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I was having lunch in a fast food “restaurant” the other day when a conflict arose between a little girl and her mom. They were on the other side of a partition, so I could only hear the exchange. I have no idea what the original conflict was about, but at this point the mom just wanted the daughter, who had wandered away, to come back to the table so they didn’t have to broadcast their dispute to all the patrons. Must not have occurred to mom that she could stand up and go get her little girl.

“No Mommy, I don’t want to”, was said in an obvious not inside voice.

“Angelica, come here to mommy right now” said an exasperated and embarrassed mother in forced hushed tones.

“No.”

“Angelica, mommy wants you to walk right back over here right now.”

“Angelica…”

Silence.

“Honey, will you please come closer so mommy can talk to you?”

“I don’t wanna.”

Silence.

“Angelica, don’t make me count.”

“No wanna do.”

“Alright then, mommy is just going to have to count. Do you want to be in trouble? Please don’t make mommy count.”

Silence.

“Mommy’s going to count then. See how you like being in trouble.”

“One.”

“See, now mommy is counting. Are you ready to obey mommy?”

Screaming: “I no wanna doooooo.”

“Honey, mommy is counting now. If you don’t come to me you will get in trouble.”

“Two.”

 . . . .

“Three. . . See, now I am at three. Okay, okay, mommy sees you moved closer to her. I will give Angelica until FIVE now before she is in trouble.”

 . . . .

“Four.”

 . . . .

“Five.”

“Did you hear mommy say five?”

 . . . .

“Okay, there now. See that wasn’t so hard to walk back to mommy. That’s a good girl. Should we pick out an ice cream for the good girl before we go home?”

I wasn’t looking at my watch, but I bet this little tug-o-war took at least 3 minutes.

Who won?

I really felt for this frustrated Mom as she was wrestling for power and control with her preschooler. I am sure that she wanted to just have a simple meal that didn’t require doing dishes afterward. And the Mom was obviously trying to be considerate of the other customers who were trying to enjoy their meals, too.

A lot of parents fall into the counting trap. We sure did.

Looking back, I can’t think of one good reason to give a grace count after a parent has instructed a child to obey in some particular way. Perhaps this sounds rigid and dogmatic to you; but does “counting” mimic anything in real life? Do you get a 5-count to get that operations report into your boss? Is there a 3-count for running red lights?

Expecting our children to obey right away is only fair to the child. Said another way, allowing a grace count while a child decides whether or not it is worth it to bend his will to mommy is bad parenting. Here are a few reasons why I make this claim:

• Counting is lying. Every time a parent gives this particular kind of “grace” to a child, it says to the child, “I didn’t really mean what I told you. Take your time and explore ways to get around my request.” The payoff comes much later in life when you will hope to convince this child that alcohol, drugs, skipping school and premarital sex are bad ideas for a 13 year old. He will naturally assume that he gets a 5-count for this stuff, too.
• Counting encourages kids to test the limits of authority. To a small child, the ultimate authority of the universe is Mom and Dad. When parents cause a child to believe that it is okay to delay submission, it is reasonable to assume they will carry those beliefs into their thoughts about God and other authority figures in life. We should be encouraging kids to press the limits in life, but certainly not against parental authority.
• Counting creates a “winner” mentality where it doesn’t belong. Of course we want to foster a positive self image in our little ones. But do I really want to make each act of obedience into a “win or lose” proposition? Think about my Angelica example: she “won” on several levels, including being rewarded with an ice cream. Winning feels good. Guess how high mommy will have to count next time? But let’s say that Angelica’s mommy gave Angelica some discipline for forcing her to count and Angelica apologizes to mommy. Now mommy wins the 5-count war, which is a hollow victory also. It would be best if “winner-loser” didn’t even get injected in discipline issues. Make ‘em winners on the sports field and in school.
• Counting increases frustration for the parent. Now ask yourself the question, “Why did we choose to have kids?” Was your answer, “Because I need bigger ulcers and I love to hear word NO repeated incessantly”? Of course not: we have kids because we want to share in the joy they provide. Sure we know that challenges are naturally a part of child rearing. But why introduce extra frustration on purpose? Poor behavior is reinforced when a child sees that mom or dad won’t mean what they say for a while longer. Wanna hear and see “NO” more often?:Put off consequences. Counting indicates your willingness to accept extended disobedience.
• Counting diminishes the authority of parents. Parenting is a wonderful mixture of fun, hard work, some tears, pride, and many more ingredients. Seems that the parental authority ingredient often gets substituted by some weaker value. Kids need the security and structure of overarching authority if they are to develop into balanced adults. Parents need to carefully tread the beam between iron-fistedness and best-buddyness, but must ensure that the child does not mistake himself as the authority figure in the home.

