I love my kids, I just hate parenting
They say opposites attract. Mom and Buried and I aren’t total opposites, but we do have some significant differences. And we definitely parent differently.
On good days, those differences complement each other. On bad days, they cause conflict. When you have a kid who is acting up, and acting out, the bad days become more frequent.
Especially when you don’t always see eye to eye on how to discipline that kid.
I recently shared a tweet decrying the daily balance parents are forced to strike between their kids’ lives and their own.
My tweet was about the well-deserved oasis of adult time that falls between those few hours when my oldest son goes to sleep and when I go to sleep, and about how that gap is shrinking as he gets older and stays up later.
When I shared it on Twitter, a fellow parent responded succinctly: Parenting is overrated.
But is it?
Read more about Is Parenting Overrated? …
I’m not one for jewelry.
I don’t wear a necklace, and I definitely don’t wear any bracelets. I don’t wear a watch, or a Fitbit; I never even wore a LiveStrong band. I keep it simple. Beauty like this doesn’t need adornments!
But I’ve been wearing an elastic band on my wrist for a little while now. It’s not a fashion statement; it’s a reminder. It’s a reminder that I am too hard on my seven-year-old.
Like many parents, I always kind of hoped that my kids would absorb decent human values through osmosis.
That just by being around average, decent people who enact and embody basic human decency on a daily basis – like me and Mom and Buried! – they’d eventually become imbued with those intangible qualities we expect good people t have.
But if my 7-year-old’s lack of gratitude is any indication, it hasn’t been working.
Disciplining your kids is hard.
It requires nuance. You can’t yell all the time, because it loses its effectiveness after a while. You can’t spank ever because you were spanked by your parents when it was acceptable and are now you are totally insane and probably in jail. You need to develop tricks. Time-outs, good cop/bad cop, the Parent Voice, etc.
Most of the time, getting your kids to behave boils down to two strategies: threats and bribes.