Today I had to take someone else's kid home from daycare with my kid.
It did not go well.
Long story short, the kid decided he didn't want to go to his afternoon daycare, and decided to make it my problem by throwing a tantrum, complete with screaming, crying, "don't wanna"s, more crying, throwing himself on the floor, and crying. (I guess that's actually the whole story. It felt long at the time.)
The daycare assistant, who is a truly lovely person, tried for several minutes to help. She even offered him a prize. I would not have offered a prize, but then, I'm not the type often described as lovely. (It's not that I was entirely unsympathetic to him - I was just far more sympathetic to myself.)
Eventually I managed to convince him to come with us by using a mix of soothing words and lifting him up and physically forcing him down the stairs kicking and screaming.
When I got home, I related my ordeal to Viggy, concluding with, "I don't like dealing with kids."
"Right. That's why we have so many," he (rather reasonably, I guess) pointed out.
Which brings me to today's warning on dealing with Other People's Kids. The warning is this: it is hard, and it stays hard.
Maybe that's an anti-warning in a weird way. Like, if you're not a "kid person," if you think newborn babies all look alike (and none of them are particularly cute), if the sight of someone else's kid kicking and screaming makes you think "his parents owe me a shot of vodka" instead of "aww poor baby" - you might find that parenting is way better than you expected.
On the other hand, if you expected that learning to love your own spawn would give you some kind of insight into dealing with other people's offspring - yeah, good luck with that.
It's not just that your kids are magically easier to deal with because they're yours. I mean, I'm sure that's true too. I'm not an expert on the human brain or anything, but it seems likely that there's a big chunk of it dedicated to making sure people nurture any small people carrying their DNA, instead of drowning out their whining with the help of massive amounts of vodka.
But it's also that you get to train your children. I'm not saying it's easy, or that it always works. But you get years to do it. Years in which your children come to limit themselves, more or less, to the types of bratty behavior that you personally find it easiest to live with.
I can think of things my kids do that I could see driving other parents nuts. The high volume, the constant pool of water on the shower-room floor, the attempts to "cook" that I clean up on a near-daily basis... I'll stop here.
But I can live with all those things a lot easier than with full-on tantrums, or kids crying for upward of 2 minutes. Both of which I barely ever have to deal with.
So yeah. I have a bunch of kids, and I'm happy to have a bunch of kids, and we all get along just fine most of the time. But don't expect me to be any good at dealing with anyone else under the age of 15 or so.
And if I ever announce that I'm opening my own afternoon daycare, someone please tie me up until I'm talking sense again.
It did not go well.
Long story short, the kid decided he didn't want to go to his afternoon daycare, and decided to make it my problem by throwing a tantrum, complete with screaming, crying, "don't wanna"s, more crying, throwing himself on the floor, and crying. (I guess that's actually the whole story. It felt long at the time.)
The daycare assistant, who is a truly lovely person, tried for several minutes to help. She even offered him a prize. I would not have offered a prize, but then, I'm not the type often described as lovely. (It's not that I was entirely unsympathetic to him - I was just far more sympathetic to myself.)
Eventually I managed to convince him to come with us by using a mix of soothing words and lifting him up and physically forcing him down the stairs kicking and screaming.
When I got home, I related my ordeal to Viggy, concluding with, "I don't like dealing with kids."
"Right. That's why we have so many," he (rather reasonably, I guess) pointed out.
Which brings me to today's warning on dealing with Other People's Kids. The warning is this: it is hard, and it stays hard.
Maybe that's an anti-warning in a weird way. Like, if you're not a "kid person," if you think newborn babies all look alike (and none of them are particularly cute), if the sight of someone else's kid kicking and screaming makes you think "his parents owe me a shot of vodka" instead of "aww poor baby" - you might find that parenting is way better than you expected.
On the other hand, if you expected that learning to love your own spawn would give you some kind of insight into dealing with other people's offspring - yeah, good luck with that.
It's not just that your kids are magically easier to deal with because they're yours. I mean, I'm sure that's true too. I'm not an expert on the human brain or anything, but it seems likely that there's a big chunk of it dedicated to making sure people nurture any small people carrying their DNA, instead of drowning out their whining with the help of massive amounts of vodka.
But it's also that you get to train your children. I'm not saying it's easy, or that it always works. But you get years to do it. Years in which your children come to limit themselves, more or less, to the types of bratty behavior that you personally find it easiest to live with.
I can think of things my kids do that I could see driving other parents nuts. The high volume, the constant pool of water on the shower-room floor, the attempts to "cook" that I clean up on a near-daily basis... I'll stop here.
But I can live with all those things a lot easier than with full-on tantrums, or kids crying for upward of 2 minutes. Both of which I barely ever have to deal with.
So yeah. I have a bunch of kids, and I'm happy to have a bunch of kids, and we all get along just fine most of the time. But don't expect me to be any good at dealing with anyone else under the age of 15 or so.
And if I ever announce that I'm opening my own afternoon daycare, someone please tie me up until I'm talking sense again.
