You Hate Me

A recent behavior that the boy has begun to manifest is a strange sort of denial when we yell at him. It’s a strange amalgam of rage, frustration and rationalization that he’s the aggrieved party and we are always singling him out. It’s a straight up attempt at emotional blackmail to flip the script and make us feel guilty for telling him he acted foolishly, stupidly, carelessly or some combination of the preceding plus other things I failed to mention. Some of this is to be expected since the totality of his behaviors reveal a fairly myopic view of the world. Welcome to the world of 8 year olds, I suppose.

What his near-tearful fits fail to account for is that the yell is typically preceded by a notice that he’s pushing the line, followed by a warning that he’s going to get in trouble, followed by an ultimatum that disaster is imminent. I know while reading that you might be thinking “Hey, what about all the decisiveness stuff you’ve talked about in the past? Clearly, he’s just going along because he knows he’ll get several chances before he finally gets it.”

To which I say, it’s subtle. The fact is, the Wife and I can’t always be around to act as his brake for poor behavior. He needs to learn to slow down and stop himself. I like to think that’s what we’re exercising- his ability to identify that he’s getting out of control, to recognize his actions might have negative consequences, to stop himself before he really does get in trouble. It’s possible that those abilities are beyond him at this point, but we won’t know unless we try. Besides, am I supposed to believe that there’s a judgment switch inside him that at some point in the future gets flipped on and suddenly, he can do it?

Maybe so, but we’re just parents. So we’ll put him through his paces anyway, thank you very much.

Take yesterday as an example. Out on the deck, the boy had brought out his large beach ball. The Wife knew what was going to happen the moment it appeared on the deck, and she warned him “Don’t throw is near the plants or you’ll break them.” Not 30 seconds later, the boy carelessly kicks the ball and almost knocks down one of my desert roses. The Wife doesn’t yell, but gives him the firm “I told you so!” voice. A minute after that, he hits one of the Wife’s tomato plants.

BOOM. Ball confiscated. Plus the confiscatory speech about listening.

So the boy starts to get tears in his eyes and stomp around the deck. He starts making some annoying, agonized, whining noise in his throat. Then he yells “YOU ALWAYS YELL AT ME! YOU HATE ME!” Big flourish, flop in the chair. Arms crossed of course, for emphasis. Furrowed brow, stare daggers into the middle distance.

And the Oscar for best 5 Seconds of Fury goes too…

I head off to the garage for something. Several minutes pass and then there’s more yelling, and now the boy comes storming into the garage. The Wife had asked him to clean something up on the deck. When he hadn’t complied after several, escalating in intensity, requests, she yelled. See, we’re alway yelling at him.

So I took him aside and tried to explain the obvious to us, but apparently not to him. That we don’t always yell at him, that he needs to learn to listen. That he’s got his causation backwards- we yell because he doesn’t act until we yell. If he listened the first time, there’d be no yelling.

“But you never yell at my sister!….”

Hogwash. We yell at her for the same reasons. Learn to listen, learn to act on the first request and there won’t be any yelling.

“But we don’t hate you, we love you very much.”