I’ve realized that, when parenting a toddler, you must be very self-aware. That’s because anything and everything you do can be considered a precedent (in the legal sense). Every action, reaction, word, or activity could be something the child decides should be repeated forever. All day long, I stop and ask myself, “is this something I want to do (or want Ruby to do) over and over?”<\/p>\n
It’s not just simple things like avoiding bad words (a topic for another post) or not giving her cookies. The most important area, and one of the hardest, is discipline. I need to keep myself ruthlessly consistent or Ruby will stop trusting that I mean what I say. If I decide to tell her not to do something, I have to make sure it’s in the form of a simple rule that I am willing to enforce every time. Sometimes it’s hard to distill good behavior down into simple rules (because human behavior is subtle and situational), but that’s the only way a toddler will understand it.<\/p>\n
I also need to make sure my reactions to bad behavior are consistent. Anger (or frustration, or exasperation) has no place here; I have to remind myself that she usually does “bad” things because she doesn’t know any better yet, and that I’m helping her to learn. So, I select an appropriate punishment (usually a time-out, or taking away the object involved) and tell her clearly and firmly that if she does [whatever it is] again, I will do [chosen punishment]. And then I do punish her, without exception, if she repeats the behavior. I feel like if I threaten and don’t follow through even once or twice, the game is lost.<\/p>\n
With all this talk of punishment, I should say that we’ve been exceptionally lucky and Ruby is a very well-behaved child. I don’t punish her very often (maybe once every 1-2 days), and she accepts the punishment without too much fuss. I’m sure the greater part of that is the personality she was born with, although at this point in her life I like to think Steve and I have had time to develop her better qualities.<\/p>\n
But I can never let down my guard! I wonder how long this will last? Will I be scrutinizing myself for consistency until Ruby goes to college?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve realized that, when parenting a toddler, you must be very self-aware. That’s because anything and everything you do can be considered a precedent (in the legal sense). Every action, reaction, word, or activity could be something the child decides should be repeated forever. All day long, I stop and ask myself, “is this something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parenting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}