Firecracker kids: walking the right disciplinary line

I don't have a lot of voice today.

I don't have a lot of voice today, because yesterday I decided to spend some time one-to-one with 'Violet'. Violet has her problems. She's a high-energy, LOUD, I'm-over-baby-stuff kid who has been going through a Bolshie stage the whole time I've known her.

Maybe Bolshie is just who she is. It goes with being bright sometimes, and Violet is definitely very clever indeed. She's a wizard at spacial challenges. Her creative work is incredible.

I come into Violet's life frame very sporadically, being a casual worker. Each time I have to re-establish the boundaries with her and work at our relationship, while she tests the fence, and tests the fence, and TESTS the fence of my limits. She does it to all the staff. It's not personal. But as with all children, it's so much easier to deal with difficult behaviours when you have a good relationship with the child.

I'm genuinely fond of Violet; she can be outrageous, but she also radiates an inner light.  If she can harness that energy for good, she will be someone truly outstanding one day. It's not so hard for me to try to build that relationship, because I can see her light despite the Bolshie wrapper. Sometimes just seeing a child's light can be a challenge, I know. I count myself fortunate that I can see that light in Violet; with other difficult kids I've sometimes struggled away in the dark.

Ironically, yesterday Violet was literally testing the fence by climbing it, and had to be manhandled and persuaded away from it before she was over, off and away up the street. Yesterday she used her considerable problem-solving powers to work out that the ladder from the climbing frame could be used to get to the top of the said fence.  Yesterday Violet was a handful.

(Actually, Violet's nearly always a handful.)

She used up my voice, and she used up my energy, but yesterday she also gave me a priceless gift.

Anger management for young children

A few years ago I had a four-year-old in my room- let's call him Bailey- who had a pretty woeful family background.  His mum and dad fought violently and constantly, splitting up and reuniting on an almost weekly basis.

Bailey could be the most affectionate and delightful child, but he could also be a holy terror.  His parents had modelled a very clear example of how to deal with problems: shout, scream, and then hit. In his experience, violence was a first-resort coping mechanism which had few down-sides, because after a short while all would be forgiven.

Naturally, this caused a few problems in the preschool domain, because oddly enough the other children didn't react the same way to being hit.  They tended to hit back, complain to the teacher (which resulted in truly annoying time-out, which Bailey didn't really understand- that wasn't what happened at home!!) or cry and hold grudges against him.  Bailey would cheerfully say sorry- he saw that all the time at his house, and it had always worked- but of course he never changed his ways.  Controlling his anger wasn't something that had ever been modelled to him.

By the time I left that job, I had made Bailey aware of the problem in his dispute resolution process and he was, with prompting, able to restrain himself from hitting the other children and deal with his anger in a more socially acceptable way.  Here's the method I used.

Modelling happiness: broken families

In this blog I've stressed the need to be authentic, the need to be respectful and the need to model the behaviour you want your child to copy. It all sounds amazingly easy when you're sitting in a chair reading it. Parenthood in action, however, is a very different experience- especially when the parenting relationship is in crisis.

Fighting with your ex- a child's view

I'm not very good at ending relationships. Most of us aren't. I know what it is to feel deeply hurt, disappointed, broken-hearted, emotionally bruised, what it's like to have my innermost hopes, my self-esteem and my sense of justice trampled on. I know that both parties will usually feel equally overpowering emotions. I also know how easily these feelings translate into a red-hot, uncontrolled boil-over when you see each other.



Well, red-hot rage might be thoroughly understandable in those circumstances, but when there are children in the line of fire be very careful. It's so tempting to mentally enlist them into your army, based only on your own anger and hurt. It's way too easy to misinterpret what they say and do on the home battlefield when you have a personal agenda.



Let me tell you a true story from my life. Call it a cautionary tale.

Don't drown in your child's gene pool

New parents have so many hopes and dreams about what their child will be like, but the reality of bringing up a little human can be crushing at times. We may hope to raise a leader of men, a sports star or a brilliant student- someone with all the best features of the people we admire most- and yet one day we find ourselves staring at a child who resembles nothing so much as a small replica of the partner we divorced so bitterly, or our dissolute Uncle Bruce, or-worse still- someone who combines all our own worst features with none of our coping mechanisms.  It's a hard moment for a parent.

Smacking: let's stop pretending!

If you read current child-rearing literature and listen to the experts, you'll know that good parents don't smack their kids. Yet if you talk for long enough to almost any parent, you'll know that theory and practice are WORLDS apart on this issue. Nearly every parent has lost their cool at some stage and smacked their child. I did; my mother did. You probably have too.  Plenty of mums and dads still use it as a regular disciplinary device- they're just not talking about it.

To have a rational public discussion about smacking which considers any positives as well as the negatives is considered taboo- smacking is politically incorrect, and that's that. This has created a quiet subculture which really, really worries me. If we're still doing it, we need to bring it out in the open. So let's have that discussion right now; it's about time.

The challenge of gifted children in preschool settings

(This is an article I wrote for an online childcare site to help preschool teachers- but it has much in it to help you identify and cope with a gifted child too. Let me know in the comments if you'd like a copy with the footnotes and references. -Aunt Annie)

Gifted children, those who have advanced intellectual development beyond their years, generally 'draw the short straw' in our schools. There is plenty of information around about the integration of special needs children into our early childhood classrooms, but when I talk to early childhood teachers (and for that matter, to many parents) about catering for gifted and talented children, I find that most people question the need for any special program- and I am sometimes met with open hostility. Gifted children, I'm told, will be okay; they don't need help from us. They'll manage because they're clever. We should focus funding and attention on those who can't keep up.

Perhaps you agree. But gifted children have special needs of their own, and if those needs are ignored, they (and everyone associated with them) will have a hard time.