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

I remember that when I was in 3rd grade and a couple of older kids were bullying me, it made me feel good to see my dad come into the school to deal with it. When I was older I felt less like I wanted my parents stepping in, and I didn't tell them about some occasionally pretty bad stuff as a result (e.g. a kid following me after school, shoving me, and saying he was going to bring a knife to school and stab me).

do we have a books about childhood / children thread?

Yes

Wait, no. I misread that as children's books.

Timesaving tip: they are all terrible

anyway i thought this - http://carcinisation.com/2014/10/04/the-last-of-the-monsters-with-iron-teeth/
- was really interesting and mentions a lot of books i'd like to check out particularly this one:
http://www.nybooks.com/media/doc/2010/02/16/lore-language-introduction.pdf

also i'd be interested in discussing the new orenstein - "girls and sex" - book (and maybe nancy jo sales "american girls: social media and the secret lives of teenagers") - if ppl are interested tho i understand why hurting things all childhood books are terrible and i'm sure these aren't exceptions (tho i do enjoy reading orenstein). otherwise i'd love to chat about truce terms which may put us on more anthropological (safer?) grounds

thinks* not things

We ended up calling the cops. I hate like hell to call the cops on people, but my child's face was pretty swollen up and he had cuts inside of his mouth. An officer came out and we chatted with him about the situation for about an hour. When the officer asked us if we wanted him to just go over and talk to the kid's parents or whether we wanted to press charges, we were originally on the side of just a quick chat with the boy's parents to explain to them the seriousness of the situation. After discussing it with his sergeant though, the officer strongly recommended that we have a juvenile citation issued for the kid, so that we'd have a paper trail in case there was any further aggression. This means he has to have a hearing with the department of juvenile services.

I called his principal this morning and reported the other bullying that had been going on. She explained that the school was aware of behavioral problems with the other kid and had been working with the parents on it and they had been very cooperative. The school didn't have any authority over kids walking home from school - only at bus stops, on the school bus, and on school grounds. She seemed to think that perhaps involving juvenile services might be a step that could potentially benefit him.

It's been really stressful. This was my kid's first day back at school after being basically bedridden for two weeks with the flu.

this situation sounds tough - my heart goes out to you. i'd personally be reticent to bring the police in (though obv in this case i defer to your judgement) only bc i know that when you get juvenile citations, legal authorities, etc involved it can make these kinds of situations much worse (not necessarily for you + yours but in terms of doing longterm damage to the child + family bc of overzealous police and/or child protective type services). "my child's face was pretty swollen up and he had cuts inside of his mouth," sounds horrible - i hope yr kid is feeling better :/

I wasn't going to suggest it, but TBH, that's probably what I would have done too.

Not an easy decision, but sounds like you did the best thing you could. One problem with going to the parents in that situation is that if the kid's behavior is already at that level of violence there may already be something missing in the parenting. You made the best of imperfect choices.

Yeah, like I said, I hate like hell to involve the police in things. It was a difficult call to make. This kid has a long history of physical violence in the neighborhood. When it extended to my family and I saw my kid sitting there roughed up, I wanted to at least get a cop's input about what they thought we should do. And I didn't want to wait to see what the principal would suggest the next morning because I wanted the cop to be able to document my kid's physical injuries if necessary (the swelling had gone down by this morning; hopefully his mouth will heal quickly).

whoah had no idea the situation was that extreme, I retract my earlier comments

because I wanted the cop to be able to document my kid's physical injuries if necessary

seems like a good thing to do, i didn't know it was that bad. i'm sorry for your poor kid!

I mean, he's a little upset about it, but mostly he just wants to get it behind him and not have to even deal with the other kid. I don't think he's as scared of the bully as his mother and I are. He wants the freedom to walk home from school unbothered - he likes the exercise and he's an outdoor kid, but that puts him on the same route as this child we're trying to keep him away from. He was pretty pissed off because oranges are his favorite food at the moment and due to the cuts in his mouth, he couldn't eat them last night.

whoah had no idea the situation was that extreme, I retract my earlier comments

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, April 5, 2016 2:12 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I got into afterschool fights when I was his age and my parents never noticed my injuries. This kid must have a hell of a right hook or something. No need to retract your comments though. It's just a weird and sucky situation for us to be in and we're muddling through it the best we can.

