I try not to give parenting tips on LACityMom except when they come directly from the experts. (See my article on Betsy Brown Braun’s new book You’re Not the Boss of Me.) In terms of my own parenting style here’s all I can say, I give myself an A for effort. The rest is a muddle of instincts and theory and an attempt to do the best I can in any given moment. However, I had an amusing road trip recently (amusing only in retrospect – hellish at the time) that I thought might be useful to share, or at the very least entertaining.
My kids, ages 6 and 8, fight all the time. Call it sibling rivalry or just plain hatred, whatever it is, it is really starting to unnerve me. We have been traveling a lot, and when we venture on a long car ride I let them watch a DVD in the back seat. I was all prepared with enough media to last for hours and had imagined a lovely quiet, scenic ride. How wrong I was.
Tip #1: If you don’t have one, buy a small gizmo called a splitter that allows both kids to listen to a movie with headphones, allowing you to listen to the radio instead of Looney Tunes for four hours straight.
Tip # 2: If you don’t have a splitter, you can buy them at Radio Shack, Best Buy or Target. We inevitably lose this precious little device once a year or forget to bring it along – you may want to keep yours in the glove compartment or some other permanent location.
Here’s where things went amiss on our ride. No one could agree upon which movie to watch. My little one believed that he should choose. There were tears, and there was fighting, and it makes me CRAZY when they fight in the car as, frankly, it is just plain dangerous. So I pulled over into a parking lot, and then I lost it. I yanked out all the cords from the DVD player and told them that there would be no movie if they could not agree.
Tip #3 : You can also buy a handy contraption that allows you to plug the DVD into the cigarette lighter, hence you never run out of battery power. Not that that helped on this particular day, but it might for you.
Back to the car in the parking lot, all cables pulled, kids in the back seat screaming, I suddenly had what I thought was a parenting epiphany. I imagined that I was about to say something that would shift their mood entirely for the better, I said (okay perhaps I yelled)
“Fine, fight all you want!”
See, I imagined that they would look at me stunned, and say, “Mom, we don’t want to fight, we just want to find a movie that we both want to watch…” I could not have been more wrong. Instead my son said, “Okay I’ll fight!” and promptly started pounding my daughter with punches. She then responded by taking her nails, which I had been meaning to trim, and dragging them down the side of his face like a cat nearly drawing blood! Realizing what she had done, she climbed out of the car, ran into the parking lot, and started to cry. He was then crying due to the intense pain on the side of his cheek, and when I saw the side of his face I cried too. “Mom, why did you tell us to fight?” He asked.
After a few minutes, a slathering of Neosporin…
Tip #4: Keep Neosporin in the glove compartment…this was the only proud parenting moment of that day for me – discovering I had some Neosporin handy in the car.
Everyone calmed down and was very kind to each other for the rest of the journey. I honestly don’t know what the lesson is in this. I share it only with you, faithful readers, because I was reminded once again of how, as moms, as difficult as it is, it really is up to us to keep calm and not lose our cool, and not do as I did.
Tip # 5: Keep your cool whenever possible.
Tip #6: By all means don’t tell your kids to, “Go ahead and fight!” If you do, it may be the one time they actually do just as you say.
I arrived home that night, exhausted, and deflated. Then I read a dear friend, Paige Orloff’s blog, who is a former LACityMom and now a writer for The Sister Project. Her blog post that day was about sibling rivalry. I have re-printed it below with her permission.I especially loved the photo, which is at the top of this post. Both Paige and I would love to hear any comments and perspectives on how you keep the peace between your children.
by Paige Orloff
RIVALRY? HA. THAT’S teeny, tiny potatoes. My resident little sister and big brother have tabled competition, in favor of all out war. It’s looking like Afghanistan in my house: no end in sight.
At least a dozen times, in, oh, the last two days, each of my children, in succession and in isolation, often apropos of nothing, nothing at all, has informed me that they would have been much better off solo, thankyouverymuch. (Actually, they usually omit that last part.) This is usually followed with some expression of not exactly murderous, but certainly magical disappearance, intent. And a discourse on how things would be better, if only they didn’t bear the burden of sibling-hood.
I chime in, mostly, with a weak-voiced reminder of some recent instance of brotherly/sisterly love (because, indeed, it does still appear) which usually merits a shrug, or more often, an eye roll. (I am an eye roller, I am sorry to admit, and worse, it appears to be genetic. Mom, I am sorry.)
Really, moms, what do you do when the conversation turns from irritation to out and out obliteration: “I wish I was NEVER a brother!” “I wish I had a sister, and NOT YOU.”
This only child was unprepared for the loving bond these sweet sibs have shared up to this point (and still, to be fair, occasionally manage to find) but I’m really flummoxed by their current desire to rid house and home of anyone under the age of 40 who shares their DNA. Please tell me this is just a phase…
For Local Blog