@inthegarden My words were truly a response to the original post, that kids are being taught to “obey” like little soldiers, do as you’re told. Or that “good job” is haute manipulation, that (from other sources,) even praise for a job well done or for expressing a talent, devalues their self esteem. (Yow.) We all build relationships with our kids as best we can, depending on lots of factors. We try our best. If my words seemed focused on you, not really. (Still, my apologies if you felt they were.) Just the way forum posts just sometimes bat back and forth.
A number of us are just talking about the ebb and flow in our own efforts, I think you’re saying the same.
@inthegarden Please, accept my condolences for your loss. I cannot speak for others, but, from my perspective, this thread is not a debate, but a conversation and exchange of opinions about different parenting styles, where many posters seemed to agree that in most cases the answer depends on the circumstances. I don’t think these responses were directed at you personally. Imho, your posts are very reasonable, thoughtful, and completely non-provocative. Hope this makes you feel better.
Thank you, that is reassuring and kind. I think it is common in times of distress to become a little egocentric…maybe that’s what’s going on (hopefully temporary!) I had my first really good, hard cry about my mother yesterday, so maybe I have just needed to process it all. I think I’ll try to stay away from CC for a few days (or at least refrain from posting so much) until I get my bearings.
My experience is that this was more the rule than the exception in the deep south. A southern accent is not prima facie evidence of small minded bigotry, as you learned growing up. It’s just a way of pronouncing words. Speaking of which, we did indeed say Yes, Ma’am to my mother, but she had the good manners to teach us that “yes’m” was forbidden in her presence.
In retrospect, I wish we had been flexible about bedtime. We were strict, and therefore my kids grew up without ever seeing a firefly. I regret that now. I remember chasing fireflies in my own childhood (at a ridiculously late hour on summer nights), and I wish my kids could have had that childhood experience.
I, too, am sorry for your loss and meant no disrespect to your parenting style. As others have said, to me this thread is a discussion about the article.
I’m a Southerner who raised my kids in the North East and it sounds like we had very similar parenting styles. Early on I had to explain varying cultural norms and manner expectations in different geographic areas. “Yes Ma’am” to your grandmama. “Yes Please” to your preschool teacher. Now that took a whole lot of discussing.
We also had rules for our house, where you could (politely) refuse a meal if you didn’t like it, and a friend’s house, where you ate everything a host put on your plate and said “thank you.” At this point in time I have no idea why they believed they had to follow my rules, but they did once they were old enough to understand the concept of hurting feelings. Maybe 5 or 6? Definitely by 8 I could count on them doing their very best out in public.
adding: Thinking back to Hannah’s post, my kids were very late talkers and weren’t allowed to have food until they said “please” instead of pointing. That was a major battle. Late talkers aren’t unusual in our family so I was just copying what I’d seen growing up. No idea if it was good parenting or not.
My kids had assigned seating in the car. I couldn’t deal with the racing and shoving for shot-gun. That was probably bad parenting. On the other hand, I’d wait up to an hour for them to pick their candy treat at the grocery, mainly because they were fairly quiet and happily occupied.
@inthegarden:
I am sorry for your loss, and yes, that does tend to make us introspective and also emotionally raw. I don’t think anyone was responding directly to you, and with parenting in the end your style of parenting is your own and it is one of the things that no one else really can tell you how to do it ‘right’ per se. When you have a kid, you have a ton of people giving you all kinds of advice on what to do, all these rules, books can be the worst because you read them and if you don’t follow their rules are afraid you will raise a mass murderer or something smile. In the end for all of us, we do the best we can for our family, listen to what others say and process it, but with most parenting styles there to me isn’t right or wrong, only what works best for our own situation.
One of the most ironic comments I ever heard was from the minister at a church we belonged to at the time, he was commenting about parents, like my wife and myself or some other couples, who he said were ‘too involved’ in our kids lives (not talking helicopter parenting here, rather that we supported our kids as best we could, driving kids to lessons, encouraging them to try new things, etc)…meanwhile this is a man who when his son was heading off to college, he and his wife figured out the kid had absolutely zero life skills, in college he kind of floundered, and when he was ready to graduate he still didn’t have much of a clue…it didn’t bother me, because we were doing what we thought was right for our son and in the end, he seems to have turned out to be a normal kid (not perfect, has done some stupid things, too), and at the end of the day if you can say that, you have done your job, and you forget the fights, the arguments, the hurt feelings, the messes, the mistakes (on both sides), and you sit back and say “when the heck did he/she grow up to be an adult?” smile
About the car, and some other kid choices- I suppose it’s too late for many of us parents on this thread, but I heard or read, (some Marilu Henner tale,) that the older kid gets the odd calendar days to lead choice, next one gets even days. Once we initiated that, no more tussles over shotgun or window seats. Each felt she’d get her share. Neither counted how many days we’d been out and she’d won her way. They knew (or thought) the principle was fair.
