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Q: My soon-to-be five-year-old
son is extremely bossy. While this was rather charming when he was a toddler,
it has become quite exasperating! He likes to tell his friends what to do (“Throw
the football like this, not like that”), me how to set the table (“Put the
napkin like this!”) and his father how to give him a hug. Is this normal? What
can I do to stop our little boss?
A: What’s cute in a two-year-old has become tedious in a
preschooler. Your son is acting perfectly normal for his age. Some children
have more of a tendency to be more bossy than others, but generally all kids
like to tell others how to do something or how to behave. But in his case, it’s
also become a bad habit, one he can’t break on his own.
However, that doesn’t mean you should tolerate his bossy
behavior toward you and her father (or any other adult, for that matter). I
would leave the being bossy around his peers alone for now. He’ll eventually
learn to moderate himself soon enough, as kids are notoriously good at telling
other children to back off or stop it.
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| Image courtesy of digitalart/FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
You can curb his corrections towards you by employing the
ticket system. You tell him the targeted behavior is telling you or his father what
to do. He’ll have three “free” ticket a day (strips of colored paper will do).
Each day, he starts off with his three ticket margin of error. During the day,
whenever he tries to be the boss, he loses one ticket. If he loses all three
tickets before the end of the day, he’s confined to his room for the rest of
the day and is put to bed directly after an early supper.
Each time he tells you what to do or what shouldn't be done
(same thing), you just smile and say, "That's a ticket!" Direct him
to pluck one off the fridge or get it yourself. The key is to not talk about
the behavior beyond calling the ticket. He'll likely run through his tickets
fairly quickly at first, but he'll soon realize his bossiness is only getting him
into his room.
I think you’ll find that as he learns to stop bossing you and
your husband around, he will also be less bossy with his friends.
Email Sarah if you have a parenting
question you would like to see answered on this blog.
Actress Emma Thompson recently took a year off of work to
spend more time with her 14-year-old daughter, saying “I wanted to spend more
time with my family. I highly recommend others to do the same if they can
afford it.”
In the interview, Thompson went on to say that juggling
parenthood and career isn’t always possible. “Sometimes in life you’ll have
some things, at other times you will have other things,” she said in an Daily
Mail interview. “You don’t need it all at once, it’s not good for you.
Motherhood is a full-time job. The only way I could have continued working
would have been by delegating the running of the home to other people. I never
wanted to do this as I find motherhood profoundly enjoyable.”
Most of the chatter has been about her statement that
mothers should take 12 months off to focus on their children, given that there
are few women who could afford financially to not work at all for a year.
What’s not being discussed is whether or not it’s actually
good for mother and child to have all that togetherness. Perhaps for Thompson
(who, after all, is an actress who must spend weeks or months away from home on
a movie set), this was what she needed to reconnect with her daughter. But most
of us, we see our children day in and day out—if we took a year off to focus on
our children, that would likely create an unhealthy relationship for both
mother and kids.
We already spend way more time with our children than the
women of the 1960s. A recent Pew
Research study found that the amount of time parents spend with their
children has continued to go up. Mother’s time with children has increased
significantly over the past 50 years. Turns out, those 1960s women had lots
more going on in their lives apart from their kids than today’s moms do.
A few years ago, we debated quality time versus quantity
time with our kids, but that also misses the point that our kids don’t need us
to focus on them much at all. What they do need is to feel secure by our
presence in the home and our strong marriages. That’s what is key to healthy,
well-adjusted kids—not the amount of time spent with them.
We enjoy spending time with our kids, but we also know that
paying too much attention has the tendency to backfire and create
attention-seeking monsters, who whine, beg and plead for more and more
attention. Ignoring our kids isn’t a bad thing, but one that is essential to
their growth. Not being responsible for their playtime, their homework, their
lives is what helps kids take responsibility for themselves, to learn to stand
on their own, and to stretch and grow.
So don’t fret about not being able to take 12 months off to
focus on your child like Emma Thompson did. Instead, focus on developing a
healthy life for yourself, one that includes your children, of course, but not
one that has the kids at the center.
Until next time,
Sarah
Q: My six-year-old
daughter won’t stop licking her arm. She has done this since she was little! I
have told her to stop and asked why she licks her arm. I have tried taking away
her favorite stuffed animal and blankie but it still continues. She now has a
sore on her arm from the licking. Is this normal and what can we do to make her
stop?
A: You can’t make her stop, but you can help her not do it
as much. Kids are weird, and often do strange things, like pull their hair out,
lick their arms, and rub themselves in places we'd rather them not even know
about at her age. Most of the time, ignoring the habit will let it run its
course and the child stops on her own.
