I have just been to the supermarket and had one of those experiences where I kept having to bite my tongue. For most of my trip through. the aisles I was in step with a couple with two small children, the mother with about a 9 month old in the stroller, the father with the a 2 1/2 to 3 yr old in the trolley. As could be expected around 4.30 on a Saturday afternoon the toddler was restless and bothersome. Both his parents kept up a bit of a litany of “be good” and “if you’re not good you will have to go and sit in the car by yourself” (and I would have been extraordinarily surprised if they had carried through on that one)
Sometimes I have moments when I just want to turn around and say “instead of telling him (or her) to be good, tell him what good looks like” In this case it was probably “Sitting up and helping put things in the trolley” It can also be “standing close to me in the queue and looking with your eyes” Typically as a parent once you start to describe a behaviour you also see ways of encouraging engagement that helps them “be good” for instance “which cheese shall we get?” “Do you think we need more milk”
If I had wanted to add a second line of parenting advice I would have suggested that you never, ever threaten something that you cant follow through on – as in it is illegal to leave a pre-schooler alone in a parked car. On the other hand the value of positive re-enforcement is a wonderful thing – I suspect a conversation about something nice they could do when they got home would have been far more effective.
I just mentally started to count up the years I have spent with my own infants, toddlers and pre-schoolers in supermarkets (about 14 and then a few more with under eight year old which isn’t much better) And I have been plenty guilty of being snappy and tired and lacking in patience. I suspect some of the memories of crying are faded into post traumatic stress syndrome.
It made me think a bit though (having had a bit of a Facebook chat about a related idea recently) how isolated we are in our big shopping spaces where our families and children move in anonymity. How difficult it is to break the barrier of silence to say something. I was contemplating how I could say something that was empathetic and positive that would be received in that spirit. A couple of weeks back it was a mother with an older child who was screaming her head off because she couldn’t have something. Her mother had the gritted jaw, frozen look of enduring and I wanted to say to her “it’s okay, you’re a great mother and most of those sideways glances aren’t from people thinking you should get your child to be quiet, but sympathy because we have all been there”
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