Parenting Blues

They say children are a gift of God. I can bet whoever said this never actually went through the arduous journey of raising one all by themselves. I have a 2 year old naughty son (from my legal wife that is !!) and all I can say is that it hasn't been what it's made out to be. Somewhere I read that parenthood is like a secret society, nobody tells you what goes on inside until you get in and when you do, it’s way too late !! Now don’t get me wrong here – I love children and I love mine more than anything else in the world(Note – All men like their own children but other’s wives!!). It’s also true that they bring along with them all the fun and innocence and all the good things which you would have never experienced otherwise. In fact this post is not to contest the pure and cherubic joy children bring to our lives. This post is to ponder over what lies beneath – the whims and fancies of a child which form an integral part of a child’s upbringing package and every parent’s seemingly unending travails.

I might agree that this post is more an outcome of the fact that I am witnessing the timeframe in a child’s initial years which is categorized as ‘Devil’s age’ and ranges typically from 1 year to 3 years. This is the age when they realize they have super powers they were never told before and start becoming naughtier, stubborn and literally ‘out of control’ in the process. Try telling them one thing and they do the exact opposite. Ask them to sit at one place and they start running all over. I have been browsing through the net to understand how to deal with the situation and bring in more discipline in the child. Almost all websites have one common set of points/theme to address the issue– lots of patience, love, affection and more patience. Some sites did go into the specifics as to how a child craves for attention and most of his actions are to attract other’s attention with his behavior/misbehavior. The underlying principle is to reward good behavior while censuring the child subtly for all the misdeeds he causes. I discovered further that the parents need to be consistent in exhibiting their behavior towards their wards lest they misconstrue one time laxity in rules as a manipulative tactic which can be adopted time and again to circumvent the rules and eventually become his/her personality.

All these sound logical and simple. However when it comes to the actual implementation, it’s not as easy. Imagine a situation when you are playing with your child all nicely with the mother gone out for some chores. All is going fine when suddenly Murphy and his mysterious law smiles at you !! The child starts behaving obnoxiously and as you are just about trying to manage him does the door bell go off and the cell phone starts ringing all at the same time. In the middle of all these, you also just realize that you have an ‘urgent’ biobreak to attend to which is giving you last minute warnings !! So how do you keep your cool in such a situation? Not just humanly possible. Another instance I would like to quote. Many a time I have family friends coming over and now almost all of them have same age kids. A very typical situation which almost every parent would identify with is the fight between the kids over sharing of some stupid toy. Now such a situation is quite tricky in the sense that since the toy belongs to my kid, he has the first right of ownership over it but the other kid being a guest too has the right to play with the toy. Now believe me its next to impossible to manage such a situation. There are some prescribed workarounds for such situations but I haven’t seen any of them really working. You should consider yourself lucky if you get any help from the guest parents(very rare), all in all a very tough situation to manage.

It would be inappropriate of me though if I don’t mention a few positive tricks which do work at times. One of them I have seen is to tell them with lot of affection and love about their act of indiscipline and how they should avoid it next time. But the key here is patience and perseverance. It wouldn’t seem to work initially but if you persist, it does have a positive effect. Another trick from my bag which does work to a great extent is to let your ward know that you would stop all means of communication with him/her if they misbehave. I am not sure if it’s a design attribute in a human being but the moment someone ignores you by not talking/communicating with you for a while, you just can’t take it for long. This holds true for children too and you can use this absolute non violent method very effectively for instilling discipline in them. My last tried and tested trick which one should know and implement only if everything else fails – just hold your child firmly when he is not listening to you and take him away to a different room in your house. By this time, the child would be crying at the top of his lungs. Now ensure that you have the most favorite thing/toy of the child kept in this room. Immediately hand it over/show it to the child and start playing with him. The key here is to distract his attention from whatever he was crying for. My 2 year old is crazy for digital camera(seems the boys are crazy for all electronic gadgets from day one of their life!!) and I use it as a diversionary weapon to make him forget whatever he was crying for. It really works. The child would stop crying as if nothing had happened a moment before and you wonder how virtuous their short term memory loss could be!!

While all the things I have penned above can not be done away with(neither do I want to really speaking), the experience is in itself so unique and enriching and one just has to witness it to understand...well the secret society!!