You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Whining child: Do’s and Do Not's
I'm ready anytime, I just am not going to be friendly if all you do it criticize what I say with baseless things about me not have a blood-child. I provided my argument already in between that, but rather than responding you decided to simply mock again and say I was being disrespectful when you were originally the one being disrespectful.
If you want to be respectful I will be, but otherwise I guess we won't be going anywhere here.
Alrighty then, let's start from the top:
In your first response to my comment, you made the claim that you have "never had a single whine yet," but you also said, "My cure to whining has always been to... explain to them why I can't/won't and ask if that's okay, or to simply give them what they want before they whine if it's healthy and reasonable."
It is impossible for both of those statements to be true, since they contradict one another. In other words, you cannot possibly have an effective cure for whining that you always use, if you've never experienced whining. Follow?
In retrospect, I should have pointed out this contradiction, and given you the opportunity to clarify your position. Instead, I operated on the assumption that, as you claim, you have never experienced whining; and therefore your "cure" for whining was based on speculation, as opposed to real-life experience. I don't think this was an unreasonable assumption.
I understand that you presently know nothing of my educational background, and very little about my work and volunteer experience (I'll touch more on those things as we continue our discussion), but suffice to say, when I gave you a detailed and thoughtful explanation about why your proposed cure would not be effective with a toddler or preschooler, my explanation was rooted in developmental psychology, biology, and of course my decades of cumulative experience as a parent/teacher/mentor/caregiver.
At the end, I made a joke about how our perceptions - and what we think we know about children/parenting - change when we have children of our own. How do I know this? Because I have been where you are, before I had kids of my own. You won't believe me until you've experienced it for yourself, but it really is different dealing with your own children, versus someone else's.
Children save all of their most challenging behaviours for their parents, because that is where they feel safe to let it all out, especially after holding it together for someone else. THIS is the reason why children can be completely reasonable and compliant for a caregiver or teacher, but the moment they are reunited with a parent, they start acting out. It's not because the teacher or caregiver has some magical powers, or superior skills to the parents; it's because the child does not feel "safe" enough to respond authentically to these other people.
I'm sorry if my comment came across as condescending. It wasn't intended to be. Your response that followed was disproportionately crude and combative, given the overall tone of my post, and I wasn't going to engage with that.
I'm heading off on a cross-country flight with two kids, so I'll be offline for the day. I'll look forward to seeing your response when I get back online, and if you're interested in continuing the discussion, I can then address some of the arguments you've made in your second comment.