How odd, my sister said something similar about my niece recently. Our sleepover went through because my kids are her cousins and my sister figured I would get to experience the Mommy Hell she has to deal with from her daughter. This of course did not happen, I told the three of them to go to bed and they did, with the usual sleepover gigglings and so on but in good time.
I am not a better parent, I don’t think; I am just not her mother. So she has no need or desire to put me through Mommy Hell at bedtime.
My daughter is 9 months old and I finally realized that I had messed up big time with her sleeping. For naps, she won’t sleep in her crib. After I rock her to sleep, I can’t move. She spends her entire nap time (from 30 mins to 2 hours) laying with me on the recliner. Since I stay at home with her, it’s never been a huge deal. But now it’s really starting to affect her night time routine as well. She STILL wakes up every 3-4 hours and will not go back down without a bottle. I’ve conditioned her where she can’t get herself back to sleep and has to have some sort of comfort like me or the bottle. It’s getting old I can tell you that. But since I don’t believe in the ‘cry it out’ way of doing things, it’s going to take a long long time to fix my mistakes.
I worked Security at a cell phone store in an urban area. (Yes, they needed Security. I was ARMED. Fuckers wouldn’t listen to someone NOT wearing a gun.)
I couldn’t believe how many parents had to be threatened with being physically ejected from the store before they reigned in their screaming brats.
One mom after being told she would be kicked out if she didn’t stop allowing her 3 year old to play with the phones: “How am I supposed to buy no damned cell phone if you won’t let my kid play with them to see if he’s going to break it once I get it home?” :eek:
Another mom, on entering the store: “I think every store should be required to have a children’s play area.” :dubious:
THIS WAS A FUCKING CELL PHONE STORE. We weren’t here to entertain your brats or allow them to break expensive equipment just to keep them busy while you conduct your business.
You can’t teach kids how to behave in a nice restaurant by only taking them to places like Chuck E Cheese or McDonald’s. They’ll only learn by going to a nice restaurant. Be reasonable in your expectations, though- don’t sit too long, don’t demand absolute silence and stillness, do give them something to draw or color on or play quietly with. Mr. Neville and I took my parents, my brother-in-law, my sister, and her two kids (2.5 years and 10 months) to a nice restaurant as a Christmas present for the adults, and the kids behaved very well. If the kids are old enough, you might want to discuss what behavior is and isn’t acceptable at the restaurant before you go.
Don’t take them only to stores with toys or children’s play areas, either. They are eventually going to have to learn to shop and how to behave while shopping, and what better way to do that than to let them watch you shop?
Teach them to entertain themselves without a parent or schedule directing them. Too many kids now don’t seem to be able to do that as well as kids could when I was growing up.
Make sure they know, by the time they move out at age 18 or so, how to do basic household chores. Some kids will pick this up from watching you do chores, some (even some smart kids) will need it explained in words. Whatever you do, don’t just do the chores when the kids aren’t around. The kids will not learn how to do them, and it will be scary the first time they have to do (say) laundry on their own with no one to help them or tell them how to do it. Yes, sometimes the chores won’t be done to your standards if you have the kids do them, and yes, it will take more time if you have to explain to the kids what you’re doing as you work. But it’s a learning experience that they need to have.
When my brother’s ex-wife comes to visit and brings her little boy (not my nephew; he’s by her third husband) and we go out to eat, she always orders him chicken nuggets. ALWAYS. My brother even said, “Damn, that kid’s gonna turn into a chicken nugget.” There is no effort to feed him salad, or veggies, or even some other meat other than chicken. What’s going to happen is this kid’s going to grow up to be a picky eater, and his mother is going to be so perplexed as to what caused it.
I second or third or whatever the Don’t Make Threats You’re Not Going To Carry Through warning. My mother’s parenting skills were… limited, and I was a bright kid. I figured out quick that I could do anything I really wanted, so long as I could withstand 15 minutes of her shouting and snarling and meaningless threats. As I got older, I become even wilier, and any attempts on her part to actually enforce rules were too little, too late. If she grounded me, I could break out of the house, sneak away, and be back before she noticed I was gone. I could lie to her face and forge her signature on school forms and she never caught on. If she swung at me, I’d swing back.
Don’t wait until your kid’s nine or ten to set rules and enforce them. It’s way too late by that point. They’ll have you figured out and turn out as mercenary as I am.
My daughter is just shy of being 7 months old and I am loving this thread. Parents are often reluctant to admit mistakes and/or things they would have done differently, so this is totally refreshing.
I haven’t had time to have made many mistakes pertaining to my daughter, although I do regret spending too much time comparing myself to other moms. I have now come to realize that I have to do what is right for me, my daughter and our family as a whole.
Do you know for a fact that there is no effort to have him eat those things? I ask just because we are trying very, very hard to get my youngest to eat a wider variety of foods. It gets ugly at times. I figure that out in public, I should just go with what he likes so that other diners don’t have to experience his reaction to being given food he doesn’t like.
“Do as I say, not as I do” doesn’t work. Never did, never will.
