Do As I Do

After the boy was born, the first piece of advice I remember getting from Dad was “Do as I say, not as I do.”

What he actually meant was he had observed that kids tend to mimic parents actual actions, rather than act like their parents tell them. If the two are one and the same, everything is hunky-dory. It’s when the parent acts a different way than their stated policy that things get dicey.

Being self-observant is difficult because it requires being honest with yourself. Let’s face it, we don’t WANT to think that we’re doing something wrong as a parent and it’s pretty easy to just assume that the child understands that parents get to do certain things and kids do other things, end of story. Applying it to a kid makes it tricky because you have to be able to imagine how the child is processing what they are seeing and hearing. Applying the knowledge is the most difficult step, because it requires the parent to change their own behavior patterns.

For instance, both kids have a temper. That’s a fairly easy one. When they were younger and were caught misbehaving, it was not infrequent that I’d lose my temper in dealing with the situation. I now see them lose their tempers when they get into situations where events don’t play out like they want. Perhaps a toy is not working, or they can’t put something together, or they can’t get their shirt on. Could be anything, really, that stresses them.

When these situations started coming around, I’d be calm initially. But their own frustration would feed my frustration and in a final fit of exasperation I’d solve the problem for them, just to be done with it. I’ve slowly learned and changed my approach to be more hands off and calm nowadays (that’s not to say I don’t slip occasionally). I’ll spend more of my energy getting them to calm down and look at the problem at hand and make them reason it out. It doesn’t always work- sometimes they just get to spun-up and are incapable of thinking. Even then, I’ll tell them to set it down and come back to it when they’ve calmed down or occasionally I’ll fix the problem very slowly for them so they can see how it’s done.

It makes a difference for my own mental health, because flying off the handle every 2 minutes over the latest piece of inanity is draining, to say the least. But I also think it’s starting to pay dividends. The boy in particular, probably due to his “advanced years,” will really sit down and try to honestly work out a problem on his own. Often times, tape is the preferred solution. The lass is still a work in progress- but I think her age inhibits her from tackling more of her challenges.

I’ve also noticed that I can confront their own flashes of anger with calm and reason. This reaction does tend to defang them. I don’t know if they are deliberately trying to get me to fly off the handle or that’s just what they expect. The fact that I don’t makes them pause a moment; often times I can actually see them stop and think about this unexpected turn of events. Like they’re not sure how to proceed. For now these situation still tend to end up with someone in a timeout, and it ain’t me. But I think the approach will bear fruit down the road.

“Do as I say, not as I do” is the phrase that everyone recognizes and as parents we tend to rely on it. From my own experience though, we should probably recognize that the kids aren’t as dumb as we think and that yes, they are watching us closely. “Do as I do” is closer to how things actually work between child and parent, and when we see kids doing something we don’t particularly care for, a good hard look at our own behavior might be what’s called for.