Parenting Sadness: Mourning something lost

I’ve shared before that I think parenting is drudgery, moments of unassailable joy, challenge after challenge, and some degree of sadness. Thus far, unsurprisingly (why wouldn’t I want to focus there?) I’ve shared lots of the joy. Today, I’d like to share some of the sadness.

Punishment

The six-year-old boy is sometimes a handful, and I’m absolutely the ‘harsh’ parent who doles out more punishments than my wife. He was our first so we were (and still are!) learning on the job, and I didn’t always know what the right level of strictness was. There’s lots of talk about ‘gentle parenting’, and there are many idealised accounts of how you should parent a lively young boy.

Honestly, I tried some of them but they weren’t me, and I just don’t think they’re what my son needed. He needed firm boundaries, clear rules, and direct consequences. He’s always been a boundary tester (arguing with a 2-year-old about what proportion of his body has to be on his cot bed to count him as being ‘in’ it was an experience I didn’t know I could have), and I think the kindest thing to give him are clear boundaries so he knows what’s what.

There’s also a huge deal of social pressure when it comes to punishment - because there’s no rule book and no clear ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…the easiest place to benchmark yourself is through people you know. Would you have not allowed that kind of behaviour? Would you never shout at your child like that? It’s incredibly hard to do anything other than whatever the parents who surround you do. I also believe it’s incredibly damaging to change your parenting style based on who you’re with at the time. Parental strictness is a minefield.

I definitely overdid it in places - one of my most shameful moments was putting him on the ‘naughty step’ and telling him not to move. When I went back 5 minutes later, he’d wet himself, thinking that he couldn’t leave to go to the toilet. Even typing it now years later feels horrible.

Aside from the rare, horrible misjudgements like that, I think we’ve raised a well-behaved but still lively young boy who I’m proud of every day.

Wrestling

Every night, we have a ‘song’ before he goes to sleep. I say song, but what started out as a song evolved into a freestyle song/rap (“Daisy the cow”) and later evolved into a story (“Jim the Explorer”), and has now become a wrestling match. Jim the Explorer spends his time fighting characters from How to Train Your Dragon, or entering Gladiators.

It’s one of my favourite bits of the day and I’m pretty sure it’s one of his too - he trains to get stronger so he’s better at wrestling. He asks for tips on how to sweep my legs, or lifts his bed up as a way of doing a workout. He tells me he did 200 squats last night. Sometimes Almost always it gets rough, and occasionally one or both of us gets hurt.

I’ve searched “how to treat a broken finger” more than once over the last few months, and he’s ended up in tears probably once a fortnight in the same time period.

It’s wild, heart-warming, feral, and is one of our favourite shared activities.

Something Lost

It’s also one of the first things that I take away as a punishment. I prefer ‘natural’ punishments - direct consequences for behaviour that are tied to the transgression. Won’t share with your sister? We’ll play with her and you can play by yourself. Won’t stop banging a drum when your baby brother is trying to sleep. We’ll take the drum away.

Last week, when wrestling (actually, when teaching him backwards rolls), he banged his knee on the edge of the bed and hurt it. He reacted very poorly, screaming at me and banishing me from his room/ever playing with him again. In the heat of the moment, I told him that “fine, we’ll not do wrestling tonight - if you can’t respond reasonably when you get hurt, we can’t do anything so violent as wrestling.”

I’m a firm believer in making punishments stick, and so we didn’t wrestle. Both of us were miserable, because it’s a favourite part of both of our day. I don’t know if I handled things correctly…but I do know that both of us felt like we lost. I lost one of the best bits of my day, and he did too. Is it worth it? If it helps raise a respectful son, who can better direct his anger and hurt, then definitely. But will it?

The Philosophy of Punishment

When he was younger, we were wrestling one time and he got so excited and manic that he bit me. We are very strict on biting and so I immediately stopped wrestling and left him. He knew he’d done wrong and was upset. We didn’t wrestle for more than a week, and I wondered whether or not he’d forgotten about wrestling. I talked to my wife about it - and we debated whether we should just stop wrestling entirely.

I felt dreadful about that as an idea - a punishment that ultimately ceases to be a punishment. I think a punishment has to be ‘felt’ as a punishment. If I stopped wrestling because of that one biting incident, then I’m pretty certain his childhood would have been worse. He might not know it, but there’d be a small bit of joy that every day he wouldn’t be having. All because of one silly out-of-control thing he did when he was 4.

That didn’t feel ‘fair’ to me - even though he wouldn’t really have known. He’d not remember - he’d just not realise that ‘wrestling with daddy’ was a joy he could have.

Conclusion

There’s not really a conclusion - I’m still living this, hour-by-hour, day-by-exhausting-day. There’s no pass or fail. No feedback. Just trial and error in the short-term, and trying to live with your choices in the long-term.

I love my son deeply, and I don’t like punishing him. It’d be easier to never punish him, but I think I’d be doing him a disservice by avoiding a short-term difficulty and reinforcing a long-term weakness.

If you ever read this as an adult, know that I thought deeply about this and always tried my best. I couldn’t let you do everything you wanted all the time and I had to punish you sometimes, but I always tried to make sure the punishments were predictable and just.