Meal time

Being a good parent isn't an easy task. It is easy to slip into "easy" mode and let kids get away with things because then there is no resistance when the kids are getting their way, but it isn't doing them any favors.

The past few weeks I've really let things slide and I've been a lazy parent letting my kids get away with sloppy behavior and attitudes. The past couple days I've come out of lazy mode and my kids did not like it. But today has been a really good day. My kids know I won't put up with their laziness any more and after rebelling against me for the past couple days they are realizing it is better for them if they just obey and cooperate and then life is happier for us all.

Becca decided to test my resolve today. Lately she has been wasteful with her food at meal times and I have been letting her get away with it. Today I decided that was the end of that and told her she had to stay at the table until she finished eating her breakfast. I don't think she thought I was serious.
At first she poked at her food, then she sat back and tried to ignore her food. One time I caught her trying to spoon some of hers into Lydia's bowl. Once everyone else left the table and she was all alone she became angry and started crying and screaming. She carried on for almost 2 hours.
She must have finally realized I was not going to let her leave the table until she was done. Once she finally started eating it took her ONE minute to eat. All of her antics for one minute of eating. And surprisingly she was happy when she finally finished and I praised her for eating her food and she went on her merry way to go play.

I am so glad I followed through. There were a couple times I wavered and considered telling her she only had to eat a few bites or thought about offering to rewarm her food. I'm glad I didn't interfere and just let her deal with her own problem.

Teaching obedience

Motherhood is a learning adventure.
As a young mother with my first child I read many parenting books, so I could know how to be a good mother. I think all it really did was confuse me and cause me to be too soft or too strict.
Time and children have been a good teacher - and finding others who are good mothers and asking them questions and observing what they do.
I have learned so much along the way and I have so much more to learn.
Today I read two wonderful blog posts written by a mother I admire (pregnant with her 7th child). Although I have never met her, I learn so much from her blog posts.
So her recent topic was obedience and she shared very generously things she has learned along the way.
 (post 1 and post 2).

I am diligently focusing on teaching my children obedience. I homeschool my children and no learning can truly take place if they are not able to obey. There are varied degrees of obedience. My goal is to work towards quick and happy obedience.

In the past when working with and teaching my children if they cried I assumed I was doing something wrong and I needed to change my approach. While that may have been true if I was using a forceful method of some such, reading the above mentioned blog post made me realize that I actually was caving in to my children and letting them be in charge, rather than calmly working through what was a tough moment for my child and helping them gain a skill.

Sunday we had a family meeting and wrote a short list of rules we are working on becoming compliant with. We  posted them in the kitchen so both the children and parents alike could be reminded of our goal this week.
One of those goals is to eat food at the table. Now, this has always been a rule of ours, but when I  am not watching the children will wander off with food and eat in the family room or living room. Last week Lydia had a bowl of cereal (dry, no milk) that she was wandering through the house with and scattered it in about every room of the house.
It was then that I realized that I "allow" many of the messes in my  house since I don't follow through on the "rules" that go unheeded. So mostly the rules are posted to remind me to follow through and help them become habit.

This afternoon, I was reading the second post about obedience and she was saying to follow through with firmness (use the word "no"), yet praise for the littlest compliance. As I was reading Lydia asked for an apple. I told her yes, she could have an apple and asked where we eat food. "table" was her reply. I handed her slice of apple in a bowl and escorted her to the table. She tried to circumvent me and go to the office to watch tv with the other kids, and I gently reminded her where we eat.
She cried and protested, I was firm and kind and gently took her bowl of apple slices and set it on the table. She persisted and I persisted. She laid on the floor to protest and I returned to the computer. After a moment I noticed the quiet and turn to see no Lydia and an empty bowl.
I found her in the office, holding a sock. The sock looked like a guilty accomplice and sure enough she had put her apple slices in the sock to hide the evidence being smuggled out of the legal territory.
I had to stifle a laugh as I carried her and her sock to the table.
I am happy to report that was the end of the battle and she remained at the table and didn't leave until she was done.

Overall I am too permissive as a parent, but reading these articles reinforce my desire to gain the skills of finding the balance of becoming firm and fair, of being fun and easy going and not feeling like it has to be one or the other.  I can see that I have made progress over the years and I am grateful knowing that I have done an ok job so far and mostly my kids obey, when they want to - it's jumping that hurdle and helping them to obey when they don't feel like it. Truly I want to learn to teach them how to be "strictly obedient in all things" like the young stripling warriors in the Book of Mormon. I think that is a worthy goal to strive for, not obedient for the sake of being obedient, but learning to be obedient in the small things helps us learn to be obedient in the more important things - not just to preserve us in this mortal life, but more importantly save our eternal life.

Praising our children

The following is from the blog teaching self government

and I wanted to share it here so I can always look back on it and remember that I am setting this as my goal for this month - to look for the good and to praise my children much more often than I currently do. It is easy to get caught up in trying to correct our children and for me that starts a downward spiral of noticing more of the naughty things that they do rather than the good.

A reader said that praising doesn’t come naturally for her. In fact, praising seems fake and annoying to this mother. She asked:

I don’t want to be a cheerleader, always saying “Good job” no matter what—I want to say things that really matter, that I really believe, that are true. I guess what makes it hard is when I know (or think I know) that I’ve taught them how to do something better than they have done it, or that they should be capable of doing some things without always having to be praised for it. I know you said in your presentation that we could never give too much praise, but how do you stay real? How can I change my mindset from being critical, to seeing the positive, while still helping my children improve and expecting them to behave well and do chores and other things well?

