My husband and I have been the most compatible partners since we met each other. We idolised each other and never had any major differences of opinion or execution … till we became parents. With this new role play, we discovered two new human beings in each other, struggling with the challenge of raising a kid, especially our kid, who is too strong as a personality, knows his mind too well, and will never surrender to high-handedness.
My husband’s disciplined life of eating, sleeping, exercising, and planning everything on time was all of a sudden challenged. Our son started leading our routine in the house as he grew up. Like all toddlers, he had his moments of dreaming and laziness. He wouldn’t come running to us like a robot at the very first call of my husband. He wouldn’t finish his food at one-go contrary to my husband’s expectations. He wouldn’t fall asleep the moment he was on bed or behave like a prim and proper gentleman in gatherings. He wouldn’t eat the food without spilling it once in a while and wouldn’t move away from the TV screen while it was on. So, my poor hubby started with his efforts to mould the little chap in to a highly disciplined kid, who is time-bound and follows his parents’s command as is prevalent in military services. Things were definitely not as easy as the determination was. Children are human beings, who grow up with their own personalities. The more my husband tried to speed him up and put him in to a strict time-table, the more my son retaliated. There was a clear mismatch of logic and preferences.
The father and son bonded well otherwise, but in case of any breach of the time-table in front of his eyes, my husband reacted, sometimes in the form of shouting at a high pitch or threatening him with time-outs. This would scare the little one. I would intervene, but to no help. In fact, I was always stuck in between, acting as the mediator, caught up in the dilemma of whether to oppose my husband because that would send a wrong signal to my son versus to support my husband because I was not convinced with his high expectations from a toddler. A middle ground had to be reached and I had to do something quickly before the entire situation went out of control.
My son at that time was developing a keen interest in listening to stories, all kinds of stories - right from fairy tales to folk tales to stories on dinosaurs, transformers, superheroes, and so on. I often observed him enacting various characters from the stories, I had read out to him, with the help of his toy figurines. It was quite amusing to me. While playing, he would often change the storyline based on his convenience. I also started to join him in his games and we started to build up stories impromptu.
Even in moments of conflict between me and my son, like his insistence on wearing an old and short t-shirt to a party because he liked it, I started cooking up stories, for example, how a super-hero walked in to a party in a short dress and was not able to save the people in need as he couldn’t manage a change of wear on time because the short dress wouldn’t come out of his neck and head. My husband shouted from the back, “Just leave him at home. Let him stay, he will learn a lesson.” But, there was something else going on in the child’s mind. He was very responsive to the logic and immediately agreed to change in to something that would allow him to act fast in case of an emergency. I was happy and surprised, but my husband was more so. We both looked at each other and secretly smiled to finally conclude this situation as a win-win for all of us.
Couple of more instances of disagreements between me and my son over food and other things followed in the next few days. I deliberately did not lose my cool even once and chose not to get into any long arguments. Instead, I used his own logic of the kid’s fantasy world on him and he gave in. For example, when he refused to eat the lentils and vegetables in his meal, I told him about how the first two pigs never ate nutritious food, but the third one always completed his meal. So, when they were attacked by the wolf, the third one with his intelligence was able to save the other two, who unfortunately didn’t become intelligent due to lack of nutrition.
I could also stop our routine episodes of making him gather his toys scattered all over his room at night by telling him how Santa Claus secretly comes in at night to keep surprise toys in the rooms of selected kids, but once he entered the untidy room of a kid, tipped over a toy and injured his back; he never visited that kid thereafter. My son started to clean his room everyday before going to sleep and I started keeping surprise toys once in a while in his room to reward him for his effort.
I started sharing my experiences with my husband and he found it quite amusing too. In fact, he witnessed some of these interesting dialogues between us and started to believe in this approach. Soon, he tried this out once himself. On a Sunday, it was my husband’s turn to give the little one a bath, but our son kept on playing and refused to take a bath. Then, my husband told him how superman once didn’t take bath because he was feeling very lazy. There was an emergency situation in the evening, he went to save a small child, but he was stinking so much that the child refused to be carried by him. Superman was very embarrassed and took bath everyday thereafter.
We both realised that our son was actually not a rebel, but we had never really taken an effort to reach out to him in his own logical fashion. We named it Kiddielogic between the two of us and since then we are using it to make all the deals and negotiations even in the most difficult parent-child situations in a peaceful environment.
The article was published in mycity4kids.com on September 10, 2015
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