I was taken as a child. It wasn’t a traumatic experience and I really cared for the kind man who gave me kisses outside the library and lured me across the street with the promise of a sausage. I remember the tug of war in the middle of a four-lane city street; my mum pulling one arm and the kind man, the other. I remember feeling terribly embarrassed about my mother’s behaviour and I remember trying to reassure her that this man was perfectly ok and meant only to give me a treat. I couldn’t understand how my mother could be so rude when she had taught me such good manners.
We teach our children manners, and that’s just fine. But what happens when these so called manners actually start interfering with their boundaries and they begin to bring these walls down, only to be confronted with the dangers that they are not equipped to deal with waiting on the other side. We, as adults, can gauge … usually … who to greet and who to give a wide berth to; we can say hi and walk on by and we can put up walls as quickly as we can break them down. Our children aren’t equipped to do this. They are encouraged to greet and hug perfect strangers just because they happen to be our friends and they are meant to be nice to the man or the woman at the supermarket or the friendly person who finds them cute on the Promenade … all because mummy and daddy want a child who is friendly and polite.
But what about damage control? Do we tell them that they must be polite as long as we are with them but they mustn’t talk to strangers when we aren’t? And isn’t this just confusing them? Shouldn’t we be teaching them to trust their instincts rather and never force them to acknowledge anyone they are not comfortable greeting. Once they know a person as well as we do, surely that is the only time we can expect a little boundary dropping. Manners can prematurely break down the boundaries that really do need to be there. Perhaps practising manners at home ought to be good enough for now.
Posts Tagged ‘behaviour’
Dangerous boundaries
Monday, April 12th, 2010Defining benchmarks
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010I sometimes disagree with my mother-in-law because … well, just because she is my mother-in-law and weren’t they put on this earth to create a bit of conflict in an otherwise happy home environment? But sometimes I disagree with her because – despite her claiming to have been around the block often enough to know better than someone of inferior years – I’m right. Even if sometimes I battle when it comes to giving the reasons.
I got so tired of her using the words silly and stupid in reference to my child’s behaviour but, because I couldn’t give her my argument why I felt so strongly about it, I taught my child to fight back with his words until she began to find more creative ways to describe how he was behaving.
It was only after her most recent visit that the voice from deep within was allowed a hearing and I realised that not only do I resent the negative terms that were used in my own childhood but that I have an exceptionally good reason to try and wean my own child off references of this nature.
It’s simple really – it’s simply about benchmarks. Use the benchmark of stupid when speaking to your child and your child will never feel he is anything better than that i.e. when he acts intelligently, he will believe he is just a stupid child with moments of intelligence. But tell a child he is not being clever rather than he is being stupid and he will realise that he is defined by his intelligence … with moments that do not match up to his capabilities.
Living up to expectations
Thursday, February 18th, 2010I always believed my husband was shredding my work. He would come home to a tired wife and child. Child whimpers and he backs down. Child asks for something reasonable and his first response is no, child insists and he says yes because it isn’t worth fighting over … reinforcing the idea that a little performance might help his case.
I used to think this was a male vs. female thing until I stayed with a friend who works and whose husband stays home and looks after the kids – this could be many people I know at the moment since it seems to be a common trend right now – and realised that in certain ways the roles are truly reversed.
It is the parent who spends less time with the child who tends to back down as soon as the child whimpers … the parent who goes to work who doesn’t force the child to do what they are perfectly capable of doing. They want to feel needed so they do whatever they can to make up for the space they have left by not being there.
I have pushed my child to live up to my … yes, often unreasonable … expectations, and my husband comes home and shreds my work. In his position though, I’d probably do exactly the same thing.
Breaking patterns
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010I haven’t written for a while. I have been on holiday. I am in the fortunate position to be able to down tools and spend carefree summer holidays with my son, running on the beach, rolling on the lawn, eating ice-creams in the sun, building Lego and playing miniature golf. I love every moment of it, relishing his bouts of energy and ecstasy and indulging his every whim as the days of summer tick slowly by.
I noticed, however, as the holidays began to draw to a close, that my focus on him has had both positive and negative effects and it’s the negative that I have been fretting over and obsessing about in the last week. It’s about pressure.
With a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder, I tend to have to do everything as perfectly as possible … but if I fail, the world has a tendency to fall apart beneath my feet. That is what it has felt like recently when my son’s usually exemplary behaviour and good manners have been replaced with a disarming overuse of expressions such as farty face, poopoo bum, old bugger, kick you in the pants etc., etc. … in response to simple questions such as: what is your name?
It didn’t take much analysis of the situation … nor much self-analysis to figure out that I am almost entirely to blame.
My personality was formed on the premise that I was a bad person with the odd virtue. To compensate, I have been, for the last four and a quarter years, telling my child how perfect he is in every way and I have been doing this every night as I hold him in my arms at his bedtime.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, if only it had a way of undoing all the things we so obviously do wrong when shown up in its light. The thing is, it seemed to work so well until it reached a threshold – the pressure began to outweigh the benefit and … I turned him into a monster.
Smacking
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009My child is a little old soul all wrapped up in a brand new body, full of wise words, a sociable disposition, a clever sense of humour, an awesome vocabulary and many, many lessons.
Just as he has lulled me into a sense of complacency and illusion that I have a very mature child, he will throw himself on the ground, throw anything he has in his hands at the time, tell me that I have a problem and refuse to do anything I ask of him. These are the terrible twos that have taken over a year to get here … and a rattling reminder that he is in fact a perfectly normal 3-year-old.
I made a vow before he was born that I would never smack him–it never worked on me but, instead, broke me … something I always suspected was the intention my parents had in the first place trying to deal with a brood of four and having little idea of how to go about that very tricky task. I have stuck to my vow even though I have to admit that there are moments when he gets so stroppy with me that I am tempted to klap him right across the room. These urges used to be a lot stronger when dealing with my anger at having had him in the first place–those days when I was convinced he had ruined my life and liberated me from my parallel dweller who wears her shopping and travelling fetishes on her sleeve–that I would remove myself from the room where he was performing just in case my anger got the better of me … a time when my stubbornness has served me well–I was, under no circumstances, going to turn into my mother.
If I can connect to my anger for long enough to take a deep breath and realise that it’s my stuff I’m dealing with and it has nothing to do with him–he is, after all, behaving like all 3-year-olds should–I am always amazed at how suddenly he drops his arms, puts a big smile on his face and carries on as though nothing has happened. As mystifying as it is maddening.
Something to ponder then is that perhaps the changed behaviour in children who are smacked has less to do with the smack and more to do with the fact that they are just following an inbuilt chain of events.
There is just no way I can smack him … how else would I be able to teach him that it is best to take out his frustrations on a cushion … or on the very same punch bag I used to defer my feelings of anger for him.