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Image courtesy of Digital Vision/
Thinkstockphotos.com |
However, you’ve bought into the modern notion that if a
child does something strange, there must be a reason—thus the questions and
conversations about licking, the attempts on your part to “make” her stop, and
the worry and fretting you’ve done on your own because of her bad habit. I’m sorry
to say that you’re part of the problem, and you’ve contributed the lion’s share
of making a mountain out of a mole hill. After all this, you've learned that
you cannot get your daughter to stop, right? She’s kept on and probably longer
than she would have if you had simply not gotten involved.
But you can provide guidance to help her stop. First,
perhaps right before bed or first thing in the morning, tell her that you’ve
noticed she’s been licking her arm a lot, and that you’ve decided she can lick
her arm to her heart’s content in her very own licking room (a powder room or
some equally boring place away from everyone in the house). Whenever she wants
to lick her arm, she’s to go to that special room. If she forgets, you’ll
remind her by saying, “Remember your special licking room!”
Second, make that the last conversation about her licking or
not licking. From now on, you’ve got nothing to say about her licking or
questions to ask her about her licking. If she says her arm is sore, simply
shrug and say, “I’m sorry to hear that” and walk away. This is not engaging her
in conversation about licking is key—you have to starve the licking monster
before it will fade away on its own.
If you stick to the plan, she should have her licking under
control within a few weeks. She might not completely give up her habit, as you
can’t make someone else stop something. At the very least, you won’t have to
see her licking and your reaction won’t fuel the licking fire.
Email Sarah if you have a parenting
question you would like to see answered on this blog.
Does anyone get lost in these days of smartphones and GPS
devices? Used to be finding yourself in a strange place unexpectedly was fairly
commonplace. People figured out how to get “unlost”—how to turn around and
backtrack.
Nowadays, the art of getting lost—and then “found” again—has
become something not many experience. As my children and husband will testify,
I often get “lost,” turned around, not where I am supposed to be, when driving.
But I’ve learned how to backtrack, take the next exit and retrace my steps in
order to arrive at the correct destination. Getting lost doesn’t throw me for a
loop anymore. Rather, it has become a chance to practice patience on a regular
basis.
Most of us don’t realize how little we prepare our children
to handle being lost. We keep them close to home and don’t let them go far on
their bikes or scooters in order to keep an eye on them at all times. In the
process, we’ve robbed our children of valuable lessons that can be learned from
getting lost and then finding their way back home.
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Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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We give our oldest two kids (ages 9 and 11) a lot of freedom
to roam our neighborhood on their scooters and bikes. We’ve given them certain
parameters, such as not crossing certain busier streets and staying off the
university campus located about a mile from our home, but other than that, the
world is theirs to explore.
However, recently, Naomi, our oldest child, went for a bike
ride after school and didn’t come home in time for supper. By the time we
realized she was lost, she had been gone for two hours. A quick ride around the
neighborhood didn’t turn up our daughter, so we were contemplating a call to
the police when the phone rang. A woman had spotted Naomi sitting by her bike
at a crossroads and had asked if she needed help, and Naomi had given the woman
our number to call. Turns out, Naomi had gotten very far a field—several miles
from home with no way of knowing how to get home again.
Naomi did the right thing in sitting in one place when she
realized she was truly lost, and we’re very grateful for the woman who noticed
and offered to call home for her. We asked Naomi what she should do in the
future to avoid getting lost like that. Her solution? A cell phone. Our
solution? Some maps of the City with our street marked and a lesson in how to
find where you are on the map.
Now she carries the maps in her small purse when she goes
for a bike ride, and the other day, she came back all aglow. She’d gotten
“lost” again, but stopped on a corner, found the two cross streets and made her
way back home.
If she’d had a cell phone, she would have simply called home
to ask how to get home. But the map gave her a chance to learn on her own how
to figure out where she was and where to go next.
I encourage you to keep in mind that you want your children
to learn independence and reliance on you or technology will keep them from
being self-sufficient. What could you let go of to that end?
Until next time,
Sarah
Q: Help! We’ve just moved our three-year-old daughter from a
crib to a twin bed in her five-year-old sister’s room. However, the transition
has not been going well at all. We put them both down at the same time but soon
the playing begins. The three-year-old keeps getting out of bed and keeps the
five-year-old awake. We’ve tried for a month to get the younger one to sleep,
but end up putting her back in the crib about 10
p.m. because neither girl is asleep. Our nine-month-old son needs
the crib but we all need sleep, too. What else can we do to help smooth this
transition?
A: Ah, the trials and tribulations of room and bed
transitions! We went through a similar struggle with our two youngest (boys).
The youngest one kept getting out of not only his bed but the entire room as
well! As with most transitions, children take time to settle into a new
routine. With a little modification, I think your two girls will soon be
sleeping much better.
