An Epiphany

There are things you learn along the way in parenting… you think “I wish someone had told me that”, but if someone HAD told you, you might not have been able to apply it until you had walked down the road a ways. I’m a big believer in having high expectations. In any situation in which one is in a position of managing a person or group of people, you generally will get what you expect. In conducting a choir, if you don’t expect them to all cut off at the same time, they won’t. If you expect them to, and demand they do, they will. So, of course I applied this to parenting and have been really frustrated. This frustration leads to anger and makes for some long days around here.

I have mentioned that Jack enjoys all his schoolwork except handwriting, and for a while I was pushing him to do at least 2 pages a day in his book, and we were getting bogged down in procrastination, goofing off, frustration, etc. Then I realized, who really cares how much he does each day? If he writes a couple of words, fine, it really doesn’t matter. We’re working steadily and he WILL learn to write quite well in the end. There’s no sense getting all frustrated when he’s not meeting some arbitrary expectation of mine each day. I maintain the long term expectation that he will learn to write successfully and legibly. My short term expectations are relatively low: a little bit each day, encouraging him to do his best.

Epiphany!

The same thing applies to all that stuff I’ve been getting so wound up about.

They fight. Some sets of siblings are worse than others, but it’s just a fact of life. I can’t MAKE Jack and David stop fighting. I can separate them if it gets too bad. I can encourage them, and help them to learn to manage conflict, and eventually, years from now, they’ll stop. My long term expectations are high, but my short term expectations need to be pretty low, for my own sanity. I’m not going to say just the right thing or apply just the right discipline and expect any kind of short term results. In the end it doesn’t matter. They fight. One day they’ll stop. Getting upset because they fight is foolish.

They scream. Jack because he has a very short temper and everything he feels comes straight out his mouth, and David because he’s two. They’ll learn not to scream. David will get older and learn more effective ways to communicate with encouragement. Jack will, Lord willing, learn to manage his anger better. I don’t have to go along for the ride on his little emotional rollercoaster. That just makes it worse (obviously… duh).

Etc…….

I’ve been focusing WAY too much on relentlessly pushing and prodding them into correct behavior, and far too little on just loving on them and enjoying them.

It’s amazing how letting go of those short term expectations has caused my own anger problem to evaporate. I’m not letting go of the consequences for disobedience. I obviously expect them to be respectful and obedient, I’m just not all that surprised when they aren’t.