A year or so ago, I had to have a serious talk with my oldest (who was three years old at the time). He and his little brother (who was around 18 months old) were fighting rather regularly, and I was worried that he was going to seriously hurt the little guy by mistake.<\/p>\n
It happened after one of their blow ups, and I took him aside and explained that he had to protect his little brother. I pointed out how my most important job was to protect both of them, and his job was to protect his little brother. We went through all the things I did to keep him safe, established that he liked me to do them, and then he agreed to do them with his little brother.<\/p>\n
It lasted about three months – until the little brother realized that the older was no longer really fighting back. <\/p>\n
I tried to have the same “you have to keep him safe” talk with him. It didn’t take at all.<\/p>\n
We had about a month of fighting then, and then we had an Event. <\/p>\n
It happened when I interrupted a fight where they were actually hitting each other. I sat them down and loomed over them. “My job,” I said in my most serious voice, “is to keep you both safe.” They both nodded, so I leaned in close and said very quietly “even from each other.”<\/p>\n
They looked at each other, trying to decide if I was joking. The little one started to laugh and tried to slap his brother’s arm. I caught his hand, and held it in my closed fist in front of his face. I’ll admit I was a bit angry, but I kept my voice low and level. “Do you see how big this hand is?” He nodded uncertainly. “Do you really want to take me on?”<\/p>\n
It was a tense moment, but he shook his head. I looked at his brother, and he shook his head quickly.<\/p>\n
I have no idea what the parenting books would say about this, but it worked. Where inspiration and love had failed, fear seemed to take hold.<\/p>\n
Now let’s zoom forward eleven months or so to this past weekend, just after I’d given them baths. The big guy (who’s over four now) was biting a towel that I was holding. I don’t know why. He was just being silly, I think..<\/p>\n
“Hey, no biting!” I said. I wasn’t yelling or anything, just trying to get him to stop.<\/p>\n
His little brother looked over from his towel. “He bit your thumb?”<\/p>\n
“No,” I said, laughing. “If he bit me, I would be a lot louder and a lot angrier.”<\/p>\n
The older brother laughed. “Yeah, and if I bit you<\/em>,” he said, pointing to his little brother, “then, oh…” He looked up at me, suddenly nervous, “oh no… no. I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t!”<\/p>\n I laughed. “Don’t worry, big guy. I know you wouldn’t. I know.” I gave him a big towelly bear hug.<\/p>\n The whole thing left me feeling more than a little ashamed of myself, but I have to admit I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, I never wanted to be feared. On the other, the boys do watch out for each other now and they rarely physically hurt each other.<\/p>\n It’s very confusing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A year or so ago, I had to have a serious talk with my oldest (who was three years old at the time). He and his little brother (who was around 18 months old) were fighting rather regularly, and I was worried that he was going to seriously hurt the little guy by mistake. It happened after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[121,120,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-the-kids","category-daddytales-embarassing","category-daddytales-sad"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6DpYi-fear","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}