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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, my favorite flavor of Pop Tarts is cherry, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share lessons I’m learning about parenting.
Today’s Fun Fact of the Day is: Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.
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What I Learned Yesterday:
I’ve mentioned a few times on this podcast that every afternoon I stop working and go to meet my daughter at the bus stop. I really enjoy the few minutes that we spend together. Even though our conversations aren’t very deep, I value the one-on-one time that we spend together and I hope that one day she’ll look back on it fondly.
Because I enjoy the time so much, I’ve been trying to leave earlier so that I’m closer to the actual bus stop when she get’s off the bus, and we’ll get a longer walk together back to our house. However, this has not been eagerly accepted by Addison. At first she refused to walk within about 10 feet of me until all of her friends were out of view. After that didn’t dissuade me from arriving earlier, she decided to be more direct.
One day last week she asked me to wait at a specific spot for her. It was a spot that would be out of sight from her friends. She doesn’t mind walking with me, she just doesn’t want her friends to see her doing it. I thought about showing up and calling out her name in front of her friends the next day, but then decided that I’d play it cool and try to back off a bit. Again, my main goal is that she’ll look back fondly at our short walks and see that they were an expression of my love and care for her.
Addison has always been a strong willed child. Most of the time her behavior is not bad, but she has moments where she’s impossible to reason with. When these moments come, she will stubbornly refuse to do anything that she doesn’t want to do, even to the point of getting punished way more than would seem reasonable to anyone else.
She will employ sarcasm, defiant body language, yelling, screaming, and illogical arguments to try and get her way or avoid doing something that she doesn’t want to do. Her typical punishment is going to bed early, but we also do things like take away the phone, computer, iPad, and time with her friends. She tells us the punishments are stupid and they don’t bother her. Spanking is a punishment we used when she was younger, but as a 12 year old, I think she’s too old for that punishment now.
We don’t demand a whole lot from our kids. We ask that they try their best at school, be honest, and treat others with respect, or they way they would want to be treated. So when she or her brother get in trouble, it’s usually due to an issue with one of these things. Needless to say, with the behavior I described above, Addison’s punishments usually come from an issue with not showing respect.
Thursday night she got in trouble and had to go to bed early. When the time came to go to bed, she gave us more trouble, and we told her that she’d have to go to bed early on Friday. When Friday came around and it was time for bed, she went to bed just fine, but then it was discovered that she’d been in there “in bed” but with her light on, messing around with some craft beads.
When she realized that I realized her light was on, she quickly turned it off. When I went into her room to ask her about it, she refused to acknowledged that it had been on. Four or five times she was asked, and each time she lied. After I stood up on a chair and felt that the light bulbs were hot, she still lied about it. Finally, she relented and acknowledged that the light was on. However, then she defiantly argued that she’d done nothing wrong because technically she’d been in bed.
She then glared at me, told me to leave her alone, and demanded that I get out of her room. I picked her up, put her over my knee, and spanked her. I hate to admit it, but I was mad. She lied over and over again, she was defiant, disrespectful, and rebellious.
She cried herself to sleep that night, and sat on the couch for hours wondering how I could have handled the situation better.
The next day I got up and Addison was eating cereal. I spoke to her, and she grunted at me, turning her back to me as she did it. A little while later I tried speaking to her again and I received the same response. When it came time to eat lunch she barely spoke, and only then it was just to let me know that she was on her way to the table.
She spent most of the afternoon in another room painting her fingernails. When she came into the living room, she would purposely say hello to everyone but me. I wanted to get mad about it, but I really wasn’t sure I’d handled the events of the previous evening in the right way. Maybe she had a reason to treat me this way.
Kari tried to get Addison to stop being mean to me, but it didn’t do any good. She continued to grunt at me, or simply ignore me. Dinner came and went.
After dinner, Addison went and took a shower. I don’t know what happened in that shower, but I guess it washed the grump off of her. After she had dressed and brushed her hair, she came up to me, cuddled up next to me on the couch, put her head on my shoulder, and apologized. She apologized for lying, her behavior the night before, and her behavior that day. And she told me she loved me.
Here’s what I learned.
Parenting is hard. If you’ve raised kids, I bet you know exactly how I feel. I’ve had conversations with some of the men from my church, and they’ve all told me that her behavior is something they experienced while raising their kids too. This gives me hope because the guys I’ve spoken to have raised some really awesome kids.
We repeatedly tell our kids that we care most about their character and that we make decisions for them out of love and what we believe is best for them. I know that they can’t always see how the decisions we make are being made out of love, but I hope that someday they will see it.
I want so desperately for my kids to be world changers. I want them to love and respect others. I want them to put others before themselves. I want them to be trustworthy. I want them to be good citizens, employees, spouses, and parents one day. I only get one shot at this parenting thing, and I don’t want to blow it.
But I know that I will blow it. There will be days when, despite my best intentions, I blow it. There will be days when my kids, despite a desire to improve on bad behavior, will blow it. However, after the emotion has died down and the dust has settled, I realize that every parenting opportunity is a chance for me to learn and experience character growth. Are they growing too? I think so, though not always as quickly as I’d like them to. But we’re in this together, we’re learning together, and we’re growing stronger together. And that, I’m quite sure, what we call a family.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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