strong willed child – The UnderToad

You are always exactly a week away from heaven, or a week away from hell. If you stick to your guns and hold your boundaries, blissful cooperation is right around the corner. But if you give up at day three all of your effort will be declared officially worthless. And the kids win.

Apparently this is a lesson I supposedly received more than one time while working at the wilderness camp. John swears he said it to us as our trainer, and repeated it again throughout his private tutoring sessions with me (aka: dating). Somehow, like most of that year of my life, such important nuggets of wisdom all seem like a bit of a blur.

This is what child-inflicted stress can do to a person, people.

This is why we continue to have more children after the first two nearly killed us.

Having forgotten this nugget, I had been recently toying with the idea of implementing some creativity into my discipline style. Before I go on, Continue reading “How to Make Your Child Obey (Part 2)” →

I know every single woman on Earth has sworn she would not grow up to be like her mother and probably most of us have eaten those words in one form or another. The lucky few of us who are no longer blind to how awesome our mothers actually were all along, don’t try to hide it.

A couple retorts that were pretty regular in my house were things like, “I’m the Mommy, that’s why,” (she even had a cross-stitched shrine to herself with this saying hanging in the laundry room), “Wait until your father gets home,” (what non-single mother on Earth didn’t use this one I ask you), and the ever-classic, “Who said life is supposed to be fair?”

Okay. So maybe I internally rolled my eyes at these when I was young. I’m sure my own children will one day be doing the same thing. Continue reading “How To Make Your Child Obey (Part 1)” →