How to Spoil a Child

Through current observations, I’ve noticed that I don’t have much tolerance for people who spoil their kids.  I may not be the most strict mama in the world, but I’m no push-over either.  Children need at least some sense of discipline or they go wild.  My kids are bad enough, I can’t imagine letting them get worse!

I’m sitting a little girl and her baby brother today.  I was told the baby wouldn’t be a problem because he was really sleepy and would probably sleep the whole time.  I feel bad keeping him in his car seat the whole time, but my floor has way too much stuff on it to let a small baby crawl around.  The kids have dropped food on the floor that I just haven’t gotten to cleaning up.  There are small toys that my kids won’t try and swallow, but a baby might.  I wasn’t expecting to have a baby in the house, so I didn’t bother to prepare.  As long as he would be sleeping, it wouldn’t matter.  However, he hasn’t slept a wink since he’s gotten here.  He might have, but his sister was sure to prevent that from happening.

The first time I watched these kids, the little girl threw a royal fit.  I don’t mean your typical grade temper tantrum.  This girl was throwing herself at the floor, walls, door, and anything else she could, flailing at anyone who would dare come near her, screaming like someone was trying to kill her.  That fit lasted for almost two hours.  I tried to do the typical thing of engaging her with something else, but instead I got toys thrown at me and repeatedly kicked and hit.  I decided the best course of action was to ignore it.  It took almost that entire two hours of ignoring her for her to calm down, picking her up and moving her whenever she got too close to anything she could hurt herself on, but she did eventually calm down.  I have never seen a child throw a fit for so long just because their parent left.

Since then she’s been pulling the same thing every time she’s left here, though it’s thankfully much shorter.  Fifteen to twenty minutes and she’s usually calmed down.  No one pays attention to her throwing herself around and convulsing on the floor, so eventually she realizes she’ll get more out of going off to play with the toys and do her own thing.  It’s gotten better.  I even volunteered to watch her today because I knew she would throw a fit, and honestly, unless she deals with separation from her parents often enough, she’s never going to stop throwing fits every time her mother leaves.

Unfortunately, I knew that this would mean the little one wouldn’t sleep.  This is why I said I would only take his sister in the first place.  It’s not fair to me and it’s definitely not fair to him.  I really hate having children dumped on me last minute.  Oz was just taking her out to run some errands, which should have been real quick.  It’s been almost an hour, which isn’t bad, but I know they didn’t just do their errands and come straight home.  On top of that, it took her forever to get ready.  Oz was waiting an hour on her so that they could go get this done, something I’m finding is a common trend.  Now I’ve been stuck with an awake baby that’s been trapped in his car seat for an hour because I don’t think I should be expected to watch him like a hawk because he was kind of dumped on me last minute.  Thankfully, Corde has been doing the "big sister" thing and has been keeping him happy.

It’s not just the tantrums here that drive me nuts.  I know why it happens.  I know why this girl messes with everything under the sun when she’s here.  I know why I have to hide all the food when she gets here.  Maybe it’s just my parenting style, but I’ve never had to have my house "baby-proofed" before.  I just made sure my kids learned early on what they were and weren’t allowed to do.  I had rules.  I didn’t need anything to prevent them from getting into the cabinets because they were simply not allowed.  I didn’t need a stove lock.  I just kept them away from the stove.  I never bothered with putting electronics and breakables out of reach.  If they were broken, that’s my own fault for not teaching my kids better.  There were days before "baby-proofing" your house became a reality and most of those children grew up just fine.  All it does is mean the parents don’t need to watch their kids so closely.

