On parenting, after year 1
March 2, 2016
Over lunch, a friend asked me if we do “Good cop, bad cop” with LB and for the life of me, I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea. Ze is one year old. Is there a point to doing a good cop / bad cop routine? For 3 minutes, I stared at her, silently pondering what that would look like for an infant.
Besides, I’m no one-note mama. I am all the cops. Sometimes the good cop, mostly the bad cop, always the tickling cop.
I’ve made some first year remarks already but as I said then, there’s a lot about parenting that you just don’t viscerally get from a babysitting or professional aunt/uncle role until you’re there in the thick of it and there are no returns.
Experience has changed my viewpoint on some, not at all on others. It’s been a lot of “ohhhh that’s what that looks like,” or “what, exactly, is happening right now?”
Discipline
Pre-kids: My sibling’s the Exhibit A of The Bad Seed or a cautionary tale for the ages. It’s hard to know which.
It’s a Pyrrhic victory to hear your parent admit that everything you’d warned them would happen if they wouldn’t listen to you did happen, after they wouldn’t listen to you. I don’t know, can’t know, if we’d still have the same end result had they listened to me, but we know it all went to hell when they didn’t.
Post-kid: LB first heard “NO” at four months and hasn’t stopped hearing it since. Ze still doesn’t care what no means but soon enough ze will understand how to use language and I want hir to know there are times that are “yes”, and times that are “no”, and NO MEANS NO. From us, from anyone else, from hir.
Ze may act clueless or disregard the first admonitions but repetition is our friend here. When we’re consistent, we see the results of that efforts months later.
We don’t enforce *discipline* (punishment) specifically at this age, ze is too young, but we enforce the boundary of No especially when it comes to hurting others (*caveat: Unless they hurt or intend to hurt you, in those cases, gut ’em), or hurting hirself.
Responsibility
As in, having it. And then teaching it.
Pre-kids: This felt like an anchor around my everything. I don’t know how to motivate a kid to care about something that’s not a fun thing. From early on, I’ve always been the intrinsically motivated kid, competing against myself, but I’m necessarily an extrinsic element to LB so how do we foster that intrinsic drive? We cheer ze on for trying things, even if ze falls down or fails a lot, because we want hir to keep trying. And ze does. But how do we avoid turning hir personal motivation into a praise-seeking situation?
Post-kid: The responsibility is still daunting. I still don’t know how we’ll teach hir everything we hope to. But I have to hope that talking to hir, honestly and carefully, and demonstrating the desirable behaviors will have an impact. Maybe I was lucky to have been the passive kid I was; Mom and Dad always seemed pretty reasonable, I never wanted to rebel even if their rules chafed a little, and by the teen years, I assumed that acting like an adult would mean they’d treat me like one, so I did, and they did. For the most part.
We have to shape LB so that ze is prepared to succeed in a world we probably won’t understand in 20 years, being the outdated geezers that we are. We have to guide hir to build character, to have compassion, to be money savvy, to work harder and smarter than those around hir. I’m not sure how we do that. And in this world today that’s full of bile and anger and horrible people, how do we protect hir? Every single day I read another horrifying story about how someone abused, killed, and hurt their spouse, child, boy/girlfriend, complete stranger that looked at them wrong or was in the wrong place at the wrong time. We can’t wrap hir up in bubble wrap forever but it’s a scary damn world out there.
I don’t have any of the answers. To some degree, you can do it all “right” and still lose your child to whatever’s out there. But today, right here and now, I’m ignoring those what-ifs and soaking up the baby goodness and trying to get it right one day at a time.
Love
Pre-kids: Everyone says “it’s totally worth it” but it always sounds like they’re trying to rationalize the choice to have kids when it was prefaced by a story of how frustrated or annoyed they are by the kid. Which I’m sure all our parents felt at one point or another.
Post-kid: I absolutely adore this kid. Even when ze is difficult or confusing or frustrating. It didn’t happen the second ze was born like it does for some people. We needed time. I needed time to heal. I will never forget my fear and despair in Months 2-3. We needed time to get to know each other. Ze needed time to be more than a baguette.
Right now, it’s easy for me to feel both love and frustration at the same time and roll my eyes at weird infantile things like licking the dog or having a meltdown over having hir ankle grabbed as ze tips over the edge: “You won’t let me sustain a concussion waaahhhh!”
