Well
maybe sometimes... and maybe if they are well behaved and quiet....
I
declare that in my house, we are no longer a democracy, but a
dictatorship, and I am the dictator (okay... co-dictator... the other
parent has a say too...sometimes...). This house shall no longer be
ruled by an eight-year-old tyrant.
I
am just so tired of asking for things over, and over, and over, and
over again. And these are not even big, time consuming, absolutely
no fun things like clean your room. All I want is for my daughter to
wash her hands and come to dinner. This should not take twenty
minutes.
Though
I want to encourage my daughter's preparation to become a lawyer (the
child tries to find any technicality to weasel her way or bargain her
way out of doing things), the countless minutes/hours of negotiating
with her to do the littlest thing is grating on my nerves. Why must
everything be done in “five minutes, mom?” which in child time
spans can range from anywhere from an actual five minutes to half an
hour.
All
I want is a couple of days in a roll (I have even given up the hope
of it lasting a full week) of me not leaving my house in the morning
angry, because we wasted half our morning 'negotiating' an extra five
minutes of TV or five minutes of petting the dog, which if you think
about it is not that bad, but my daughter is a dawdler and is easily
distracted, by air molecules... that extra 10 minutes is the
difference between a leisurely, happy stroll to school or a mad dash
up the hill.
I
have tried the natural consequences route. I have explained it to
her, repeatedly, that if she eats a bit faster or skips her
television show, she can play with the puppy longer; or if she does
not want to play with the puppy that is fine too, then she can have
more TV. I have tried the not rushing thing and just show up late to
school. Guess what, she does not care. She whines a bit about being
late, which is annoying, but in the end she runs in, sees her friends
and forgets all about it.
So
I have now put my foot down. She will do what I say when I say it.
However,
my problem is that I do not want her to grow up and just blindly
follow orders (with the exception of mine, of course). I want her to
question authority if she feels that something is wrong. I want her
to be able to stand up and think for herself and to find her voice.
But
my feeling is that she is still in single digits, and for now, mommy
does know better in some things, so she really should listen and do
what mommy tells her to, for now. However I told her that she can
always ask me why I told her to do certain things after she
does them. In fact, I encourage her to always ask me why, but
after. And, I promised her that if she shows that she is listening
better, she can start asking 'why' before she does the thing,
and maybe we can negotiate about starting to negotiate again.
