It's never easy knowing how to balance between extremes when it comes to children. Like many mothers around me, I keep worrying if I am over-indulging my toddler under the name of caring, or coming down too hard on him in the guise of discipline. I make my mistakes, and feel lucky that R is still young enough to let me get away with them.
I recently introduced the concept of 'time-out' / 'corner' to R - the place he is sent to calm down or realise something he did was not very pleasant. He quite defeated the purpose in the beginning by running gleefully to the corner, facing the wall and coming right back to repeat the offending act. When such a time out occured in front of some family friends, they wondered why I was 'punishing' him at such a young age. 'He hardly understands what he is doing', they said. My point exactly. How would he know what he did was not praiseworthy if we didn't point it out. Longwinded, logical cause-effect explanations are not going to cut it with him at 22 months. Knowing that a certain act causes his mommy to be upset might do it. Being removed from the place of activity certainly does it. Am I doing the right thing? Judge away.
Now that R goes to a playgroup, I get a better opportunity to observe other mothers, teachers and their toddlers. Say what you will, but I find myself getting surprisingly judgemental about parents' and teachers' attitudes towards children. I would have thought myself to be the 'Do what works best for you' types, but my parent avatar seems to disagree a bit.
What set off this diatribe today was this - R has a new teacher who in all her gusto to 'teach' seems to me to have forgotten that toddlers hardly need someone chiding them for being who they are. What set me off was when she questioned a wailing tot at that difficult time of drop-off, and not too gently, 'Why are you crying, early in the morning?' Surely no toddler cares for being made to feel at fault when they're already dealing with that emotional mountain of mommy leaving them. It instantly took away my security as a mother. Or was I being too protective? Could it be that toddlers respond better to that no-nonsense approach?
Questions like this one and others wizz around my tired brain, and in the end I just go with the the tried and tested 'mother's instinct'. And care little about being judged :)
I recently introduced the concept of 'time-out' / 'corner' to R - the place he is sent to calm down or realise something he did was not very pleasant. He quite defeated the purpose in the beginning by running gleefully to the corner, facing the wall and coming right back to repeat the offending act. When such a time out occured in front of some family friends, they wondered why I was 'punishing' him at such a young age. 'He hardly understands what he is doing', they said. My point exactly. How would he know what he did was not praiseworthy if we didn't point it out. Longwinded, logical cause-effect explanations are not going to cut it with him at 22 months. Knowing that a certain act causes his mommy to be upset might do it. Being removed from the place of activity certainly does it. Am I doing the right thing? Judge away.
Now that R goes to a playgroup, I get a better opportunity to observe other mothers, teachers and their toddlers. Say what you will, but I find myself getting surprisingly judgemental about parents' and teachers' attitudes towards children. I would have thought myself to be the 'Do what works best for you' types, but my parent avatar seems to disagree a bit.
What set off this diatribe today was this - R has a new teacher who in all her gusto to 'teach' seems to me to have forgotten that toddlers hardly need someone chiding them for being who they are. What set me off was when she questioned a wailing tot at that difficult time of drop-off, and not too gently, 'Why are you crying, early in the morning?' Surely no toddler cares for being made to feel at fault when they're already dealing with that emotional mountain of mommy leaving them. It instantly took away my security as a mother. Or was I being too protective? Could it be that toddlers respond better to that no-nonsense approach?
Questions like this one and others wizz around my tired brain, and in the end I just go with the the tried and tested 'mother's instinct'. And care little about being judged :)
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