I was recently banned from a community group on Facebook because
I question the value of kicking people when they are down and of trying to
improve our city by running to the media and putting it in a bad light whenever
they find something offensive.
After banning, the admin felt they needed to state that I
was and talk about my personal page, not the usual MO, so I’m going to say “Thank
you” that you found my opinions valid enough to shake you out of your ordinary,
maybe you will read this whole post while you are looking for “mistakes” on the
rest of my page.
When my son was little, I was the authoritarian parent, what
I learned from my own. I’m not sure why,
because it didn’t teach me anything. It made
me afraid, it made me temporarily comply, but it certainly didn’t make me agree
with them. In fact, it did the opposite.
At some point, around when he was about 10, I had my wake up
call. It wasn’t working. My life could be very miserable, and I was
stressed all the time, as was he. I didn’t
rub my dog’s nose in his accidents when he had them, rather I learned to
recognize the signs and took him our when he needed to go. If there was an issue in the software I supported,
I didn’t try to band aid it, I looked for the root cause so it could be truly
fixed. When I got a divorce, I had a discussion about what was important to
each and wrote a fair agreement (I don’t do lawyers, lol). Why couldn’t I be as
sensitive to my own child?
I changed my approach.
If my child threw all his toys around the room, instead of grounding him
or implying he wasn’t good enough, I talked to him. I found out what was going on in his
thoughts, and went from there, addressing the issues from that starting
point. I didn’t punish, I taught. That doesn’t mean bad behaviors weren’t
addressed, or that there were no consequences, it meant that I didn’t beat him
down but instead helped him to be a better person. The toys being thrown? Day at school where he was in the back of the
class and couldn’t hear because others were being distractive and he zoned out
as a defense mechanism from the overstimulation and would get in trouble for
not paying attention. He’s a good kid,
he’s a rule follower, he held it in at school but he would get home and it
would all come out. I didn’t punish him,
I hugged him. We talked about finding more appropriate outlets for frustration
(going outside and practice swinging the baseball bat, punching a pillow,
talking it out). He had to clean his room. And I followed through on my
suspicions that all was not right and got diagnoses and meetings at school and
a 504 plan. I can’t remember the last
time he threw anything. We fixed the
problem permanently, not just for that day.
In the past few years, I can only even remember one time I had
to discipline him, and this is because we worked through whatever it was that
was causing the issues. I attacked the
root, I taught alternative behaviors, I didn’t shame.
This is how we need to treat everyone if we want to change
anything. There is nothing, absolutely
nothing, productive in digging up mistakes that someone already corrected just
to shame them. There is nothing
productive in calling people names if you feel they have somehow wronged you or
don’t agree with you. There is nothing
productive in putting people down. There
is nothing productive in trying to punish instead of trying to teach. It is, all, in fact, counterproductive if
your goal is to try to get anyone to reconsider their opinions. I am sorry if I didn’t express that message
well enough that you could understand what I was saying. You need to start from the point where you are
where right now and move forward to really make a difference.
That’s why they have wine.
Here is a toast to hoping that people can understand this, because I want where I live to be the best it can be.
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