Start by putting the girls to bed separately, with their
bedtimes staggered by at least half an hour. This will give the younger one
time to settle down on her own before her sister joins her in the room. We’ve
found that most of the time, the youngest was asleep when the older one climbed
into bed.
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| Image courtesy of yingyo/FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
Don’t forget the power of music to sooth them to sleep.
We’ve long let our children listen to songs, poems or story CDs when going to
sleep. You should make sure it’s not too stimulating, but there are many
wonderful CDs for children out there. We’ve especially enjoyed the Rabbit Ears
storybook audio series (read by famous actors), as well as various children’s
poems. (My mother’s recording of her reading children’s poems on a cassette
tape that we had transferred to a CD has been a favorite of all. Something like
this makes a great gift, too).
Make sure the girls have plenty of exercise during the day,
as activity contributes to good sleep patterns. A quiet bedtime routine that avoids
extra stimulation, such as screen time of any kind, will provide signals to
their brains that sleep is coming soon.
But if the playing continues despite all of your efforts,
just let the girls know that it’s only forbidden if its too noisy. That means
no lights on, no bed jumping, no shouting or screaming. If they play quietly
for half an hour and fall asleep on the floor, that’s okay.
The most important thing is for you to let your girls figure
out on their own how to fall asleep in the same room. Remember, you can’t
command a child to go to sleep, but you can provide the tools for her to learn
to do it on her own.
Email Sarah if you have a parenting
question you would like to see answered on this blog.
The literary character Pollyanna, from the same-titled 1913 children’s
book by Eleanor Porter, has been long been misunderstood. To call someone a “Pollyanna”
is to imply that the person has an unrealistic happy outlook on life or a
situation. In reality, Pollyanna cultivated an attitude of gratitude in all
things with her “Glad game.”
To our modern sensibilities, the thought that we should be
glad about some of the awful things that life throws at us is abhorrent to our
sensitive nature. We don’t want to find contentment in a pair of crutches when
we wanted a new electronic toy! We want to wallow in grumbling and lash out at
the injustice of not getting what we want when we want it.
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| Image courtesy of Feelart/FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
As parents, we are sometimes too slow to correct this
attitude in our children. Because we so often feel—and express—our own
dissatisfaction with a situation, we allow our children to do the same without
checking their whining. Or, even worse, we correct their grumbling but let our
own run rampart.
The best place to start to correct this is in our own
hearts. At times, all we see is the forest of wrongs—the things not done, the
things not done quite right, or the messed-up schedule or to-do list. But it’s
at those times when we truly need to seek to be glad about our circumstances.
It’s the times when everything is going wrong that we should
remember and give thanks for all the things that have gone right. Maybe not
that minute, but not in the too-distant past. We have so much for which to be
grateful that if we’re not careful, we’ll let grumbling and whining and
thanklessness creep into our speech, our habits and our lives.
If we want our children to learn to live a true Pollyanna
life—and studies have shown that having an attitude of gratitude is one way to
stave off feelings of sadness, discontentment and dissatisfaction—we need to
live our own lives with joy overflowing at God’s goodness.
Let’s all work to rehabilitate Pollyanna and develop our own
“glad game” to help us and our children face life’s difficulties not through
rose-colored glasses but with an attitude of gratitude. Like Pollyanna’s father
said when the barrel they received had not toys but crutches, “We should be
glad that we didn’t need to use them!”
How will you be glad about your circumstances today?
Until next time,
Sarah
Q: Our 5-year-old son
loves to tease his 7-year-old sister—and when I say, love, I mean it’s nearly
constant throughout the day. We’ve tried time outs in his room when he teases
her but that hasn’t slowed the taunting. Part of the problem is that he can so
easily get under her skin with a comment, and I can tell he loves getting a
rise out of her! What can we do?
A: Your son has become addicted to teasing. Right now, he
receives lots of attention when he teases his sister—both from her and you. And
children who get attention for doing something will keep on doing it until you
step in with an offer he can’t refuse (a la the Godfather Principle, attributed
to John Rosemond).
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| Image courtesy of stockimages/FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
The easiest way to address this is to institute the ticket
system for teasing. Write down (or use illustrations if he can’t read yet)
three target behaviors related to teasing, such as name-calling, put downs,
etc. Post that sheet on the fridge along with four tickets (squares of
cardboard or construction paper). Each day, he starts out with a clean slate of
four tickets—essentially, his margin of error. Every time he teases his sister,
he loses a ticket. All you have to do is call the infraction and have him
remove the ticket from the fridge.
When he’s used up his “free” quota (i.e., all four tickets),
then he’s confined to his room for the rest of the day and goes to bed directly
after supper--and make supper early than usual. This system works because you’re
not talking about the teasing with either child—you’re only calling the
infraction in a calm tone.
