It's a Saturday evening and we're watching the news. Funny thing is that one of the featured stories is really close to what I wanted to write about. That subject is motivation. During the summer my daughter has no homework. Typical of seven year olds she also has an incredibly short attention span. During the school year, when she did have homework, it was a never ending battle. What espicially frustrated mommy was that this kid spent more effort trying to weasel out of homework than she would have just to do her damn homework.
One of the biggest issues we had was with writing. Her teacher was an amazing woman who really got involved with her kids and didn't bury them with homework. You'd think we were asking our girl to rip out her eyeballs or learn nuclear physics over 4 measley sentences! Every night at home was too much fun for humans. I could only imagine how she was behaving in class. By the end of second grade I bought the teacher a gift card to a liquor store.
All of this is just the latest in a never ending battle for raising a competant human. This brings me to one of my biggest parenting gripes. I am ungodly frustrated by the fact that it is seemingly impossible to get this gorgeous, brilliant human being I gave birth to to just do what the hell I ask without some kind of bribery involved. One of my problems is my age. I grew up in the pre-behavior chart era. My "motivation" started with dealing with an angry Polish woman and the reward was not getting the s**t beaten out of me. Flash forward to today and now I have to figure out what to reward my squirrely princess with so she'll do her math! Incidentally, the news report I mentioned profiled a program in California that pays kids money to stay out of trouble. I can only imagine what my folks would have said about that, after they stopped laughing.
Rewarding kids for doing what's expected seems to be everywhere. I recently read a book called Mean Mommies Rule by D. Schipani. I wish I had read it earlier. I think it would have been much more helpful than those what to expect books by a mile. The author details her attempts to raise her kids to be independent functioning humans who are responsible for their own happiness. It talks about hearkening back to an earlier era of when kids had chores because they were family members and people didn't have the luxury of materiality. It appears that we loved our daughter a little "too much" in some respects. I am finding that to "reverse some of my mistakes" is going to be a long slow process but my daughter is not the only stubborn person in the family.
I am holding onto the fact that our girl is still only seven. She is older than I would have liked to be figuring this stuff out although things could be worse. Our little girl is not an out of control beast but there are definitely areas we need to work on. Part of my problem is that being a bit isolated means I don't have a good handle on what is age appropriate for certain behaviors. How old should she be to do the wash, for example.
There were things about my childhood I wish were different, no question. However, there's too much about today's environment that makes me wish I had a time machine. Anti bullying campaigns drive me nuts. I get the impression that parents are expecting the schools to help raise their kids. It's true that it really does take a village but rather than pressuring schools to fix bullying shouldn't people be raising their kids not to be assholes in the first place??!! Again, my dinosaur brain goes back to the days when there was a grapevine and people were honest. If someone else's mom saw you do something stupid, unless you ran faster than a phone call, you were in trouble when you got home. The grownups rarely questioned the accuracy of another parent's report, either.
I admit I don't recommend spanking - I just completely understand it. Everyone reacts to discipline differently. I grew up a nervous kid. $3000 worth of therapy and several hundred milligrams of prozac later and everyone is fine is not how I want to raise my daughter. Doing the hard work of parenting is way more complicated than spanking to get your way and moving on. Making someone understand the why of how things have to be can be draining to say the least. I will probably looking for the happy medium until my kid is thirty.
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