Have a New Kid by Friday - Dr Kevin Leman [102]
If you’ve allowed tantrums to control your actions in the past, you’ll need to hold especially firm. Now is the time to stop the power tantrums. (Power is really what they’re about, isn’t it?) Do you really want your child to grow up to be a 13-year-old who’s kicking the magazine rack in Wal-Mart, or an 18-year-old who has poor impulse control and a bad temper and throws tantrums when he doesn’t get his way?
After a temper tantrum is over, the child must apologize before life moves on. And that doesn’t mean you say, “Young man, I want an apology out of you.” It’s like asking for a hug. That hug doesn’t mean very much because you had to ask to get it. Asking takes all the emotional fulfillment out of it. In the same way, making a child say “I’m sorry” doesn’t carry the same weight as a heartfelt response without the prodding.
Remember that in all things, “B doesn’t happen until A is completed.” Until you receive a real apology (and you know the difference!), life doesn’t go on.
Thumb Sucking/Blankies
How many junior highers have you seen sucking their thumbs in public? How many take their blankies on field trips?
So many parents get hyper about a child sucking his thumb after a certain age. They hear all the horror stories about how it’ll ruin the child’s teeth and he’ll have to get braces. They worry about how babyish their child will look. They wonder why their 4-year-old still sucks on a blankie during his nap.
But what harm will it do to suck on a blankie? Will it hurt the blankie to get wet? Will it make the blankie gross? Gross never bothered a kid yet. I know that from personal experience. When I took out my cell phone this morning, it was amess. My granddaughter, Adeline, had her sticky fingers all over it at lunch yesterday. Sticky and gross certainly didn’t bother her.
What I’m trying to say, parent, is that if you pay attention to all these little things that will change anyway as kids grow and mature, you’ll drive yourself completely nuts.
Everyone has a different view of thumb sucking and blankies or certain stuffed animals as psychological crutches. But will any of this mean a hill of beans to you or your child in a couple of years? Most likely not.
Then don’t make a mountain out of a very tiny molehill. If your child is still sucking her thumb in kindergarten, just let a little peer pressure take over. The minute she’s called a baby for doing so, her thumb sucking might just stop by itself (at least at school).
Undereating
There’s a big difference between the way young men eat and the way young women eat. It’s not uncommon for a 14-year-old boy to come home from school, take a serving bowl (not a cereal bowl), fill it with half a box of cereal, cut up 2 bananas on it, and chow down the whole thing. In 2 hours he’s ready to eat a big dinner. It’s that time of life where he’s growing by leaps and bounds and expending a lot of energy, so no wonder he comes home hungry.
Young women are much more mindful of what they put in their mouth. It’s not uncommon today for 8- to 11-year-old girls to tell their parents, “I’m too fat” or “I don’t like my body.” If you are hearing such words from your child, that’s a sign your daughter might be headed in the wrong direction because she’s becoming preoccupied with how she looks.
Take a look at billboards, movies, and magazines, and you’ll see in a second that those of us in America put a premium on how people look at a very early age.
Years ago, Charlie Gibson, Joan Lunden, and I did a Good Morning America show on Barbie dolls. They asked me to comment on them. “Notice how perfect and thin they are,” I said, then proceeded to talk about the pull of anorexia, a disease that strikes young women primarily in their teen years (90 percent of the time), when looks are becoming so important. When young women who are perfectionists see how perfectly thin all the models are on television, in magazines, on billboards, and in the movies, they want to be like them. That drive tobe perfect begins a downward spiral into anorexia (undereating or not eating) and/