I too got into all kinds of fights as a kid (although this tapered off through high school, as getting in fights then had way more serious consequences both physical and otherwise), and yeah nothing ever really left a lasting mark. worst case scenario was usually a bloody nose.

yeah was gonna say pretty rare to see legit injuries from kid fights

Bloody nose is pretty serious, imo!

was going to post in the 77 feeling like a lump thread but i don't want to bog down the childless w/ complaints about parenting

i feel like a goddamn lump

i just had two of the worst sleeping nights in months, i probably slept like two hours last night. this is after a few months of waking up every 1-2 hours every single night to get our 1 year old back to sleep

it is just one of those days of such extreme exhaustion that i feel ... like... broken

i am so incoherent at work, i wonder what my colleagues think sometimes, especially those who don't have kids which is quite a lot of them, i just feel brain-dead and completely inarticulate

Having gone through all that and having seen other new parents go through it since then, I'll say that it feels and looks a lot worse from your POV than it probably does from your co-workers.

Doesn't change the fact you feel like shit, but it probably feels worse than it looks.

That's rough man. How do you split up the wakings with the lady? Functioning at work is important, but I think we've all been there.

yea the division of labor w/ my wife is a major issue, we haven't quite found a good rhythm with that

you guys both working similar schedules?

we never solved the division of labor at night problem since my wife was devoted to the tit & I don't have them. or I guess we did solve them: she dealt with the wake-ups. she stayed at home most of those years & I had jobs so our relationship could weather it...but it sucked. when #2 was born I was still finishing my dissertation too so I only slept every other day. I'm happy to have had kids so young (first was born when I was ~25); it must be even harder when you're older.

yea my wife did all the wake-ups for nursing previously, but we've been gradually trying to wean him at night, cutting out feedings one at a time for a few weeks. since last week, we dropped all night feedings so i'm doing most of the wake-ups. it is doable, i guess, on weekends when i can sleep in, but still sleeping in until 9:30 or 10am or so doesn't really compensate for being up all night. weekdays we've been trying to split up the shifts a little but its still been terrible.

as I've posted before my wife nursed our kids for a long time, like 4-5 years, and whatever I might think about that on my own, the fact that it meant she'd still handle night wakings with tit didn't dissuade me.

I'm working and H is home and still nursing so she handles most wakings, but I'm usually up much later and help as long as I'm up. Not to try to scare you Marcos but my job can be high pressure and my performance actually did suffer when I was getting less sleep. A bad night once in a while is manageable on adrenaline but persistent lack of sleep is a problem.

yea it has been a major problem, my boss still thinks i'm doing great work bc i can kind of manage pulling things together for our weekly meeting but i basically show up every day and struggle to do things. procrastination has always been a struggle for me as i've posted elsewhere but when i'm consistently sleep-deprived my ability to concentrate and commit to things just completely tanks

I feel really bad as a procrastinator now because every free moment where I'm not constantly watching the kid to keep him from destroying himself, the dog, or any of our property feels like a rare and valuable gift. Combine that with varying degrees of depression and it's really really fucking hard to will myself into doing anything other than just starting blankly and enjoying solitude when I really should be grading and prepping and answering endless email.

Speaking of weaning, when and how does that happen? At 17 months we're down to a bottle before bed and one before his nap which seems to work fine and since he's always been formula fed it's super easy with no overhead of feeding or pumping on my wife's part. But it feels sort of unnecessary now and we're thinking about trying to cut that back.

Sleep and exercise are the best procrastination fighters for me beyond some strong internal motivation, and that isn't always available.

Yeah those are key things for me too; since the kid I've become much more aware of how regular exercise keeps me sane and had to get over the self-indulgent feeling of going off to work out for two hours because it makes the rest of the hours of the day a lot more productive.

