Mike and Robbie are good kids. They’re sweet, caring and funny. They’re also 4 and almost 5 and I think I’m going to have to sell them on eBay™.
I tell them no, and they laugh. I get mad, they laugh. I attach real consequences to their misbehavior, and they laugh. The fuckers.
The real problem is that they’re a team.
As in “tag-team.” I love that they have each other’s support, and I truly hope that follows them through their life. In fact, I had previously set fostering this close bond as a personal goal of mine. But now I’m not so sure that was a good idea.
I’m going to need some serious help once Chip gets assimilated into the BoyBorg. It is going to get ugly.
We don’t spank, which is too bad. That would be such an easy answer! Mr. Plain could go either way on the issue, but I was spanked as a child. It made me despise the spanker, not learn a lesson. Well, not the lesson that was intended. So we don’t spank.
So what do we do?
I guess we don’t spoil them enough, because I can’t think of a big enough ‘neat thing’ to take away as a punishment. They only get dessert on special occasions, so I can’t take that away. They can play for hours with a piece of string they find under the couch, so I can’t give timeouts to special toys. We don’t do any particularly special outings that I could cancel.
What if punishment isn’t the answer?
Maybe I’m going about this all wrong. Maybe I just need to sit down with them, mom-to-boy and have a “real” conversation. Explain to them what the problem is and then they’ll grasp the logic of it. And…
No, that’s obviously not going to work. So I don’t know. I’m kind of out of ideas. Oh wait, what worked last night was bedtime 30 minutes early. Because the little delinquents don’t know how to tell time.
Yet.
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