“Okay, it’s getting late, you need to do your homework now,” I tell my seven-year-old daughter.
“Squawk! You need to do your homework now!” she parrots back to me. Like a parrot. I mean, actually squawking like a parrot. Why? I have no idea.
My kids are many things, but they are not obedient. They are loving and chatty and funny, but they are not obedient.
I was a good, obedient, well-behaved child. Oh, wait. I’ve just remembered the time I threw a pair of scissors at my brother and left him with a gash above his eye. (I was two. It was Christmas. He wouldn’t let me open the present.) And my habit of eating spoonfuls of sugar from the sugar bowl and putting the spoon back. And the tantrum I threw at my eighth birthday party because I wasn’t winning all the games. Okay, maybe I wasn’t perfect. But if my parents asked me to do something, I did it. I didn’t squawk at them. And I didn’t immediately do what they had asked me not to do when their back was turned.
When my mum asked me to stop climbing on the carport roof because it made her nervous, I’m sure I stopped, at least for a while (even though she had nothing to be nervous about because I was perfectly safe). When I ask my daughter to stop climbing on top of the car, I find her doing it again and again. Doesn’t she realise how dangerous it is?
I read up on disciplining children when my daughter was a baby. I thought I understood the key principles: have as few rules as possible, make sure they’re reasonable and have explanations for them, be calm and consistent, model the behaviour you want, etc. I like the principles, and I’ll like them even better when they start working for me. Take, for example, a simple rule: no jumping up and down in muddy puddles until you put your gumboots on. (Damn you, Peppa Pig!) So simple. So reasonable. So hard for my three-year-old son to follow.
I think back to why I obeyed my parents when I was a kid. There was The Smack. My dad didn’t smack me often, but I certainly feared it. Also, being brought up as a good Catholic, I knew that God was watching – even when my parents weren’t – and if I did something bad and died without going to confession, I would go straight to hell. (Me and all the other kids who ate sugar straight from the sugar bowl would hang out with the sadistic murderers.) Then, when I got a little bit older, I had an additional motivation. I wanted to make my mum happy and not upset her or make any extra work for her.
I don’t smack my kids. I just don’t believe a big person should hit a little person to get them to do what they want. I don’t want my children to fear me. Even if somebody could prove to me that smacking my kids would get them to be perfectly obedient, I wouldn’t do it.
There are plenty of times I feel like smacking them. But it’s usually when I’m angry, which is when it would be a particularly bad idea. Sometimes, if I’m really angry, I yell, “In some families, parents would smack their kids for doing what you’ve just done.” My daughter will gasp dramatically, “Smack? No!” (Of course, I don’t believe in yelling at kids either, but I do do that.)
Not smacking my kids also gives me the chance to sound virtuous when I tell them off for thumping each other: “We don’t hit each other in this family. I’ve never hit you, have I?”
I haven’t brought my kids up to be religious, so that whole God/eternal damnation thing doesn’t help me out. That just leaves one motivation from my childhood: kids doing something to make their mum happy. Hmmm…
I’m hoping that, as my kids get older, my patient explaining of the reasons behind the rules will sink in. I’m hoping they’ll grow up to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.
I don’t want my kids to be blindly obedient, anyway. I don’t want them to do whatever adults say, just because they’re adults. I want them to feel they have the right to question and to protest when something isn’t right. I want them to speak up if they – or other kids – are being treated badly. I’ve read so many awful stories recently of children being abused, and I can’t bear the thought of something like that happening to my kids and them suffering in silence.
When my daughter got told off by her school principal the other day, I told her, “Back when I was younger, a lot of kids were scared of the principal.”
She looked surprised. “I’m not scared of anyone,” she said.
When I was in primary school, I remember being so terrified of the nun who was our headmistress that when she accused me of doing something wrong, I admitted it, even though I hadn’t actually done it. I had to stay in at lunchtime and write lines. (So unfair!)
I’m glad my daughter isn’t scared of her principal, or anyone. I don’t think she would be intimidated into admitting to something she didn’t do. I don’t think she’d suffer in silence if someone was treating her badly.
I just wish she’d do her homework the first time I asked her and stop squawking like a parrot.
Motherthunker 