Yeah, my wife and I actually have talked about it a lot and have agreed to fully support each other's regular workouts -- for me this means I go at work lunchtime when I can, but go after work if unable to do lunch and this is understood. For her this means she gets to do her classes on weekends, and occasionally it means she goes early in the morning and I handle all the morning kid stuff. I think it's good to think of it as a non-optional activity, a part of your health regimen like eating properly, brushing your teeth, etc.

It makes us better parents as well.

What are your iPad/screen time rules for your kids? We've been having issues getting Evie off the iPad without a temper tantrum lately, but I'm hesitant to take it away completely because it's how she listens to music and I want her to be able to listen to music. So I'm trying to draft some official rules bc we've been pretty loose about it so far.

Generally on weekdays she uses the iPad for Spotify and Neko Atsume, occasionally for educational apps, but no Netflix. But even with that, she's constantly nagging to "check on her cats" or promising that if we let her listen to music, she'll stop when we say stop, but then she never does.

My little one is 16 months and is obsessed with Youtube. He doesn't know he can pretty much watch anything on there so he's always wanting to watch the videos he's seen before - ones about buses, nursery rhymes, the theme tune to Timmy Time, and, oddly enough, the first bit of this which cracks him up when they start nodding - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FavUpD_IjVY&nohtml5=False

I'm fairly sure his mind will be warped

Anyway I try and limit it but he REALLY hates me stopping him watching it, also he's cottoning on that my phone also has videos. so yeah, advice?!

Since we have two that we have to navigate, our answer has been to not let either of them play with our phones/iPads unless it's under direct supervision while we are doing something that's easier to accomplish while they are distracted, like combing hair or cutting fingernails/toenails. We do play a lot of children's television as background noise but also give them noisy electronic interactive toys as well as stuffed animals and balls so they don't focus all of their attention on just the TV. (That was not planned btw; we just started doing it because neither of us likes having the TV off when we are at home.)

our 3 year old is not really interested in tv, phones, or computers, our 1 year old likes to chew on my phone

I personally don't want them to get into the habit of listening to music on headphones around me because a) I want to be able to passively monitor/check what they're listening to as they grow older and it's much easier if they're used to listening to music over speakers rather than headphones/earbuds; and b) I am super super curious about how their musical tastes will develop and want easy access to the things they start choosing for themselves.

Evie doesn't use headphones. I wish she did because her taste in music is terrible. But yeah, since she's on Spotify, we have to be able to monitor her use.

I'm trying typing up specific rules for the iPad so that she knows exactly what the parameters and consequences are. We'll see how that goes.

The boys can listen to Spotify on their phones, but other than that, they get to play videogames for 40 minutes, 2-3 times per week.

They would play 24/7 if we let them. We gave them free rein on our plane ride to Thailand, and they played Geometry Dash for like 10 hours straight.

My partner lets both his kids play games and watch TV as much as they like, and at one point it culminated in the 10 year old staying up ALL NIGHT skyping his mate in the UK in bed on the ipad, so that had to get banned.

But the wailing and hysterics when you tell them they cant be on the PC anymore is, frankly, startling to me.

It doesnt help that said partner is on the PC/consoles as much as his kids are.

sunday night is "games night", so they get to use phones/playstation then. sometimes they trade it in for "movie night". it is the greatest rule we ever made, stole it direct from Steady Mike. they NEVER pester us for phones. we do occasionally use them as stay-awake tool in a crisis.

they watch TV almost every day, probably about 45 minutes to an hour, either cbeebies, cbbc, netflix or illegally downloaded french stuff. there are a lot of arguments about it.

For those who let your children stream music, what would you not want them to listen to? Not criticizing, just curious as to what's in and what's out at what age. I haven't though about it much. Although I do play Nelly frequently for Ivy.

I avoid songs that have obvious cursing in them as I don't want to get any startled reports from day care. (There is a Kendrick exception but it usually only lasts 2-3 songs before I get uncomfortable.)

We haven't really talked about it and it's not really an issue since she's mostly still interested in "kid music"; I'm more worried she'll accidentally click on something bc she tries to search for stuff herself. She was into that song "Stiches" for a while and when you search that the incredibly profane rapper Stitches comes up too. But yeah trying to avoid swearing/sexual innuendo/racial epithets, you know, the classics.