There is no harder job than being a good parent. Why make it even harder by offering a grace count in response to your child’s willful disobedience? Really, you will notice a lot less tension (in you and your child) once this kind of tug-o-war is eliminated from your child-training and discipline efforts.

Blessings

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There are 3 milestones in the life of every child that really stand out in the minds of the parents:

1. Conception. While the precise moment or position may be hard to determine, that + on the peestick certainly is the hallmark of the right of passage into the child rearing years.
2. Childbirth. Undoubtedly the most profound of experiences for both men and women.
3. Potty Training. You waited whoknowshowlong for a fertilized egg. You waited 40 weeks for the egg to cook. You wait up to 3(or more) years to get the little beggar out of diapers!

OMG! We were in diapers for nearly 12 solid years! I should have bought Huggies stock. The reek of toddler urine became my new cologne. We couldn’t make love if there wasn’t a wadded up diaper stuffed under a pillow or rolled down between the mattress and headboard. Costco’s P&L suffered when we finally got done with the things.

And what is a parent to do when their child gets to “the age” when he or she should begin to show an interest in going on the toilet but won’t? Is there a good way to encourage our child to take this necessary (for the parents’ sanity) step? Sure there is, and I will share a few that worked for us.

• Bribe ‘em. Yep: Skittles candy were a fave. We offered a few for pee and a handful for poop. Mom and Dad would reward each other with skittles in front of the child just to reinforce the idea. Mom would make sure skittles were set out in the open as a reminder to pee in the toilet.
• Dad takes the boys with him to go pee every time. Lead by example. Talk about it. Joke about it. Make pee time fun and bonding. This is a great time to introduce the “pull my finger” tradition if you have not already. Make sure to dry the walls after all sword fights.
• Always talk in a postive tone about using the big-boy/girl potty. Never demean or try to shame anyone into doing something: the opposite result often happens.
• Hang out with similar age kids who are well potty trained. Don’t make a big deal that your kid’s friend can and he can’t- just let him watch the other boy do his duty. Your child will see this and often “own” his potty training better if you try to coerce him into it. Don’t allow yourself to compare your child to another; he is doing that already in his own mind.

Now, we had one child that potty trained really well during the day, but just could not hold it during the night. We dealt with plastic sheets and beach towels until he was about to enter kindergarten, but it became apparent that he was getting embarrassed about his “problem”. We noticed that he would not want to do sleepovers with friends or anything that would reveal his secret.

Bedwetting seems to be more prevalent in boys than girls, but not unheard of even in teenage girls. Some kids just sleep soundly enough to not notice their body’s signals to hold their pee.

I am bringing this up because lots of parents let the bedwetting thing go longer than need be, thinking that their child will just grow out of it. And many do. But a small percentage of all kids just need a little extra help. Basically, your options are drugs or devices.

We decided to take a pass on the drug route initially. Our pediatrician mentioned a device called a Potty Pager, which we tried and had great success with. Now this is in no way a paid advertisement, but I just wanted to pass along the info about a product called The Night Hawk. The price today is about the same as we paid 12 years ago: about 80 bucks.

