Apparently, if my child pushes another child it means I'm a bad parent.
But does it really?
At an indoor playground recently a little girl who couldn't have been older than 1 stepped right into the battlefield that is 'The Exhausted Noam (TM)' and got herself quite the push so he could make headway toward the slide. Where was I? I was sitting about 8 feet away feeding my baby Adina. I had my eye on Noam but I couldn't possibly get to him in time to stop him from the inevitable fate that was awaiting this poor innocent child.
The incident: Noam shoves the girl, girl falls to the floor and begins to cry, girl's mother appears in 2.6 seconds and grabs Noam's wrist frantically looking around for this "animals" mother. She didn't say that, I added it for extra drama but in all truth I know that's what she was thinking.
So many wrong things here, let me just begin with the mother's response.
Instead of girls mother rushing to her daughter to make sure she was okay, she ran to rebuke my son and to try eagerly to find his mother in order to reprimand her as well. Because, apparently, that is more important than checking to see if her daughter was well.
See this just sets off alarms in my head about parenting in general. Firstly this was the mother of a little baby girl who is probably more gentle than a kitten and doesn't even know what hitting is. But, sorry mother of girl, one day your child too will push, shove, hit or call someone names and the question is what will you do to deal with it? I mean besides the fact that if you are taking your child to an indoor playground you have to be realistic and plan that these things happen amongst kids, we must be realistic insomuch as life in general with kids is like an indoor playground with a bunch of little tired, overly stimulated animals running around.
In my opinion of parenting, which may be limited but in defense I believe is thought out and based on real sources, is that we are here to prepare our children with the challenges of the world and to give them the tools as to how to deal with those things as they come.
Are we going to run up to every kid's parents when something happens to our child and try to parent their children or change the parents parenting tactics? That is never going to work. You will not change others this way. You can only work on your own parenting and teach your children how to stand up to adversary in life, and then in turn through example we stand a chance at teaching others how to appropriately act.
If her child is acting up in class or isn't thriving in school later in life, will she try to change the child's teacher in hopes of having her child thrive better? I'm sure there are times when changing a teacher is appropriate but in most cases, we are probably better of teaching the child that there may even be teachers they don't jive with, but regardless, they are responsible for being good students and that's that. No exception.
I fear with this approach we are robbing our children of their independence and of their entire purpose in life at that. We are taking from them the basic fundamental principal of being an adult, which is to take responsibility for yourself and to learn to deal with life in an appropriate way.
In defense of my own parenting tactics, don't think for a second that I didn't have a serious (however serious can get with a 2 year old) talk with the guy about hitting. Don't think I didn't speak about it all the way up until he went to bed and told him how important it is to be kind and gentle. And regardless of this incident, don't think that I don't praise my son every time he is gentle with his sister. The reason I say this is because I fear that mothers or fathers reactions to a child hitting their child can result in a lot of judgment of the parents or the household. I am very quickly changing my mind as to the judgments I make about parents based on their children. I think at an older age you can probably make a better judgment as to the values being taught in someone's home based on their kid's character traits, but hardly when they're two years old.
The end of the story goes that the woman found the "animals' mother (me) and yelled at me, projecting her voice higher and higher to overcast my apologies as if not to hear it, and continued with, "Your son just.....etc etc......you should have intervened!" And then, no joke, she picked up her baby and stormed out of the playground with a thick cloud of angry smoke trailing behind. Okay the smoke is an exaggeration but you get the picture.
What are we teaching our children? Are we teaching them that they must be perfect and that if something "wrong" happens it's the end of the world? Or better yet, if something "wrong" happens, it is an excuse to completely lose it on someone? This is detrimental to our children if we teach them to think they can act like angels and not like humans who make mistakes. When a child hits my child now, I really do try to feel for the parent as they look at me with those guilty eyes. Right away I tell the parent, "It's okay these things happen now let's deal with it" because I know the pressure put on us parents to have these perfect children who don't hit, scream or have tantrums. We have to be realistic and arm ourselves for when these things happen because they are going to.
What will you teach your child to do when someone hits them?
How will you respond when your child is acting up in class and the teacher is "picking" (in his opinion) on him, and he's not doing well in that class?
How will we respond when our children get fired from a job?
What will we tell our children if, God forbid, we are faced with a tragedy such as death?
We can give them the tools to deal with it. Imagine the scenario: A boy comes home from school to tell his parents that a boy in class is picking on him. The parent sits down with the child and explains to him that all he needs to do is be true to himself. Don't feel insecure about yourself because this boy doesn't know you and is picking on you only because he is not happy with himself. The parent explains that the best thing to do is to ignore the bully because that is the ultimate defeat to someone who is trying to get a reaction. Later in life, the parent tells the child, you will see that this person will come out of his shell and try to rectify these bad behaviors and relationships he's made for himself, whereas you will still be you and not have sunk to any levels below yourself.
Or we could just teach them that when things are tough, don't deal with the issue yourself just go directly to the source. If a child hits you, go yell at his mother. If school is hard, yell at the principal. If your job isn't working out, curse out your boss. If life is tough, go yell at God for all the bad in your life.
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Adults are just grown up children. We have to work on ourselves before we can "perfect" our children.
ReplyDeleteWith that said, understand that she may have had a bad day (hence the smoke...) so maybe normally she wouldn't have reacted this way.
Anyway, I am playing devil's advocate and understand and agree with your point. Sometimes people need to grow up and separate themselves from their child so that their child may thrive to be an independent person. BUT not everyone is an independent person themselves and need to become that first. That is the first (difficult yet necessary) step.
I totally agree with you on that one. We can never know where someone is coming from and what might have upset them that day etc. We should never judge an individual. But we can judge their actions, and here I'm commenting on her response.
ReplyDeleteAlthough it is challenging and part of being human, it is not acceptable for us to REACT in a bad way toward any situation. That's the work we have to do in this world is figure out how to react in accordance to what we know to be true. We would never tell our children, "behave yourself and speak nicely, unless you get fed up and then you have an excuse to yell at people."
Thank you for the comments!