This post started out with the intention to be about the MTN Science Centre – it’s chaos, things are broken a lot of the time … and it involves going to a mall! But it’s fantabulous fun for an incredibly active child.
It could even be about sending my child to a friend and each time having to retrain him back to normality on his return due to his exposure to extraordinary behavioural quirks.
But it’s about something far more pertinent to me right now.
A friend of mine more than implied that I pander to my child. I don’t take criticism (constructive or otherwise) at all lightly as I tend to analyse everything that is said. I was firstly shocked that she said it at all and then I was shocked that I of all people actually pander to my child. The horror of it! I started feeling like a total fraud.
I took it away and thought about it … a lot! And what I came out with is that I don’t pander to him at all. In fact, it’s shocking how little I let him get away with and how he has actually been on the verge of rebelling … at the tender age of 10 years pre-teen. ‘Defiant’, is what his teacher calls it.
I should have known better, having studied developmental psychology … and using it more on my dog than on my child. When someone is constantly abused by someone else, they will eventually reach a point when they have to let some of it go … and it invariably ends up being dumped onto the people they care about most. Something like kicking Pavlov’s dog. It’s sometimes hurtful, it can often be shrugged off … but then there are those rare occurrences when you can use someone else’s rubbish to clean up your own home.
Two days of a little more pandering and his defiance is already on the wane. We’re all dysfunctional; we just have to learn to share it around a little.
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