It is. Especially when combined with a general lack of discipline. My aunt and uncle raised their three kids that way. Those kids were not welcome in our house while they were young, because they were complete hellions. I privately referred to them as “Satan, Lucifer, and Beelzebub” (I was a teenager at the time). My sister does not let her 2.5-year-old daughter get up and do other stuff during mealtimes, and she’s much more civilized at 2.5 than those kids were at much older ages.
I could see doing something like that at a Passover seder, where there’s a lot of stuff other than eating going on at the table and it might not be of so much interest to kids. But at a normal, everyday meal- no way.
You are the parent. You can also be a friend, but you are primarily the parent.
I’ll start with, I don’t have kids. I see way to many parents that don’t seem to want to be parents, they want to be their kid’s best friend. A number of the things mentioned above fall under this.
You’re the parent. You set bed times, assign chores, make up the dinner menu, set dating rules, curfews, allowance levels, etiquette rules and a host of other things. While it’s lovely that you want your child to like you, you aren’t doing them any favors by abdicating as parent. Eventually, they have to learn to interact with the rest of the world, and by not setting examples and limits, you are only settnig them up for either a rude awakening, or a string of failures.
Be loving, be encouraging, be open to suggestions, but be a parent.
I know a little girl who is still struggling with her ‘sm’ sounds. They come out as ‘F’. Smoke becomes ‘Folk’, smile is ‘file’ and so on. ‘A’ sounds commonly become 'U’s.
So the word ‘smack’ is endless hilarity for me. Her mother told her that if she didn’t stop whatever she was doing she would smack her butt. Little girl replied, “No fuck my butt!”.
I completely respect your decision not to use a “cry it out” method, but I just want to mention that my son was very similar at 7 or 8 months (he’s 1 1/2 now) - day or night he had to be rocked to sleep, would usually wake instantly if we tried to put him down, had to have a bottle in order to sleep, etc. I know you’ve probably read enough on the cry-it-out approach to make an informed decision, but I want to offer this just in case it’s helpful: My wife and I were exhausted and distraught, and finally opted to let him cry-it-out. That does NOT mean he cries himself to sleep every night forever. It meant that for a week we had the agonizing experience of listening to him cry for a while before he finally went to sleep. But after that week of hell, he’s been a great sleeper ever since (for the most part), and I don’t think he’s any worse for the experience.
Sorry for the hijack - as to the OP, I don’t have anything to add at the moment, but I’m taking copious notes!
I’m not a parent, but I LOVE this thread! I also love watching parenting programs because the little bundles of joy don’t come with a manual and if you can learn from other people’s experience (or mistakes) you should.
One of my favourite programs is the House of Tiny Tearaways and it never ceased to amaze me how many problems could be lumped together into three broad categories (eating, sleeping, general behaviour). Parents would come on the show insisting their children were special and the traditional methods to their issues wouldn’t work, but lo and behold a week later the issue was either resolved or massively improved.
I think the thing I took away from that show the most was definitely the importance of establishing boundaries or acceptable behaviour and consequences for not being within them (which of course leads on to “if you say you’re going to do something then do it!”). Watching people ruled by their own children was really unpleasant, especially when it was so obvious (as an outside observer) that the parents could stop it easily.
Cry it out really is the answer, and at 9 months old that’s the perfect time to get her into it. Trust me, you’ll prefer it. My daughter puts herself to bed now because we let her cry it out at 9 months old.
Actually I’ve been having some good progress so far. I used to run to her the moment she cried but now I wait to see if it was a real cry or just a ‘I’m sleepy and slowly falling asleep’ cry. More often than not, after one short cry she calms down and goes to sleep just fine. My biggest problem is nighttime wakings though. And unfortunately since my mother has to get up for work at 4:30 every morning, I can’t let the baby cry hardly at all. So if she wakes up and a paci and a soft shush don’t work, I scramble to get a bottle lol It’s going to be a slow process, I know but I’m fine with that. I’m coping well with the sleep schedule since I’ve been doing it for 9 months lol But thanks for the input, it’s appreciated
Heh, I can’t tell whether this is a mistake or not, maybe not in terms of her well-being but in terms of my sanity.
At about 7 months I worked hard to toughen her up. Now she is just way too tough for me. I started by dropping pillows on her while she laid supine. Then it became throwing pillows at her a few months later, then throwing her on the bed. Now I can’t use a physical demonstration to show her why I don’t like something. She pulled my hair, so I pulled hers to show why it’s not fun, she thought it was hilarious.
It may not be you. 9 to 10 months is notorious for sleep issues. There are some developmental leaps going on, often there’s also some teething mixed in there. So baby’s brain is working on developmental stuff, her body is working on movement related things, and possibly a little gum and jaw pain to top it off.
That said, 9 months is a good age to start with helping her learn to settle herself.
Amen. But of course the opinions of those of us who are not parents, no matter how gently expressed, are never welcome, no matter how badly they are needed. See, because we don’t have kids, we know NOTHING about parenting, no matter how common sense the particular concept (consistency, not giving the kid everything he wants) may be.
(This has been my personal experience in only one case, but I’ve seen it expressed elsewhere.)