It’s interesting that one of my oldest friends knew bonding could take some time but didn’t tell me until I was past the 4th trimester. A mark of how well she knows me, and respects boundaries, that she wasn’t going to dictate to me what my life experience was going to be like some people do with their “wait until you … !”
So far, it’s hard work and it’ll only get harder. I think we can make the call in 30 years whether we did a good job and if it was all worth it because it’s way too soon to tell but right here and now, I’m just glad we took the chance and aren’t regretting it.
“*caveat: Unless they hurt or intend to hurt you, in those cases, gut ’em)”
This is our caveat as well. Mr. Sandwich and I are in firm agreement that we will not tolerate any kind of bullying, and that Baguette will learn that if she is the instigator or joins in, it doesn’t matter what school says–she is in much more trouble at home. But if she does something in self-defense, it doesn’t matter what school says–we are in her corner and she is not in trouble at home.
At least for now, her autism means that she is far more likely to be bullied than to bully. Heck, she barely interacts with other kids; she cannot be bothered to pick on them. And fortunately her class is full of the loveliest, most encouraging and inclusive TK students a parent could ask for. She’s got a lot of people in her corner. We want to keep it that way.
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Exactly, that’s our stance exactly. LB and Baguette need to know that we will always back them if they’re bullied and that we won’t tolerate their being the instigators.
It’s wonderful that Baguette’s currently surrounded by good students, though, it makes such a difference in their experiences.
Enforcing boundaries is tough as kids grow from beyond curious to intentionally disobedient. We’ve only recently entered that stage though. If Rob or I is able to give Kenny plenty of attention we notice that there is a good chance that he will be more obedient, but even then, we have no guarantees.
Raising kids is tough. I think the most important thing is to try to be consistent, and always guided by love.
To be honest, Rob and I have not done much to teach responsibility. I think we are mainly focused on the ability to do things (like go to the bathroom by himself) first, and as we know he can do things, we will develop some expectations. We pretend to let him help though and he likes that.
There are occasionally times that LB seems to be deliberately disobedient or defiant, and I’m sitting here wondering: already? It’s that time already? Ze gets this grin like “I KNOW you won’t like this and watch me doing it anyway!” *shaking my head* But it is part and parcel of their testing boundaries.
So far we’ve just started working on really simple things like putting blocks away. It’s fun to see hir learn how to do these little things.
But yes, we frequently discuss what we need to do and how we do our best by the kiddo.
LOL!
“Ze needed more time to be more than a baguette”
I was thinking burrito…
There seems to be good evidence that Baby Bun will turn out all right but you just never know.
Looking at pictures from before and now, it’s INCREDIBLY different. And year on year, they’re just going to keep changing. We just have to keep molding them.
Hey just letting you know, you wrote a specific gender pronoun in the first paragraph.
Thanks! In this case, the “her” was my friend doing the questioning but I very much appreciate your looking out. 🙂
TBH this all … intimidates me somewhat.
But I’m hoping getting and having a dog will help prepare me for this kind of stuff later on. I’m gonna need to – I’m a total pushover with other people’s pets.
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Have I said that being a good pet-owner is not unlike being a good parent? Because for me, it’s very similar. It’s hard to hold the line against those big puppy eyes, or the begging, or the I’m STARVING plaints. (They rarely are.)
And I think making our mistakes with our dogs might be a little more manageable, you get a little bit less of the guilt because dogs don’t hold it against you 15 years later 😉
I think that within reasonable bounds of parenting (barring abuse or affluenza levels of coddling), a lot of how kids turn out is on the kids, not on the parents. They are their own people and find their own ways.
nicoleandmaggie recently posted…Part 1 of a series: Writing productivity
This is likely true. I’m just gun-shy after my brother. :/ Not that it was my job to parent him but in the end it kind of became that and it sucked.
This is so true perspective do change from before and after.
Okay so I have to ask what is hir? And is Ze and LB the same person. 🙂 I was getting a bit lost as I read. But I got the gist of it.
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I use gender neutral pronouns for the baby until it makes sense not to or the kiddo can agree to have any of hir identity be shared.
LB (Little Bean, because I couldn’t come up with a more creative name when I was pregnant)
Hir = his/her
Ze = he/she
LOL! I remember my mother remarking that when I was little she thought the only word she knew was “NO!”
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That was certainly one of LB’s first words 🙂