It’s likely that he’ll race through his tickets at first because
he’s not learned how to control his tongue. But if he’s like my sons, the
thought of being indoors during this glorious springtime will drive him to
figure out how to stop teasing. As he progressives and starts losing fewer
tickets, you should take away a ticket at a time, to tighten up his margin of
error gradually. When you get down to one ticket, you can suspend the program,
as you can’t expect perfection.
As for his sister, tell her that you are handling it, that
she’s not to tattle-tale about the teasing, and that her brother is younger and
therefore needs more time to learn self-control. You don’t want her gleeful at
his mistakes, so make sure you don’t accidentally appoint her in the role of
victim, thereby placing him in the role of villain.
Email Sarah if you have a parenting
question you would like to see answered on this blog.
Sticks and stones may
break my bones,
But words will never
hurt me.
Whoever thought up that little ditty probably never was
teased as a child. Words do hurt, especially those uttered by family members.
We do our children a disservice when we gloss over teasing, taunting and
name-calling by our offspring. As parents, it’s our job to help our kids
understand the power of words—and why watching our language is essential to
building good relationships with each other and ourselves.
Here are some tips for parents to model—and teach—to our
children regarding spoken words.
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| Image courtesy of farconville/FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
Speak well of all. We
must be careful not to bad-mouth anyone in front of our children—not another
child, not a teacher, not our spouse. We should also halt any talk among our
children that denigrates another, even if that person is not part of the
conversation. Ask them how they would feel if a friend or classmate said that
about them. Remind them to always strive to speak well of everyone, even those
they don’t like. The old adage “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say
anything at all” still retains its wisdom and is an easy way for children to
remember their manners.
Watch the language.
One of the most destructive things in any relationship is name-calling. Calling
someone names that are derogatory, disparaging, belittling, deprecating,
derisive, and ridiculing tears apart the relationship. Ban name calling of any
sort in our homes, and address name calling seriously when you overhear a child
do so. Yes, all children will sometimes call one another “Stupid,” or “Dummy,”
etc., especially when vexed, but we should try to nip destructive speech in the
bud.
No teasing.
Taunting, while not strictly name-calling, is its kissing cousin as far as its
destructive nature. Teasing can trigger fighting among siblings, friends,
classmates, etc. We need to discourage interactions that are mean, belittle or
knock down the other person. Teasing can become a habit for some children, too,
so it might take discipline for the child to break the habit.
Check motivation.
We like to think our intentions are always good and noble, but the reality is,
it’s usually not. Children’s consciences are in the developmental stage, so we
have to guide them to look inside their hearts when it comes to their speech.
To help kids do this, here are some questions you can ask them:
- Are
you being a tattle-tale?
- What
did you hope to gain?
- What
did you think you would lose?
- What
do you think the other person felt when you said that?
These are just some of the ways we can help our children to
develop more self-control over their words. What are some ways you do this in
your home?
Until next time,
Sarah
Q: My 15-year-old son
(eighth grade) has been struggling with acceptance into a social group that
doesn’t exactly embrace his presence. Although he talks to them at school, that
doesn’t translate into social inclusion. Several times, he has invited this
kids to our house to hang out, etc., and they come but it ends in
disappointment on his part. Now he wants to issue another invitation—this after
he has expressed his concern that the group doesn’t like him. I’m torn between
agreeing to host the event and telling him to cut ties with this group. It’s
been hard to watch his attempts at inclusion over the past two years. Should I
keep enabling him by allowing him to invite these kids over, even though past
experience tells him it won’t help?
A: Your son is still trying to figure out where he fits in,
which isn’t at all unusual for an eighth grader. Even the
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| Image courtesy of Ambro/FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
so-called popular
teens have periods where they question their place in a group, so this is
pretty typical stuff.
That said, you should stop trying to micro-manage your son’s
social life. Yes, I know, its hard to step back when you see him making
mistakes, but those are his mistakes to make. As long as he’s not endangering
himself or others, you should take a backseat role in his social life. Frankly,
you might not be seeing all the nuances that flow in a group of teens—what you
perceive as painful might not be that for your son.
The fact that he's willing to keep trying—and that he wants
to do so on familiar ground—is a good thing. Support that, keep an eye on
things, but leave the group to themselves. You can ask your son about the event
after the fact, questions like, “What went well last night?” and “What do you
think you could have done differently?” Mostly, though, even though it does
hurt for us to see our kids floundering, especially in the social arena, we
need to be available for a listening ear, give support (such as hosting events)
when asked, and step back the rest of the time.
At this stage in his life, you need to be firmly in the
mentoring chair, leaving him to make decisions and live with the consequences
(again, as long as he’s not doing anything illegal or could result in loss of
life or limb). For more on how to mentor your teen, read John Rosemond’s
excellent book, Teen Proofing.
Email Sarah if you have a parenting
question you would like to see answered on this blog.
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