The boy made a big show of of stomping off and abandoning his breakfast.
Why did he do that?
It’s really pretty much irrelevant since it could have been anything. The Wife might have asked him if his homework was complete. I might have asked him to feed the animals. The lass exists. He might have dropped a fork. The dog might have farted in his general direction. At this point, it really doesn’t matter because the list of things that could set him off is so long and undistinguished.
Since you probably have to know now, it was my “fault.” He had started trying to tell his sister how to do something and was acting like, well, he was her parent. If there’s one thing the Wife and I have consistently stepped on since he was old enough to develop the delusion of being in charge, it’s that he has no place bossing his sister around. At this point, I can’t even count the number of times I’ve told him not to do it. Yet he persists. This time, convinced of his righteousness after I stepped on him, he stomped off to demonstrate that he was really good at putting his foot down. Literally. Over and over. Even going up stairs.
I finished my egg and sausage breakfast and then went after him. Not like I was shot out of a canon and hell-bent-for-leather, mind you. I wasn’t overly upset because, as I’ve alluded to already, I’ve done this before. It’s hard to get too worked up over the same-old-same-old.
He was waiting at the top of the steps with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face. I stopped two steps down from him, where I was still taller than him, and stared him down for a moment. Then I started speaking. No yelling, just a stern talking to and reminder of his place.
Afterwards, I realized that I had been monologuing.
The term was originally conceived for what the bad guys do when they think they’ve got the good guy pinned down and finally defeated. The bad guy reveals all his evil intentions and brags of his superiority and what not, completely unaware that the good guy is taking advantage of the situation so the bad guy can finally be defeated. Watch The Incredibles for some good examples.
Parental situations aren’t quite so dramatic. But they can come close, sometimes.
The basic circumstances are the kids are old enough to have a basic grasp of reasoning and rationale. They’ve typically crossed some parental line that needs to be enforced, but doesn’t necessarily require punishment. Enter, the monologue where the parent takes the child aside and attempts to discourage behavior by explaining why it was unacceptable.
It happens with older kids for a couple of reasons. First, they already know the big things that will definitely get them into real hot water so they avoid those things like the plague. But, there are all sorts of gray areas that arise where they decided to test the waters. I’ve found that many times a situation that ends up with monologuing had a prior history. That is, they’d tested the water previously and there was no repercussions, so they test it a bit more, and a bit more, until finally an undesirable response is generated.
The other reason these areas come up with older kids is because they have developed the smarts to always have some kind of plausible-deniability or rationale to keep them from getting in real trouble. You know, like “My sister started it” or “She was doing this and I was just trying to keep her from doing that” or “He never gets in trouble and you always blame me.”
Now that I’ve realized how often I do it, I’ll have to start keeping some kind of informal tally to track the effectiveness of monologuing. I suspect it will be somewhere in the vicinity of “not very.” But we can always hope.