Communicating with Kids by Stephanie Davies-Arai

Author:Stephanie Davies-Arai [Davies-Arai, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN: PARENTAL AUTHORITY

When I was a new mother I often observed parents managing situations in a way that I could see seemed to make things worse, like the harassed mother in a campsite washroom who was trying to wash her little girl’s hair as she sat on the washbasin squirming and screaming loudly as the shampoo bubbled everywhere. In exasperation (and probably embarrassment) the mother said furiously ‘If you don’t stop screaming we’re not going to go and see the ponies.’ If you had wanted your daughter to scream louder, I couldn’t think of a much better way than that.

Some scenarios quite upset me, like the enraged father I saw in a shop calling his three-year-old boy over with the words ‘You’re going to get a hard smack if you don’t do as I say.’ The father’s face was red with anger and the little boy was paralysed, rooted to the spot in fear, rendered completely incapable of obeying his dad.

And then there was the little boy – who lived across the road from us when my oldest two boys were small – who screamed and threw tantrums whenever he was required to do anything he didn’t want to. The mother would respond to his demands by gently and patiently saying things like ‘You’re feeling really angry… ?’ She would placate him by trying to negotiate an option which would please him, and the more she tried the worse his behaviour became. We once spent what felt like hours trying to get through a gate into a playground when he kicked off about not going through first. My boys and I meekly trooped out again to allow him through, but that wasn’t enough to pacify him. This little boy’s behaviour was so out of control that even my boys weren’t keen for him to come over to play, and children will usually put up with anything.

I didn’t want to be one of those threatening, punishing parents. Sometimes I would see horrible situations like the little boy in the shop and I would feel really sorry for the child, and at other times I could see that it just didn’t work. I wanted to be nice and lovely all the time but the problem was that I could also see that the nice parenting techniques didn’t work, either.

I muddled through for years before, bit by bit, I found a role of Parental Authority with my children which felt about right. All my children had to push me into it: they all made it obvious what they wanted from me. I remember when my first son started to ask me ‘Am I allowed to do this?’ and taught me, to my amazement, that I had the power to allow and disallow things. I think he learned that from other children. I will be forever grateful to his nursery school who taught him to say ‘Please may I get down from the table?’ after a meal – a habit which he introduced into the family, where it remained throughout all my kids’ childhoods.

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