You might be like me; you work a full time job, and you volunteer in the community while managing your duties as a mother and a wife. With all the demands outside of the household, comes guilt. (says my mom, and she might be right, shhh-don’t tell her!) There is guilt that you are not providing the right attention to your children in the hours you have because you are overworked, tired, and have many chores within the household to accomplish i.e. wash, dinner, homework… All of this makes for a long week for the whole family and if you have children like me, they know you have certain buttons they can push.
Let me explain with an example you will find comical. Delaney goes to the orthodontist, she comes home with a list of things she can’t eat and then there is pain she feels which also prevents her from eating some foods. So I, as a mother, the one putting her through this pain, trying to make her teeth correct, comfort her. “Oh you can’t eat a nugget whole, let me cut it up for you in bite size pieces, so it is easier to eat”, “Oh sure eat less veggies at dinner because they are hard to chew and yes, have an extra apple sauce.” (I am sure you are already laughing.) And so, I start to see a pattern but say nothing because I want to believe it is not true – my child is not getting the best of me. Until she comes home from school, with her full sandwich intact stating “she can’t eat it”, when I know deep down, if that peanut butter sandwich was a Nutella sandwich, even the crust would have been eaten. Don’t even get me started; all her snacks were missing from her lunchbox.
Standing my ground becomes so clear in that moment along with feeling, as the young kids says,” being played”. I have no choice but to issue a consequence. As you can imagine, it becomes my motherly duty to then share the hours of labor it takes me to actually prepare lunch for the family for the week ahead and now she has a decision to make. Does she forfeit her Nutella Sandwich or the school bought lunch on Friday? Because she is going to eat the sandwich I made.
It is not easy sometimes to see “we are being played” but once we do, we need to take action. If we don’t take action, we need to realize they are going to get older and the issues that we are faced with are going to be more complicated and harder to teach the lesson.
My goal for this week’s post is four-fold:
- You realize you’re not alone, all of our children try to “play us” at one time or another.
- Take a moment to hear when an outside party sees what you don’t. My mom spends a lot of time with my kids and many times she can see what is happening before me. I am very blessed to have a mom who can invest the time and cares enough to share.
- You’re not a bad mom for realizing and taking action, even if you feel overworked or not able to provide the right attention – discipline is the right attention our children need.
- Find the humor in it all; don’t get too emotional, your children are no different than you were at that age. We all do what we can without pushback; it is part of learning your boundaries.
Don’t be shy! If you have a story and want to share with the readers, please feel free to send me a response and I will share within this post.