I didn’t have enough energy for charts that made sure everyone got their fair share. My kids were super competitive. I would have had to rotate the chart regularly so one name was never the first. So I just assigned car seats, bunk bed spots, table spots, first bath, etc. Interestingly, they negotiated among themselves changes in my assignments and then came to me and explained their reasoning and I allowed the changes. It makes me weary just to remember it all.
Odd and even days would definitely have had my kids finding a calendar and keeping track of who got shot gun how many times in the course of the year. A leap year would have been the basis for weeks of debate. They would have been worried about that leap year long in advance and wanting to know how I was going to handle it, after we’d arranged a “regular” year to be fair.
I only had two children. I honestly don’t remember them ever having a disagreement about where someone sat in the car. I’ll have to ask them about this, as if there were disagreements, they will definitely still remember.
We only had two kids–they sat wherever they wanted–whomever got to the seat first had dibs. S was better at figuring out the shady side and ended up with it often.
See - that just wouldn’t have worked for us because the idea of the kid getting to the seat first having dibs would have resulted in someone having to go to the emergency room for stitches pretty regularly because of a fall or banging into the car door. Imagine the running of the bulls with toddlers. When I think back on it, a whole lot of my parenting style was based on keeping out of the emergency room. We still made visits. I remember telling them “Don’t do this again. You don’t like to get stitches, none of you wants stitches.”
When my kids were preschoolers and just could not be convinced to look before crossing a street, I finally took them to look at road kill and told them that was what happened when you didn’t look both ways. Probably that was really bad parenting. Maybe it would have been better if I’d just been more authoritarian. However, I’m not sure even now of the correct response to that particular parenting challenge for my particular kids. Thank goodness they are grown.
Lol! We had a weekly rotation for seats in the car. My kids almost never had a serious dispute over that. Until a few weeks ago when the stubborn 20 year old and the stubborn 15 year old had a long standoff in a parking lot over who got the front seat. They both knew it was ridiculous and had the standoff anyway. It made me laugh, and I eventually make them get in the car, since it was wasting my time. One big fight over car seat preference after all these years of parenting isn’t too bad .
Thing is, we are all trying to raise adults, who we and others can eventually treat as equals, with mutual respect. Also an understanding of authority, what it is for, and how it can be abused. That takes age-appropriate practice along the way. We’ve tried to give our kids reasons for the way we have done things. Those conversations don’t always take place at the moment obedience is expected–that’s not always the most appropriate time–but the conversations do happen. We felt it was valuable to teach the kids to respect the emphatic “behave yourself” or similar, so the explanation could be given at the proper time. If the kid doesn’t agree with the explanation, at some level, for a time, it becomes a matter of authority-“because I said so.” But my authority over my kids runs out, and my goal is for them to be able to function well in society when it does. For that to happen, they need to understand the why behind appropriate choices.
In our house, there were years of complaints from the kids that they were deprived of one birthday cake per year because two family members had birthdays on the same day. I only served one birthday cake on that day because obviously a family of four would not be able to eat their way through two of them.
This earth-shattering deprivation was eventually resolved by buying an extra birthday cake once a year on a day the kids thought was worth celebrating – the last day of school.
On the other hand, nobody seemed to care about who sat where in the car. They had their customary sides, but nobody made an issue of it.
Good solution, Marian. Ours had birthdays 1 day apart. We had 2 cakes because we had enough family in town to make that not crazy. But only one family celebration per year.
We got a van “while the kids were still young enough to enjoy it,” and it has been a useful vehicle for hauling around stuff for my nonprofit, as well as taking all 4 of us plus my folks when we need to get anywhere. Because we had the van, each kid could have an entire row of seats if they chose and they often wanted to lie down and do this or one kid could have the front passenger seat which reclined while another kid had an entire row. Neither kid had the energy to have any high pitched battles over seating.
Both kids had birthdays in November–5 days apart. We usually just threw one joint party for both of them and everyone was fairly satisfied. S was the only one who ever went to an ER and it was when he was with the scouts so they took him there, he got some stitches and he insisted on going back to join everyone at camp. He got a cut demonstrating the proper way to use a cutting implement and he was going it correctly (it was probably just too big for his small hands).
