ILX Parenting 6: "Put Some Goddamn Pants On Before You Go Outside!" is a thing I say now

I'm worried similarly about the 11yo in our household. I've overheard him being really quite aggressive/bossy to his friends online on Skype when they game online. He's a good kid, but god boys are dicks on the internet.

Yeah, I just got done chewing him out about it and I'm pretty depressed.

Was going to post this in the lurking clowns epidemic thread, but it became increasingly ILP-M as I wrote it:

We HAD given our children a warning about clowns, because one of the earlier supposed sightings wasn't far from us. That one turned out to be a hoax, but to be honest, the whole thing is unnerving anyway. "Ok, is this clown going to be another college kid hoax or is somebody going to do something actually malicious eventually?"

So we took my daughter to a colleague's daughter's birthday party. The parents had hired a magician. He shows up in this jester outfit with skulls all over it.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/gigsalad_media/m/magic_michael_forest_hill/54001557cd7e1.jpg

My girl was so terrified she clung to her mom for the entire 3 hour party.

Poor guy, I had never been to one of those parties where the hired entertainment had to work a really tough crowd of disinterested children. He did alright though. He was really good with balloon animals too and when we left, my kid kept crying "balloon animal! balloon animal!" But she wouldn't go back and ask the magician for one because of his spooky clown outfit.

And that's how I spent Sunday evening becoming an expert at balloon animals!

how you gonna make balloon animals with a nail through your hand

Magic?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrFyRT3nPS0

Well she was adorable tonight except for being completely rude at the first five houses and not saying thank you which I was ready to just kill the whole escapade at house #3 but mom was right - in part - that she needed to warm up a little, shyness etc. but I will not suffer rudeness!!! ARRGH.

Anyway I think part of it was feeling silly in costume, which I totally get, and I think the way I turned Halloweeen around for myself was by dressing up as various genuinely terrifying things and actually scaring people. I suggest: What about next year we dress up as something scary? And try and scare people, like Dad used to do?

"Next year I'm going to be a mean cheerleader that only likes girls!"

OK!

Someone gave my daughter a kazoo for halloween and I'm not sure if I like her anymore.

hahaha

lol

how have you all talked to your kids about death and dying?

my four-year-old has been asking a lot of questions. his great aunt gave him a little dreamcatcher in his room with feathers on it and he asked how feathers fall off of birds and i told him that they either fall off naturally the way our hair falls out or else we can pluck them from a dead bird. he asks "how do birds die?" to "where do birds go when they die?" to "what happens when i die?" he's heard language about death and dying before in passing but he's only now started to ask a lot of questions.

i gave him some answers but im not sure there is any satisfactory way of going about this. i talked about how our bodies shut down and we become part of the earth (im agnostic so i didn't talk about heaven and eternal souls and all that, though my wife has mentioned heaven a little bit to him). fundamentally i find it comforting that we do become part of the earth when we die. but i also talked about how we live on in the memories of people who loved us. i have an uncle who died about 10 years ago, an artist who created thousands of prints, and whose work is on the walls of our house and in all of my family members' houses. my son knows who that uncle is even though he died before my son was born so i talked about how my uncle got sick from cancer and died and become part of the earth and now he lives on in our memories and our love for his art. my son creates a lot of art too so i thought he might connect to that. but who the fuck knows really?

now he's asking questions right before bedtime about where he goes when dies, when he goes into the earth what happens to his pajamas, his toys, etc. he definitely seems a little alarmed and confused by it all but still asks questions about it in that everday incessantly curious way he asks questions about basically anything that four-year-olds wonder about too though.

my stock answer to "where do we go when we die?" is "we go back to where we were before we were born". tbf neither of my kids have gotten too death obsessive - it certainly hasn't registered in any serious way with my 4yo, who enjoys "playing dead" and has seen various dead things (animals mostly) but I don't think really grasps the enormity of it. My daughter was about that age when my great-grandmother died (at 101) and so she's been through the thing of a relative dying but she never seemed particularly fixated on it.

I realize the above is not helpful at all, lol...

"where do we go when we die?" is "we go back to where we were before we were born".

i like that answer a lot actually

i talked about how our bodies shut down and we become part of the earth

This is basically how we spoke to our kids about it. Neither of my kids have had anyone close to them die yet, other than small pets. We always stop to examine dead animals when we find them in the road or the woods or wherever.

