Time out!
posted in Uncategorized |(Or, “The Omegas are parenting wusses”.)
Johnny is a self-proclaimed parenting hard-ass.
The lucky Johnny and Sharon have a lovely two-year-old who goes to bed at 7 p.m. Sigh.
Can OmegaMom admit that she’s jealous?
OmegaDotter (admittedly two years older) has a bedtime routine that starts any time between 7:45 and 8:45, and ends between 8:45 and 9:45. She gets a bath every other day or so, then “eleven minutes” with OmegaDad (a very elastic period of time, because OmegaMom uses it to chill in the office, read email, blogs, lists, boards, etc.), then gets one or two stories read to her by OmegaMom, then has to have OmegaMom with her while she goes to sleep, which can take anywhere from one minute to…let’s say, “a long, long time”.
God forbid we change the routine. All hell breaks loose.
Then there is the “time-out” thing. We tried time-outs with OmegaDotter when she was a young’un. Note the “tried”. One could call OmegaDotter “spirited”, I’m thinking. Or perhaps it’s a matter of attachment issues. Time-outs are a waste of time in this house. She gets absolutely hysterical, and a two-minute time-out turns into a one-hour ordeal for the whole family, which ends with OmegaDotter hiccuping in OmegaMom’s arms, very damp from tears and exhausted. Of course, the OmegaParents are exhausted, too, by this time.
“Alone” is a very, very scary thing for her. Disapproval is, too. So we have had to find ways and means to convey disciplinary ideas to her.
This is not to say she’s a Wild Thang. “Time-ins” (where one holds child in arms fairly securely, facing outward, and “discuss” the behavior in question) work–we get hysterics, but they’re much shorter. And OmegaMom is, of course, a Mean Mommy, who has drilled the Fear of Leaving The Store into OmegaDotter to the point where a simple, “Do we have to go sit in the car until you can behave?” has mutated to A Look when mom and dotter are out shopping together. (This required application of only a few carrying-the-tantrumming-dotter-out-of-the-store scenes.) Unfortunately, OmegaDad is a ball of mush when it comes to the dotter–usually–so a group outing can be more problematic.
We’d much rather have a happy, healthy girl than deal with the hysterics that go with time-outs, or the hysterics (hours-long, making-herself-sick type hysterics) that emerged about six months after bringing dotter home when we would put her to bed in her crib by herself.
But I will admit there are times when it would be nice to have a dotter that goes into time-outs with only a small amount of fuss, who goes to bed by herself at a set time, and who stays in that bed all night long without climbing in with mom and dad and subjecting mommy to the Foot Thing.
