Parent Thread

Agraza_sl said:

Did you cook the dogs and serve them to her lendarios? It is only just.

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It actually is our family dog. He had issues adjusting, and it did bite her twice, after been beaten into a pulp by my wife, he finally got it ( i think). The bed falls were my fault.

wait.. what?

So I have a bit of a temper, always have. Not a raging temper like anything remotely abusive, but a temper where I just lose patience and get frustrated. As you can probably guess, with a 3.5 year old boy, and a 3 week old daughter, my wife handles the lionshare of the kid work (mostly by her choice, but also because she's more patient than me).

I love my kids, but I do find myself raising my voice to my son a lot, expecting rather quick results when I ask him to do something. For example, he has a great day at daycare, we let him watch rescue bots on TV (his fav show) for an hour in the evening, then tell him to brush his teeth and he starts whining, so I get stern "Go brush your teeth, come on let's go", getting up and leading him to the bathroom. He slowly stares back at the TV, then if I don't keep pushing, he will stand there. That's when I start the very firm, raised voice, "1.... 2..... 3" routine. Rarely do I actually get to 3, after 1 he understands it. Or when I give him clothes to put on and suddenly he "doesn't know how" to put on his underwear and shorts, despite doing it very often. Frustrating. "Come on, you're smarter than that, I know it, I see you put your underwear on every day" ... "I know, but it doesn't work!" ... "Yes it does, it's fine, here let me put it on" ... "No daddy, let me do it!" ... *waits* ... "Wrong way" ... *waits* ... "Oh look a fire truck!" ... "Ok, get up, I'm putting your underwear on".

The thing is, even with my short temper, and raising voice to my son when he doesn't do as I ask - he's turning out to be an absolutely remarkable boy. Maybe I'm biased, but he can go out to eat with me and my wife and sit calmly in his chair 90% of the time. He does well in daycare almost every day, maybe 1 day every 2-3 weeks he gets in trouble. He cleans his "mess" when told, and always wants to help us with anything. He knows his ABCs and we read together most days, and he's learning his english and chinese words. I know he's only 3, but I do kinda want to tone it down a bit and manage my temper better. My question is - any other dads like that, and if so what did you do to manage your temper a bit better, and manage your voice raising a little bit better?

My kid is only 9mo but since he was born I've noted an incredible ability he has for making me lose my mind when he cries and I can't stop it. It's an instinctual rage instigated by some kind of hormone he and my wife give off that trigger something my psyche. I've intentionally broken more shit in my house in the last 9 months than I had in the entire history of our marriage.

Also someone I know once told me the key to maintaining discipline in your kids was abrupt and impredictable escalations of response to acting out. I think that might be atypical but sound advice. Kids are constantly trying to learn the game of your reaction. You see that all the time where kids know just how far they can push their parents. Changing the ruleset on them deters that problem.