The device is about the size and shape of the old Motorola pagers that were worn on the belt. It fits into their underpants and vibrates when any moisture becomes present. Lest ye think the vibrations of the Night Hawk have any resemblance to any of Mommy’s big girl toys- I sincerely doubt it. Sleeping in the next room, I could feel the ground rumble when the thing went off. Seriously, you can’t operate the device within 1000 yards of a cemetary. When it goes off, you might think you are in the grandstands of a NHRA event. And you will go through a lot of batteries.

Like I said, no one is paying me to tell you about the NIght Hawk. It just worked really well for us.

Comment back if you have some other suggestion about how to encourage kids to potty train. I will update my list with your suggestions.

Blessings

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This past Friday, the wife and I attended the funeral for her good friend Ro. Something happened with her girls before the service started that really got me to thinking.

Ro’s youngest daughter, age 6, was playing with her little cousin at the front of the church where the flowers and the urn were placed. Actually, her urn was a pretty ochre colored hinged box that would naturally pique the curiosity of any first grader. You guessed it- she opened the box. Fortunately her 14 year old sister saw what was going on and stopped a potential disaster before it unfolded. But little Jane wondered out loud what was in the pretty box. The only thing her sister could think to say was “Candy. But don’t ever get into that again.”

That was on Friday afternoon. Not much more was said about the incident and the rest of the service was really nice. Ro was a wonderful mom and friend, and there was no shortage of people who wanted to tell stories about knowing Ro.

Saturday morning, we took Ro’s girls to the lake for a day of decompression and  tubing behind the boat. We hoped that getting them away from their usual surroundings would be cathartic for them. We also hoped to create an atmosphere for them to talk about anything they might be feeling about the death of their mother.

At one point in the day, the beautiful and wise Postmistress got alone with the 12 and 14 year old girls, and they got on the subject of Mom and heaven when she mentioned the incident with their mom’s ashes. These girls were starved for information. They barely understood anything about cremation. Nobody had given them any context to associate the ashes in the box with the mother they loved. The sum total of their dad’s counsel was “We’ll see mom on the other side.”

And this is from a man who claims to be a christian.

These girls had no idea about heaven or anything about what happens to people when they die. For over an hour, they peppered my wife with all sorts of questions that should have been answered months ago. They wondered if she is playing a harp on a cloud above streets paved with gold. Could Mom see them right now? Is she bored up there? Does she still feel pain? Is she sad?

It would take me ten thousand words or more to give you the answers she gave to those girls about an issue that has become very relevant to them now.

Point is- there are answers to “heaven” questions.

And I wonder how many of us adults would be comfortable explaining to a teenager what happens to a person after they die. I mean really dealing with the hard questions from a perspective of knowledge rather than hopefulness. I wager very few of us.

It would be hard for most of us because I believe most of us have not thought fully through the process of death and dying. It seems so strange to me that we will invest so much time and energy into understanding the whole birth process, but choose to be fairly ignorant of the process of dying and death.  Obviously funerals are not nearly so fun as births, but still, don’t we owe it to ourselves and our families to have honest, hopeful, cogent answers?

Perhaps some of our reticence comes about because an effort to comprehend death brings us around to deciding what it is we believe about God. Not preaching here- just saying. If I am fuzzy about the God business, then I am for sure going to be fuzzy about the death thing, too. Can’t see how it could be any other way.

Would you think a manly man would willingly leave his kids with unanswered questions about death and dying? Is it truly fair to allow your kids to wonder, just because you are uncomfortable dealing with death? Can you see that it might be a part of our job description to know the answers to such questions? Don’t you think that a manly man would want to give his family the tools to deal with this subject?

So how prepared is your family?

Blessings

Apologies for the thin posting . . .

