I got kids, which means I got problems.
Now, I got problems of my own, FO SHO.
But that’s another story.
For reals.
The problems I experience with my kids are not behavioral,
or sibling rivalry, or picky eating, or sleep issues, or any of the myriad of
problems having children brings a person.
No kids? Consider
this my contribution to your birth control plan.
I’m talking about emotional problems of the kind that which
cannot be healed, fixed, or eliminated.
The kind that must be dealt with.
They must be cordoned off from the rest of a generally happy kid’s life,
and they must be tended, so as not to be blown out of proportion later on in
life, to resurface exponentially worse than when you were a child.
Feel free to flash back to that one night you
were four glasses of wine in, crying at your kitchen table to your girlfriends
about how your mom never came to any of your basketball games that one year you
played in junior high.
Kids get angry. They
get sad. They cry, lash out, hit, bite,
or scream. Sometimes they do all of
these things at the same time. It can be alarming. My own strategy with dealing with temper
tantrums is to steel my own emotions with the cool of a seasoned double agent,
trained and hardened in the field. I show
no alarm or concern, and with a steady voice, I say:
“I hear and understand what you are saying. You are angry because I ate the last of your
chocolate bunny from Easter.* I am sorry that I did that. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”
Depending on how they feel, this could go on for hours.
My parents were children when they had me.
They did a great job raising my siblings and
I, and I have no complaints with my upbringing at all.
In fact, it’s kind of not fair how good I had
it as a kid.
But when I had a tantrum, I
was sent to my room, or told to be quiet, or that it was too bad, or on rare
occasions, I was spanked or even slapped.
Gasp.
There
was none of this “tell me how you feel” nonsense.
It was go to your room you don’t know how
easy you have it stop bawling before I give you something real to cry about.
And I did, and I got over it, every time.
I trusted my parents to know what was best
for me, and I listened, and we got along just fine.
I have no illusions about how different things are these
days from when I was a kid. The pressures
that come from TV, online, school, friends and over-involvement in
extracurricular activities is enough to make even the most even-keeled kid
start whacking his head against the wall.
But I remember how it felt to be a kid, all happy go lucky and no
responsibilities mixed with frustration and angst and fear and
uncertainty. It is tough.
There is no reason to believe that my kids feel any
differently than I did when I was their age.
I see myself in them, relive my own childhood through their eyes. What I need to be careful about is putting
what I know now, that working through your feelings is important, on them. Asking them to tell me their feelings might
be well-advised, but what happens when their feelings are so confusing that
they can’t even articulate them? When
they don’t even know how they are feeling?
I’ll tell you what happens.
More frustration, more confusion, more tears.
It happens in my house, more often than any
of us like.
We are giving them the
opportunity to express themselves, unlike we did as kids, but it results in frustration
because they have these feelings without knowing what they are or where they
come from, much less what to do with them.
Resolutions are hard to come by when the person in charge is winging it.
So what is a parent to do?
I don’t know. Something between
talking to your kids about their feelings, and telling them to take the tantrum
somewhere else. I can help my kids sort
through their feelings, but I have to remember that sometimes kids just need to
be told what to do, and being sent to their rooms might be what they need to
get over it. They can deal with their
feelings later, when they can better articulate them.
Like therapy, in which I am considering investing. Might as well start now.
*******
*True. I did.
