They’re the words I hate to hear and am loathe to occasionally utter. They make me want to throw up when I say them. I literally feel like a lesser person when I let them fall out of my mouth like a toddler falling off the arm of a couch. The ending to the sentence varies but it always starts the exact same way; “That’s nothing…just wait until…”
Kill me now.
I’ve been a dad for almost five years now and honestly, every day is a lesson in mathematics that I don’t quite understand. How can something be simultaneously easier and harder? How can two kids occasionally be less work than one kid? How can a child destroy an entire room in less time than it takes me to use the bathroom while simultaneously checking Twitter? But I understand three things about kid math.
I tend to think that I’ve got it pretty rough. My son (5 in November) is a really hard child. My wife read this (apparently) great book called Raising Your Spirited Child and in it, it says I’m not supposed to call him “hard” or “a problem child” but I didn’t read the book. I was too busy chasing my son around and trying to get him to not murder the other one.
In all that chaos, I’ve come to realize that my son is not ACTUALLY that hard. I mean, he’s more work than some, but less work than others and the sharp edges are actually a lot of fun. I bumped into friends of mine that I haven’t seen in years. I was chatting with them and told them I had two kids and talked about how hard my boy was. They immediately chimed in and said, “That’s nothing…just wait until…he gets kicked out of school before you even get home from dropping him off.”
Now, I’ll admit, that sounds hard. But when we talk like this to other parents, we’re belittling their experience. Yes. That DOES sound hard. My day was also hard. Can’t we all just have a hard day? Is it a contest? Is there a prize I don’t know about? The point is that YOUR experience is probably nothing like my experience. I don’t tell other parents that their life is easier or that their life is harder. I admit that we could all use a massage and some really strong coffee.
Every parent will tell you that you just have to get through the terrible twos and you’ll be fine…until you get to the traumatic threes, the fearsome fours, the frigging fives…and…
Ok, so here’s the thing. I thought that there was a magic line. Things were awful and then you crossed the finish line and everything was great again, right? Yeah, not so much. It turns out that this isn’t just a straight-line race. Sometimes you forgot something and you have to go back and pick it up or you’ve been running around in a circle for what seems like eternity. Sometimes things actually DO get better with time…only to suddenly get much, much worse very, very quickly.
Kids don’t grow the way my Pokemon eggs currently are. (Don’t judge me). You don’t just walk 10km and then you have some sort of bird creature. Instead, you need to understand that there will be ups and downs, like a roller coaster. Occasionally the entire ride breaks and you just sit there crying for a little while. That’s ok. As long as you are moving forward, your kids will too…probably.
I like to offer other parents some hints that have worked for us. But this always comes with a very important caveat; this worked for us, it might not for you. This is the other one that just slays me. “All you have to do is…”
Thanks for the input but when we tried bare-bum potty training, my son peed down four heating vents and then dropped a deuce in front of our bathroom door while we had guests over for dinner (important point: the line of sight between the bathroom door and kitchen table is, in fact, direct).
Yes, we have spoken to our son in a firm tone about consequences. While we were doing so he made faces at us and walked away.
Not everything works for everyone but we seem to lump parents and kids into these silly boxes. “Your child is HARD. My child is SPIRITED. That mom is LAZY. That dad is TIRED.” So what can we do so that we stop calling us, and our kids, names?
Try to be as supportive as possible. When you see a parent doing something or saying something that you think is ineffective or “bad parenting,” stop and think about what may have generated that response. Maybe they’ve tried what you would do a million times and it has literally NEVER worked. Maybe they got 2.3 hours sleep last night because their son kept getting out of bed with stranger and stranger request (my personal favourite was a 1:15am trip out of bed because my son “couldn’t touch the ceiling with his feet” which I remedied by picking him up, upside down and touching his feet to our ceiling).
Stop comparing yourself to other people. It’s bad for everyone. You’re not better because you don’t ever raise their voice and their kid isn’t better because they follow directions. I have a park/neighborhood friend whose children I think of as the dream duo and the other day I watched the elder kick the younger right square in the face. Kids do the darndest things. Let all just understand that no one has it figured out but that together, we’re stronger.
I’m a huge believer in community parenting. What does that mean exactly? There is a small group of us (5 parents, 8 kids) who basically all work together to make sure that everyone is doing what they should. A kid’s doing something that they shouldn’t? Call them on it. Two kids are just filling each other in with lefts and rights? Stop it. If one of us needs to speak to someone else’s child about their behavior, we do it, and assuming we do things properly and respectfully, everyone gets alone just fine.
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