My nephew, who is in seventh grade like my oldest kid, had a friend die on Sunday. I haven't gotten any reliable word on how it happened. I never met the friend, but it's been heavy to think about. Nephew himself is already being treated for severe depression, so it's gotta be extra hard on him.

i used to have pretty bad death-phobia as a kid, waking up at night in full panic - as a little kid i was constantly running into the living room at night saying "i dont want to die i dont want to die" etc. those panic attacks lasted until a year or two ago when i started doing yoga.

i dunno how to retroactively say what could have been done to thwart it but definitely honest, but caring, conversations can only help imo. my parents never really talked much about it, just platitudes etc

it also dovetails with fears of loss of control, so coming at it from that angle could help?

i've read where it can manifest as ocd in some kids in extreme cases

Mom's been out of the house for a few days, so it was inevitable that my 7-year-old son and I would finally begin discussing the JFK assassination.

HIM: Well it's good that the wives didn't get hurt. Did they get blood on them?

ME: Oh, yeah. And the first lady walked around for the rest of the day with it all over her.

I know it sounds horrible out of context, but it was a real casual conversation. We were sorting and folding his clean laundry, he started asking about snipers....

looool

kinda lol also O_O

My 4.5yo was surprisingly concerned about the death of her great grandmother, whom she met only once at 20 months old and maybe skyped with a few times, although she had seen a lot of photos of her and stuff. She kept saying she missed her and asking when we could see her again. She may partly just have been parroting her mom's sadness. At the same time, I didn't sense a lot of anxiety or fear around it. I think kids at that age just don't conceptualize death.

when my oldest kid was 3 his great great grandmother died so we talked about it then. i didn't have anything really wise to say, just that death means it's over, you just stop. i said that some people believe in heaven, like a place you go after you die, but that i didn't really believe that. he was surprisingly down with that. just sort of accepted it, yup, that's how it goes. next!

for those of you who celebrate christmas (as a religious or seasonal/family holiday, for me it's the latter) do you do anything about santa w/ your kids? i don't want to, i'm fine w/ it being a fictional story that would be fun to imagine w/ my kids the same way we have fun reading fictional books but im not down on telling them that a man physically comes down our chimney to deliver gifts to them and every other kid. my wife feels differently and wants to do it. my older son is extremely literal-minded and analytical and if we told him this actually happens then his questioning about how this is logically possible would be very intense and i don't think i can sustain that much myth-making w/ him.

if it ever comes up, I plan to tell them that Santa sub-contracts out to us

lol i was talking with friends about this last week -- when they learned abt santa and such -- and they said their parents had basically taken the view that they had paid good money for all presents bought and no way were they handing over credit for that to a fat bearded made-up man in a red onesie

I'm pretty anti-Santa and xmas in general, but it's inevitable with a 3 year old that goes to daycare where they are always doing seasonal/holiday stuff, she gets drawn into it. Even though she doesn't understand it, I tell her that it is a myth/fictional/not a real person. But don't tell other kids that because they may not want to hear it.

I don't know if my 6 year old believes or not. I haven't made any special effort to rope her into believing. We pushed it a lot with her big brother when he was younger and he ended up believing until he was 10, very opposed to ideas that there may not be a Santa Claus. Like, he'd get angry at us. That was a weird scene.

I dig Christmas as a purely secular seasonal holiday deal and a have an almost pathological opposition to anything remotely supernatural so I really struggle with how to deal with Santa. The kid is 2 now so definitely aware of Santa as a concept but no real understanding of the mythology or anything.

Not sure how I deal with this in a way that sort of plays along enough for it to be fun but also isn't making him the SANTA ISN'T REAL kid who ruins it for others at school some day.

i just try to stay out of it. if my kids ask me about santa i just go yes well itisamystery.jpg

Re: talking to kids about death--

I'm don't do kiddo grief counseling (just adults), but a client recently recommended this kids' book about death and dying: https://www.amazon.com/Ida-Always-Caron-Levis/dp/1481426400

OTOH one of my hospice social work colleagues has a kid with ASD and she has found that kids on the spectrum benefit from something way more realistic than two polar bear pals, so she's written one herself and has publishing deal! Will post that once it is available.

Anyhow, just talking about death and not avoiding it or minimizing it or using vague stuff like "gone to be with (dead) grandad" seems to be the best strategy, at least that is what I was taught in social worker skool.

quincie my son has ASD so yea please share that when it's published!

https://twitter.com/CharlesFinch/status/823942113838542848

how long does the tantrum phase last and is there anything you can do to power/accelerate through it? am willing to consider any and all suggestions

yr kids are ...2? 3?

They just turned 3.

they mellow out a lot once they get closer to 4

my 4 year old occasionally has tantrums, somewhat related to his autism but we've been able to pin down the triggers and that helps us prevent them most of the time

it doesn't go away until kindergarten or so in my experience. It definitely doesn't just miraculously vanish when they turn 3. A friend of mine remarked once when I was complaining about "the terrible twos", "wait until you get to the fuckin' fours" and now that Judah is four omg is that the truth. It's kind of worse when they're older because they get more physically powerful and it's harder to just scoop them up and deposit them somewhere.

