Discipline

Oh, I hate it. Just hate it. Both my kids are prone to temper tantrums, Jess more so than Sam, but they are both capable of a full blown freak out fit. And I’ve tried all sorts of ways of dealing with them (and Jess started with them when she was about a year old) and the best solution I’ve come up with (and I don’t claim it’s a solution at all, but simply what works best for me) is to sequester them somewhere safe and tell them to stay there until they get a grip.

Sam lost it yesterday, over something. Ironically, I can’t remember what it was now… oh, yeah, his hair. Marc had cut his hair and then we had to rinse him off. He was furious about it, and screamed and jumped his way thru the bath. We were just literally hosing him off with the shower attachment, but he was incoherent with rage and fury. Mostly, he was just overtired, but that’s no excuse. So I did it fast, and then pulled him out and took him into the living room. He was still raging, and then started kicking me. That’s a zero tolerance thing here, an immediate time out was called for. So I scooped him up, lugged him into the dining room and put him on a chair. He’s screaming and yelling, choking for breath – but he has to know that he cannot, under any circumstances, hit or kick me. So he’s on the chair, and I walked into the kitchen, just to take a deep breath and I can still hear him, screaming my name. Finally, he chokes out “Mommy, if you don’t answer me, then… I don’t want you to be my mama anymore.” And his little voice – you tell he was terrified at that prospect, but it was the worst thing he could think of to say to me… and it certainly did the trick, because my heart broke, just a little, in the way that it does when your kids say something like that to you. He stopped screaming, and had calmed down to just sobbing, so I went back into the dining room, had him apologize for kicking, and explained that he was stuck with me, and it didn’t matter how mad he got, there wasn’t anything he could do that would make me not be his mama. Then I scooped him up and snuggled with him. He fell asleep less than five minutes later…