that she wasn’t even a little bit cold.)
With breakfast she was her usual slow self eating her cereal. But instead of my doing my usual “hurry up! We’ve got to go!” routine, I went with giving her a logical statement and letting her sort out her choices.
“Sweetie, Mommy’s car has to leave at 9 o’clock and that’s just a few minutes from now. And you’re making choices to eat slowly when Mommy hasn’t had time to comb your hair. So if we run out of time, you’ll have to go to school with your hair all over the place. Will that be a good choice?”
She looked at me a bit worried. “If my hair is all messy, Miss Kristin and Ms. Linda will be so sad. I need my hair combed before I go to school.”
“So what choice do you need to make to get your hair combed before we leave?”
“I’ve got to finish my breakfast really fast,” she said with finality. I almost fell over.
Though she speeded up her eating, she did start her habit of banging her fists on the table, something we’ve had major words with her about, all to no avail. Again I went back to the book.
“Honey, you’re making a choice right now to bang your fists on the table and it’s not making me very happy. It makes me feel really icky to have banging going on while I’m eating my breakfast. It’s fine to bang the floor in the family room when we’re not eating but banging the table while we’re eating just makes me feel really sad. I don’t think that’s a good choice.”
“Can I bang over here?” she asked, indicating the back of the bench she was sitting on.
“Oh, I’m sorry honey, but banging while we are eating just makes me feel sad and icky. But when we’re done eating, you can bang as much as you want on the floor or on the couch in the family room. But I’m feeling really sad and icky right now because of your banging during breakfast.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” she said, looking remorseful, “that was my fault. I’ll stop now.”
And that was when my brain exploded.
It’s working. The freaking technique is working. My kid needed choices, logic, empathy, and to be allowed to experience and address the consequences of her choices. It isn’t perfect, but it certainly is better than anything we were doing. And, truth be told, it feels better. Giving empathy when she makes a poor choice feels so much better than getting angry with her. And she learns from the empathy and discussion. I’ve also found that parenting has not become a negotiation with a two-year-old. We are still the shotcallers. But we’re just giving her more of what she needs to feel included, loved, valued, and smart. How amazing! Reading at 3 AM can really change everything.
