My son said...

My son said “you’ve hurt me. Don’t do it again” the other day. A four year old can recognize when they’ve been hurt and is taking action about it. Got me thinking…when and how do adults express this so straightforward??? When your child is small any/many parents will spend hours and hours thinking about how to bring them up, their behaviour, their discipline, the outcome. Wondering if they’re doing it right? Wondering if they really should do everything differently from their parents. Wondering what to do when things are obviously not going so well. And also wondering if they are over reacting. Having a child(ren) can be the most exhausting, expensive and yet a very thorough therapy session of your life, and it will just keep going.

The biggest issues I feel are around discipline and punishment, as well as reward and encouragement. You can (if you can afford it) adopt all the best eating habits and lifstyles, find the best schools, dress them in organic cotton and make sure they do not watch too much TV. But when it comes to the soft stuff, I’m pretty certain that parents have A LOT to say, and many contradicting each other. And yes, all the self help books say: do what feels right for you and your child. But like I already said, all the wondering questions do not answer themselves.

Every parent would probably say that ‘this is the toughest age’ at any and all ages, because it really is. But obviously at some point any sane person would let the reigns go a bit and relax, and bathe in their glorious achievement of having reared a decent human being, even if it is only through their eyes. But until then, you are constantly coaxing, moulding, altering, patting your kid to the best possible form. And that includes punishment for wrong doings. And I got thinking, with my four year old son, I know exactly how to handle some tricky situations because there quite a bit of literature out there already. The ‘tantrum years', 'the fire child, water child method', the 'time out method' etc etc. And I have so far come to a somewheat customized amalgamation of these versions and more based on everything I could get my hands on for my son. But what I’m worried about more is, what happens when he ages beyond the age bands of self help books that seem abundant but do not fill that gap up until the doomed teenage years? And what's worse, beyond?  Traditionally, as soon as the teenage years have gone by the kid is an ‘adult’ and therefore should be capable of all the adult things in the world: safe sex, driving, owning a credit card without going crazy, getting an education, finding and getting a job, functioning within society without getting arrested etc. But if we look at all the non-lethal problems we have in our society, I’m pretty sure that people still makes mistakes, even after they’ve turned 16, left home, and/or become an ‘adult.’ And what happens then? Who disciplines them? Who teaches them? Because I know that I still make horrendous mistakes. And so does everyone else. But who punishes me? Who tells me that I should’ve have known better? Or  to learn from our mistakes? Where's our guide??

Being a child of the 90s and 00s I read a lot of what I know now, what I have come to learn and have come to expect from magazines. We were the generation that grew up on self help books and magazine columns. Some may think 'parents' are the obvious answer to the source of great wisdom through a series of good bollocking but few are lucky enough to actually get sound bollocking that are actually helpful in real life and on playgrounds. Whereas the majority of the generation would roll our eyes and shrug, continue to devour the cheap but accessible words, that would unite us at a later time in life through a sense of eternal optimism despite the constant dissillusionment and disappointment.

Why disapointment? Because we’re all continuing to make mistakes well into 'adulthood' even though we have supposedly been brought up on a diet of self help books and guides. Why disillusionment? Because we expect our children to expedition through life in an adult’s body, with adult’s thoughts, with adult expections and projectons, with adult responsibilities, when their discipline learning has stopped at childhoood. God forbid, I still need to be disciplined sometimes. I can’t get through a day’s work in the office without checking my FB account once or stick to this little blog continiously! When it comes to self discipline and the basics like honesty, not stealing, etc etc I’m sure most people are capable of walking through adulthood without breaking rules. But what about the problems that arise outside of childhood, in adulthood, where you don’t know if you’ve done something bad, let alone how to remedy it? In some ways I've come to think that in order to discipline myself, be more productive and not err on the edge of wrong doing, however white or small, I just need to follow a diffferent type of punshiment. The fear that my children will grow up 'bad' by watching me, which is every parent's nightmare. Discipline by doing. And most importantly discipline both parent and child by admitting when they are wrong. And so our generation, at least, have this option to save their children by saving their souls.

*this blog was first written in 2016 but never edited until today. you can sense the frentic panic of suddenly realising the inevitableness of having to raise actual walking, talking, thinking human(s).