I wasn’t raised by parents who praised me all of the time either. I mostly remember trying do anything I could to keep my parents from knowing I did anything wrong, because I dreaded all the negative comments. Yes, I learned a survival skill; dishonesty. From my experience and observations, if people are not praised enough, they usually start to hide many things about their lives from people who love them to avoid negative attention. This is significant to me.

Years ago when I started doing foster care we were told to praise 6-10 times for every correction to the youth. This was overwhelming to me. Praising didn’t come naturally for me either. I would often remember to praise, but stumble over the words. I would think of praising and let the thought pass, because I didn’t want to appear weird to the foster youth. During this time of no praise, I noticed something. I was making a dark cloud hang over my home. I was all about expectations and not nurturing. I was driving away the Spirit.

Even though I recognized it, I was slow to change. Praise just didn’t roll off my tounge smoothly. I think most of society is like this. Too bad too, because freedom comes from praise. I made myself praise each child 20 times per day. I kept track. After a few weeks I was doing better. After a month I noticed that my whole family was happier, and I was by far the happiest. I was looking for the good in the people I love, how can that not make you happy?

Training yourself to look for the good in others, especially those closest to you, frees you from the bondage of pride and selfishness in your relationships. I have also noticed that it only takes one critical person to make a home full of critical people. Likewise, it only takes one person to start praising to change the whole mood in the home to love and support.

As to the fakeness of some people’s praising. The praise could seem fake to a person not used to praising, or it really could be fake praise. Some people do fake praise. I don’t like fake praise. If you praise, mean it. A normal praise for me is a lot more than a “good job”.

I say things like, “I love the way you walked into the kitchen just now and saw what needed to be done in order to get dinner done on time, and chose to just start doing what needed to be done. You are a great problem solver! I think that I will probably have time to hem that dress you needed to have hemmed because you saved me so much time. You are an incredible help to me. I don’t know what I would do without you. Thanks.”

To avoid being fake, just tell them how you really feel. The problem comes if you have conditioned yourself to not feel like people deserve praise.

Should people ever get to a point where they don’t get praised for every thing? Yes! I am not suggesting that we parents praise things not worth praising, or praise for brushing teeth every day as long as they live in your home. My children know that as they get older they will not get praised for the same things younger children get praised for. Some people have the belief that children should be babied by praise, and never be expected to behave like an adult; who doesnt’ get praised very often. I am not one of those kinds of people. I would never recommend enabling people.

That said, most parents I know expect perfect adult behavior from their children before the child has an understanding of how to control their body or emotions like an adult would. Basically, we are impatient. It takes more talking, teaching, patience, and energy to keep teaching our children what they need to behave like in all the many different situations. My rule of thumb on this is: If they keep making the same bad decisions, then they are not ready to graduate from being praised when they perform the behavior correctly.

To change your mind from seeing only negative to seeing things to praise about you must see your family through different eyes. When you are negative you are looking through your own selfish eyes. I often sit and watch my children interact with each other and try to pick out what their intentions are for all the things they choose to do.

My daughter was given an instruction to clean her room. About 15 minutes later she was found cleaning her brother’s room. Her room had barely been touched. I went to my daughter and told her that she didn’t follow instructions because she was supposed to be working on her own room, so she had earned an extra chore. She immediately asked to disagree appropriately. She said that she heard her little brother crying in the next room because he was overwhelmed by the mess he had to clean up in his room. She told him that she would help him clean his room to ease is anxiety. She was planning on going back to her own room.

Of course I accepted her disagreement and she earned no extra chores.

She showed me that she was really governing herself by deciding what would be the best thing to do at that time. I decided then that I needed to give her more credit. She was doing what I would want her to do. I just didn’t understand the situation enough to know it. Seek to understand them. Give them credit for being the good child that they are.

Praise as often as you can. Praise brings the spirit into your home, it unites your family, gives the children a reason to care about choosing the right, and it frees you from all of those feelings of dissappointment that can ruin a day or a life.

Have a good cry

Today was one of those days. I didn't feel well - I was sick yesterday, threw up and everything and today I was in recovery mode and was very tired. My children were extra rambuncious and wild and fighting and making messes like crazy. Then came the moment when I "snapped". The boys know that they are supposed to keep drinks in the kitchen - but you know kids, they will try to get away with whatever they can. Tom poured some soda in a glass, I saw him with it and reminded him to stay in the kitchen. I went down the hall to my bedroom and a moment later I heard a thud and Tom started to cry. He had gone downstairs with his drink and got tripped up or something and bumped into the wall on the landing. Of course his soda spilled everywhere. He said he had hurt himself, but I was too mad about the soda everywhere to care about him at the moment. I sent him to his room. Then Charlie did something or other, and I yelled at him and to top it all off Becca came by me whining and crying while I was trying to clean up the steps. I sat on the steps and started crying, feeling like such a mean mom - yelling at my kids and being so mad. When ever Becca hears me cry she starts crying. This brought the boys out to see what we were crying about and then Tom started to cry. "Why are you crying mommy?" he kept asking, but I couldn't say anything yet, I was still too emotional. So the three of us were crying and Charlie comes over and gives me a hug. So all the children are gathered around me and most of us are crying - and at that moment I felt love, and the anger and the frustration left and I was thankful to my children for gathering around me in my moment of need. And for about the next five minutes they were as good as gold.