Lessons Learned

As a parent, you have all of these things that you want your children to learn and ideas of how your discipline will go. Then your baby becomes a toddler, and it's time to instill those things into your child and put your discipline ideas to play. I have come to realize as a mother of two toddlers that all of what I thought disciplining was going to be like has gone out the window. Here are some ways my disciplining ideas have backfired lessons I have learned.

1. Be careful the words you use when scolding your child! The very first phrase Maddox decided to use against me was "you wanna go to bed!" Sounds really innocent, but when you are using that phrase as a way to get your child to stop misbehaving, it takes on a whole new meaning! Now every threat I use to redirect my children to be better behaved has been used against me atleast once!

2. If you think you will be teaching your son a lesson by letting him watch that scary movie you have already told him is too scary for him, you might sadly be mistaken. we had been at a friend's house where Maddox saw some other kids watching one of the Halloween movies. A couple of weeks later (it was around Halloween time) it came on TV and Maddox cried his eyes out wanting to watch it. I thought maybe if it scared his pants off he would learn his lesson that I know best...NOPE! He loved it! It took months to get over him wanting to watch Michael Myers on TV. Now he saw it on TV while flipping through it a couple of weeks ago and has become obsessed once again. Now even Jakk talks about Michael Myers. So by thinking that if I scared him to death that he wouldn't ask to watch any scary movies ever again, I actually turned my son into a serial killer wannabe! Good job, Kris! Actually, I have asked other mom's of boys and it's actually pretty normal at their age not to be scared of things like that. Sheww!

3. All children are different! Yes, even siblings. If you think you can use one type of discipline for all of your children you may be in for a rude awakening! I mean it may work, but typically it doesn't. Every child is an individual and responds to different things. With my boys, Maddox does not really respond to being spanked all of the time. I still use spanking but it just depends on the situation. He actually is more effected by a time out. Also he doesn't respond to a scolding at the time of the incident. If you try to go into depth about why what he did was wrong at the time you make him stop, he shuts down because he gets embarassed. It is more effective to wait until things cool down to try and explain things to him...he will be more apt to listen when he doesn't feel attached. Now Jakk just turned two so explanations really have no effect on him just yet. A spanking will do good for him...it breaks his little heart to get swatted for something, which in return makes him forget what it was he was doing!

There were some other examples that I had but I kinda forgot since I've been typing this while singing VBS songs with the kiddos! So I guess that's all for now!