I think being able to talk/communicate their needs is a real big part of it. Once they learn they can express themselves/be understood verbally then they have less of an emotional need to lash out. So getting them to talk about their feelings and understand that they're being heard is a big help.

yea that's all true

tantrums for us are almost a mathematical thing, if the answers to the following questions are "no" then we are probably fucked:

1) did they get enough sleep last night/today?
2) did they eat enough today?
3) have they taken a shit today?
4) did they avoid sugary foods today?

2 was actually pretty easy aside from the newly discovered delight in just destroying everything around them; it's only in the past few weeks or so (and really only with one of them) that screaming fits have been added to the repertoire.

I have noticed that fatigue and constipation play a large part in this; the more amiable child is the one who falls asleep faster and has more regular bowel movements. I'm not sure how to really manage this aside from slipping the other one Immodium roofies.

In my experience, a kid throws a tantrum when he/she runs into certain boundaries, and uses them to stretch those boundaries. If you set them beforehand, and let your kids know what the limits are in a certain situation, you have to make sure to keep the boundaries and not give in. The screaming will stop when they find it doesn't work. Of course, that's the hardest part, especially when there are other people nearby.

Short version: kids are not the center of the universe, you set the rules, they obey. Not a very popular attitude these days, but it works.

xp - Regular sleep is very important. Our kids (age 7, 5 and 3) sleep close to 12 hours every day. They go to bed at 7 PM every night, no exception. They napped from 12 till 2 until they were about four years old. Kids need a lot of sleep.

tired-tantrums are def a thing. Judah can go into a weird violent fugue state - like, just wordless arms flailing and punching anybody in sight - if he's exhausted and not getting his way.

ok so I've got a 2 1/2 year old who does this thing now where you put him in the crib and he wants to hold your hand and sing songs and practice his entire vocabulary for like...half an hour before falling asleep. if I leave him at any point in this process he loses his mind. I can't let him cry himself to sleep but IDK what to do.

Whatever you do to change this behaviour, you should go slowly. You let it get to this point over two and a half years, so you can't expect him to change overnight. Talk with him during dinner about how you will sing three songs tonight and read one story or something. Make sure he understands. Then, when you want to leave and he does start crying, remind him of the new rules and leave. Let him cry. It will be heartbreaking if you're not used to it, but it won't hurt. He will learn.

We used to have the ten minute rule: if our oldest cried for more than ten minutes on end, we went to check on her. She hardly ever cried that long, although it sometimes seemed to last for hours.

ten minutes can be excruciatingly long in child-crying-time, yeah

setting limits def necessary. whether or not they understand limits... well that will be revealed to you I guess lol

The most important thing is to set the new rules sometime before he goes to bed, when he's calm and understands. Remind him a couple of times before you take him to bed. He will try to get back to the old situation, but you have to keep in mind your ideal of reading him a bedtime story and leaving him. Our bedtime rituals (excluding reading time) hardly ever last for more than five minutes.

its strange because he kind of did change overnight. used to be difficult to put him down, then all the sudden he was asking to go to his crib right away. he'd talk and sing to himself for a few minutes and then doze off. a couple weeks ago he asked for my hand and I gave it to him, so he's been doing it ever since

tbh I'm not sure what he gets and what he doesn't get. I think he understands more than he lets on.

like, if I say "I'll read a book to you and then I'm going to leave", I don't think he yet understands that

We used to have the ten minute rule: if our oldest cried for more than ten minutes on end, we went to check on her.

yeah this is the part that confuses me sometimes, b/c I've heard that doing this teaches the child that they get what they want if they cry long enough. but you don't wanna leave 'em in there forever.

you can also tell him that you are leaving but that you will come back and check on him. 2 1/2 is not too young to understand that concept. we've done that with our boys in the past and it helps calm their anxiety about us leaving quite a bit

I think being able to talk/communicate their needs is a real big part of it. Once they learn they can express themselves/be understood verbally then they have less of an emotional need to lash out. So getting them to talk about their feelings and understand that they're being heard is a big help.

yeah, I've found that to be the case too. Like, when my son (29 months) starts flipping out we tell him to use his words and tell us what's wrong. When we want him to do something he's not ready to do, he now sits down and says "I want to be alone" We leave him be for about 20 seconds at which point he usually says "I feel better now" and is ready to move on. I think he learned some self control from that "Calm-Down Time" book. Of course sometimes communication is stuff like Me: "I want you to put your toys away." Him: "No. I don't want to. Daddy can do it."

I tell our more frequent tantrumer that I can't do anything to help him if he screams at me. About 50% of the time he will calm down and tell me what he wants (usually to watch/hear the Big Bang Theory theme song, which is surprisingly easy to memorize via osmosis, I've discovered)