There are things unique to parenting across a wide age spectrum, and one of them, one that continually surprises me, is how you have to treat your children differently (and by different standards) at the very same time. One morning last week was case in point.
Picture if you will a teenager who hadn’t slept enough. Picture a seven year-old boy in a pretty cheery mood for the morning of the second day of a new camp (a few grumbles and critiques but overall, a proverbial happy camper). Picture a chirpy toddler. Picture the mama trying to get dressed, having made lunches, having had the seven year-old say he’d walk himself down the street to his camp (literally at the end of the street) only to change his mind. Return to grumpy teenager and add a little storminess to that grump, like foam on a latte. “Get out of the bathroom,” he railed to his brother, who could not at that moment get off the toilet. “Get out of the bathroom!” Never mind that it was his parents’ bathroom.
Oh, picture the papa and the ‘tweenager (love that non-word word) both away so the mama is solo with these three.
Add the word “stupid” countless times. Let the scene play out for a few more minutes.
Then, picture the mama storming back: You cannot treat me this way. Infer the mama’s intended message: suck it up, buster.
I’ve found myself reaching this line in the sand of sorts again and again, the one where I feel my kids are crossing a boundary into treating me so poorly that I don’t care how upset they are at that moment. I care that they express their upset without tearing into me. And I refuse to hear more until that changes. The moment does not resemble a really upset four year-old’s meltdown, when the wash of emotion is so great the child cannot censor one more thing. It also does not really resemble—not exactly—the toddler’s frequent timeouts for hitting or biting or other transgressions, because she’s testing the boundary in order to test it. The teenager (or insert here tweenager) just then, is pushing the limit because he (in my case) can’t contain his upset and I’m pushing back with a message that he can and he will. And then, only then, can I be sympathetic (which I really, truly can be).
And picture this: as he stormed away toward his day and I pushed the stroller away from the preschool (toward being late for preschool, toward the paper airplane camp that’s really not called that), I softened my voice and said to the seven year-old, When a seven year-old changes his mind and wants his mama to walk him to camp, even at the last minute, that’s fine. Because he’s seven, and if he wants his mama to do that, his mama should walk with him. You saw grumpy, and you can see that grumpy is pretty hard to take. But what a kid can’t do is be so mean to everyone. A kid can be grumpy, even a fourteen year-old.
While there are similarities in those meltdowns of the ‘tween and teen set to the younger versions—tiredness and hunger, those are factors in meltdowns of any age, I have grown certain—they seem to draw from me different responses.
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I don’t talk baby talk to my toddler all that much. Sometimes, sure, but in general not so much, and that’s because everyone else is just talking (that said the kids do talk to her in baby talk sometimes). I’m also, as I was when she started to bolt from the stroller on our street after dropping her brother off and we were already late, firm with her in a way that I’m not sure I was with my others (certainly never my first one or two, yeah perhaps I’m paying the price now, don’t say it). I’m firm for a similar but different reason than I’ve gotten firm with the teen and ‘tween, and that’s because there are lines I don’t want her to cross. As in, she can’t hit or bite or dart into the street. I love her feistiness and I also want her to be capable of listening to us; I want her to take listening to us seriously.
The bottom line, a different one than when our kids were closer in age to one another, is that the variability in how we treat each one isn’t about older kids get privileges or older kids get more responsibilities, it’s more like there are distinct developmental considerations for each kid and then there’s some invisible thread stitching the parenting all together that really does have everything to do with learning to be a citizen in the microcosm of community that a family is—and perhaps, that much more so when that family is larger and more elastic.