The wife and I are attending the funeral for one of her close friends today at noon. The past week has been crazy and sad. We are not so much sad for Ro: she is walking with her savior now. Death was a blessed relief for her. Cancer beat her, and it beat her really bad. She went through all of the treatment options, including surgery and experimental chemo. In the last month, she lost something like a pound a day of weight.

Ro left this life carrying regrets. I think that is why we still cry when we think of her. She was always sunny of disposition and wanting to crack a joke or play a prank even if the pain of her tumors forced her to medicate. Ro had a big, sunny Irish smile. But Ro’s sunny-side point of view could not overcome the darker, isolationary tendencies of her husband. Sunny girl versus thundercloud man.

Our friend regretted her choice of a mate. And that choice begat other people who will carry on the battle between sunny little girl smiles and a dark disposition dad. Enough said about that for now.

I guess I just wanted to say something about choices and regrets today.

By and large, if we have or carry around any regrets it is due to choices we have made of our own free will. Sometimes regrets spring surprisingly at us like a snake out of tall grass- but even then we are the one who chose to walk unprotected in dangerous territory. Looking back, after being bitten, it is so easy to say “I should have stayed on the path or brought the dogs that day or worn my tall snake proof boots. Then I wouldn’t be in the painful situation I am in today.” And you were just taking the shortcut to save a little time at the other end.

Hindsight.

Now foresight is another matter altogether.  In Ro’s case she probably knew better than to choose who she did, but she wanted to be loved by a man and she wanted to be married. She wanted children. Well, she got the kids at least. Ro was married in a ceremony, but never married in life: no “one flesh”, no emotional bonding, no affection. Love was only a word with no feeling or enthusiasm to it. No hugs. No “me and you against the world”.

Ro didn’t vet her choice well. She rushed into something that felt like it could maybe turn into something good. She couldn’t wait a while to get confirmation that this man would be the best one to meet her needs. She could and should have.

And this is so true for all of us- not necessarily in the arena of choices of a mate. I doubt very few have chosen as poorly as our friend did. But we all make choices every day that pay long term dividends, often in ways that we never took time to consider.

Time to consider.

“This deal won’t be here tomorrow. You had better snap it up today before someone else does. Price goes up after tonight.” No doubt you have heard phrases like these. And how often has that “deal” gone away like the nice salesman said it would? Rarely.  Often that 10 percent off turns into 20 percent off if you are willing to wait it out. We proved this out last summer when my son wanted to buy a truck off the dealer lot. He made a lowball offer that was rejected. He wanted that truck and was willing to raise his offer . Dad recommended he wait it out. He did wait, and that same pickup was still there a month later. ( He agonized daily over this ’cause he really wanted that truck). He ended up getting what he wanted and paying even less than he had originally offered. The payments are very much in his budget.

Most of life is like this, too. We allow ourselves to feel pressure to make snap decisions about stuff that has long term consequences. I said we allow ourselves to feel the pressure. We don’t allow ourselves time to consider.

Regrets are conceived when fools rush in.

So I throw this out there . . . Are you carrying around any regrets? Watching Ro die, we saw that the pain of her regrets was so much more profound that any pain the tumors and cancer caused. Morphine could dull the strangling pressure of tumors pressing on her heart and lungs. Nothing could take away the hurt she lived as a consequence of poor choices.

Do you need to make right a regret? Perhaps there is a life choice that was made in haste that I could go back and make right. A busted friendship? Critical words to a loved one? Too few hugs given? Ro waited too long.

I can get so caught up in the moment- earning and saving, climbing the ladder, acting selfishly, whatever- that I don’t consider what regrets I am giving birth to. 

I am taking stock of things now. What regrets might I be innocently feeding today, only to reap a surprise regret later? Do I have right time priorities . . . meaning will my kids,when grown, feel that I made them a time priority? When the kids are gone have I nurtured a marriage that will survive the empty nest? Have I loved lavishly?

Here is to letting go of regrets.

Blessings

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