I’ve seen how things work at their house.  Pretty much, this little girl gets away with murder.  If she wants food, she gets it, even though she’s decently over weight for her age.  I’ve seen her walk around the house carrying a bag of cookies under her arm, devouring the whole thing, and no one stops her.  She’s eating near constantly.  It’s not surprising that she’s more than a little chunky.  All she has to do is throw one of these tantrums like she does here and suddenly someone is trying to stop her before she hurts herself.  She’s learned how to play her parents to get anything she wants.  When she stops throwing a tantrum, she gets rewarded for calming down with candy or snacks.  I think I would throw tantrums too if I got whatever I wanted in the end and got candy on top of it!  That’s a pretty good deal!  Then there’s the discipline issue.  Mom tells her one thing, like "no more cookies."  Then dad tells her five minutes later, "you can have some cookies as long as you sit down over there."  Mom tells her she can’t have things, dad turns around and lets her.  Dad punishes her for misbehaving and five minutes later mom lets her get away with the exact same thing.  There are no regular rules or anything in that house.  It’s not surprising their daughter is overweight and gets away with murder.

What really gets me is that every time I leave my kids for them to watch, I generally find out that the mom thinks my kids have been horrible.  My daughter is making my son scream all the time, something she never gets away with at home because I separate them.  She talks about how my son cries a lot.  I can see why he cries so much just by watching all of the kids together.  Her daughter hauls out and hits my son.  She yanks things from his hands that he was in the middle of playing with.  Just the other day I picked my son up to find he had a huge scratch across his side that looked quite nasty.  It was all red and irritated and I mean red, not the pink of recently scratched.  It’s still all red and irritated, which means she got him good!  I’m not surprised he cries all the time!  Realistically, it would only take an ounce of paying attention to stop that problem from happening.  All she would have to do is intervene and make her own child behave.  Then she complained about my daughter running up and down the stairs c

onstantly, which her daughter was also doing, but apparently my daughter was the only one who got in trouble for it because she’s older.  My daughter is six, my son and her daughter are both almost three.  However, my daughter was annoying her with it, but she didn’t take any measures to stop her.  I can’t blame my child for not listening.  It’s hard to feel inspired to listen when there’s no sense of rules and order.  Of course she doesn’t have to listen!  She won’t get in trouble if she doesn’t, at least not until she gets home, so it’s worth being as out of control as possible.

The worst part about the way this mom treats her own children is that she doesn’t seem to understand that it’s her parenting that’s making her daughter act up so much.  She’s always got all these excuses.  Her daughter is tired.  Well, make her take a nap!  Regular nap times and bed times are really important for kids.  She’s just hungry.  She listens to her father, but won’t listen to her mother.  Well, if that’s the case, there’s a reason for that.  She thinks rewarding her child for being good with sweets and toys will somehow make her behave better, however she earns those sweets by starting to act good after being incredibly bad.  She throws a two hour tantrum and gets ten candies when she calms down.  She spends the evening being talked to by me for hitting my son (when the mom is present) and when she acts nice to my son for five minutes she gets sweets as well.  They don’t pay attention to what she’s doing unless she’s throwing a tantrum, so she gets into everything.  She grabs any food she can get her hands on and devours it with no consequences.  The solution to her bad behavior is usually "time-out", but in reality, "time-out" is "go to bed and take a nap".  There have been a few days where she’s put in the booster seat in the car instead of a seat with a five-point harness.  Honestly, with my son that’s not a problem.  He sits in the seat and rarely messes with the seat belt.  With her daughter, she’s practically out of the seat belt in five minutes if she doesn’t want to be in the car.  I worry about driving with her because I’m afraid of what will happen if we get into a car accident.  It’s just plain dangerous!  On top of that, it’s not my responsibility to let her use my children’s car seats when her kids are in the car.  She should seriously have and use her own, either that or make sure her children can ride safely in the seats I have available.

I don’t know.  It just seems like her kids are being spoiled rotten and she’s just passing it off as a phase.  She thinks her son is going to grow up to be so much better and girls are just unruly, but in the end I think she’s going to be sadly mistaken.  Her son is going to grow up to be just as spoiled and out of control because they don’t have any sense of organization, schedule, and discipline in their house.  Both kids will end up getting away with murder.  Either that or the younger one will always remain blameless, even when it’s his fault, because his sister is such a trouble maker.

I just think looking at that house is a perfect example of how to spoil a child…

~*~Raven Night~*~