Their Children's Hell Will Slowly Go By

Although this blog has degenerated into a litany of my inability to inspire budding mathematicians, the woes of step parenting and the occasional limerick, its original purpose was as a forum to discuss the issue of assertive parenting: The Flaming Sword.

To reiterate: parenting is work; it is the most important work you will ever do. It is only vaguely different to basic army training where you, the parent are the sergeant major and the children are the unruly troops. Remember 'An Officer and A Gentleman'? 'Private Benjamin'? 'Top Gun'? Remember the hideous, unfeeling drill sergeants? Remember how the recruits/troops resented them until the graduation ceremony where they grudgingly admitted they wouldn't have made it without them?

Kind of like parenting.

Children come to us with no life experience. They come to us trusting that we will care for them, provide for them and protect them and all too often parents let them down. With the best intentions in the world of course.

"But I want bed time to be a calm and pleasant experience for us all (key words). I'd rather not fight with him about brushing his teeth. He can always do them in the morning."
Well, explain to your 10 year old why they are having to sit through injections and drilling and even extractions because you didn't protect them from their own inexperience in the area of dental hygiene. That was your job. You were the parent.

But that's not my issue today.

"Oh, don't worry about them jumping on the sofa, it's only an old one, we don't mind," this from another friend as we came upon our respective two year old children trashing her lounge room. Sure. Let's not say a word. Let's not inform them that many, if not MOST people would be very unhappy about them using their best sofa as a trampoline, cause after all, at two, how do you discriminate between a sofa you can jump on and one you can't? They don't have that life experience. We do. We do not do them a service by withholding information about social norms
which could result in embarrassment, guilt and humiliation.

That's not what I want to talk about today either.

'Why do you buy your daughter a toy or a chocolate bar every time we leave the supermarket?' I asked my friend once (I wasn't being interfering, the problem was she also bought MY daughter one each time......)
"Well, " she looked around helplessly, searching for the words, "well, 'cause I love her so much and I want her to be ... happy."

Happy? Let me finish the sentence for you (because now I am being interfering), because you want her to love you back and you are unsure whether that would ever happen without the provision of bribes.

But even that's not my issue today.

Today I want to tell you a story about a lovely, lovely girl. Her age is indeterminate (late twenties, early thirties? who knows) but her kids are 4 and 6 and her mother must be slightly older than me. Her problem is that her two sweet children will not go to sleep.

She was tired, very tired. She works part time but long hours and she was on her own with the kids this night. They would NOT go down to sleep. She had tried everything. She had removed things, cuddled them, given 'drinks', read stories, put them back to bed and still they came out of their rooms and raced around the place in fair impersonations of whirling dervishes. Finally she admitted to me, she had the youngest one by the shoulders and was shouting into her face
Why.Won't.You.Go.To.Sleep? She was at the end of her tether.

I remember this feeling. I'm sure most of us do. It's perfectly normal. Your own exhaustion, the pressure of being everything to everybody, the seemingly malicious intent of our children to tip us over the sheer drop of sanity into the abyss of the demented shrieking harriden. The first thing any of us would do is reach for the phone.
"Mum, she's driving me crazy, she simply WON'T go to sleep!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

And so this lovely girl's mother jumped into the car and came around to her house. What a treasure. What a fantastically supportive mother to drop everything and help out her child as she struggled with the boot camp that is parenting.

Except that she took the children away to her house and put them to sleep there and the sweet and lovely girl smiled with relief in the knowledge that her children would go to sleep like angels for her mother.

What has gone wrong here?

The children have received a message. The message is this: Mummy is not really capable of putting us to bed, we have a lot of power over mummy. Grandma is another story. Grandma is strong and stern and safe and when she says bed she means bed. Which is a pretty good thing really cause come to think of it I'm pretty tired with all this running around after my bedtime...yawn.....

What could have happened.

There is nothing wrong with calling mum. There is not even anything wrong with mum coming around to give you moral support given daddy was not there but moral support goes like this.

Grandma could have:

• watched the other child whilst mummy dealt with the more problematic one.

• kept watch over a door while mummy put the second child to bed

• told mummy she was doing fine, that she was a great mother and that she could get this done.

• made cups of tea

• made hot milk or read to the 'no longer sleep ready' children while mummy napped
  

• offered another perspective

• listened and reflected

• hugged

Sometimes all it needs it for another face to appear around the door jamb to break you out of that desperate cycle of inability to cope.

Himself has been the devil's advocate in this story.
"You don't know what the circumstances were. You can't generalise. There may have been other things contributing...."

Perhaps. But I honestly can't think of anything other than a major health crisis which would have prevented those children going to sleep in their own beds that night. Please call me out here if you think I am being too harsh.

Our job as parents does not stop when our children have grown. It changes subtly but the tenets are still the same: don't be soft, force them to do the hard yards when they need to, encourage them (perhaps not exactly as a drill sergeant does : GET OVER THAT WALL YOU HORRIBLE LITTLE MAN :-) ......) , assure them that your love is unconditional and give them the benefit of your advice, but for the dear Lord's sake,
do NOT do it for them.

This will only lead to your child believing that they are not capable and how dare we do that to our children?

In my deepest, darkest hours when the Baby Angel was at her most difficult, and believe me she could be difficult,
my parents and my dear friends saved my sanity on many occasions, not by taking her away but by bringing us together.



"Teach your children well."
Crosby, Stills and Nash.