Raising My Kids: Their Challenges

Being a full-time Mom has been my favorite job so far...and I've had quite a few!  My little-people co-workers are cute and adorable and warm my heart.  It may be a 24-7 job with no breaks for meals but I get immediate feedback (sometimes in the form of a two year old clapping and sometimes in the form of a pre-teen eye-rolling).  It's a great and rewarding job and since it is my current career choice, I spend a lot of energy on self-evaulation.  I take a lot of time reflecting on my choices and how I handled my kiddos in the situations that we encountered during the day.

I consider one of my goals to be to guide my kiddos to turn their challenging characteristics into their best quality.  It may seem ambitious but I enjoy a good challenge myself!

My little one (Indiana Jones) is two and so his biggest challenge is that he wants to be in charge.  He wants to control everything.  My approach - let him control it.  I give in - all the time...here are some examples:

• He wants to hold the bag of pretzels, chips, grapes, anything!
• My response: okay - I give him all the control - he holds the bag and I ask politely for one of whatever he has.  I respect his "no's" and thank him for his "yes's".
• He wants something that his sister has and he is yelling for it!
• My response: okay - his sister can share but he needs to say "please" and he usually has no problem saying that and it makes everybody feel better.
• He wants to do something dangerous; for example he wants to plug in the vacuum cleaner.  
• My response: calm him down explaining it is a "Mommy job".  Sometimes I teach him how to do a "Mommy job" like opening the door with the keys.

The hardest times though are the times I cannot physically give him what he wants.  Those times I tell him how we are going to get it.  For example, at the orchard the other day - he wanted to eat the grapes that we picked before we paid for them and washed them.  So I laid out the steps - "first we need to pick our apples"...."then we need to pay the lady"...."then we will wash the grapes"...."then you will eat them in the car".  90% of the time, he will work with me - the other 10%, I assume he is just too tired and he has a fit.

So - point is - I give in...I give in to let him know he has control to build his self-confidence.  I hope it pays off one day :-)

Enjoy :-)