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I’ve been reading a lot of blogs and books about parenting lately. Not surprisingly, at 3 years old, my Bean is a bit of a terror. She’s generally a good girl – polite, fun-loving, friendly, funny. But she still has the occasional tantrum, and tends to be very illogically frantic when things don’t go exactly her way. This ranges from freaking out and throwing something when she can’t make it work (hmm…where else do I see this happen frequently…oh yeah, her father!) to having a complete meltdown when we really want, nay need her to do something she’s not interested in, like taking a bath or getting dressed or eating her dinner.

I’m still early in the parenting research and I have a lot more to read and absorb and watch (believe it or not, one of the best resources out there is that Nanny 911 show!). But I am making a few promises to myself (and the Bean) even now:

1. I won’t hit her, even when I really, really, really want to. Hitting doesn’t accomplish anything; it only shows a child that violence is acceptable, which it is not. Even spanking, which I will admit is mostly harmless physically when only done with one’s hand, really doesn’t do much to help a three-year-old understand what’s expected of her.

2. I will take a deep breath and try to control my temper when she’s being really frustrating, and try my best not to raise my voice. Yelling and screaming doesn’t accomplish much either, for most of the same reasons that spanking doesn’t.

3. I will try to be unambiguous when expressing my expectations. This is a really big one. You can’t really accomplish much with a pre-schooler by telling them to “be good,” you have to be specific, instead: “sit up, use your inside voice, eat your dinner.” Don’t say, “Stop being bad!” Instead, say “Please don’t throw your food or else we are going home right now.”

You see, I was the recipient of some rather ambiguous parenting myself, and I still remember the frustration that made me feel. From the time I was around six to the point where I moved out for college at 18, it seemed like my Mom was always mad at me and I didn’t know why. I remember when I was 12 or 13 and really coming into my own personality, and developing the cynicism and sarcasm that would later form the basis for most of my sense of humor, my mother frequently accused me of “smart-assing her,” which I did not understand. Unfortunately, I guess she didn’t appreciate sarcasm, and her response to it was usually to slap me in the face, hard. Yeah…I got slapped a lot. Pretty much until I was so much taller and larger than my mother that it was just too intimidating for her to slap me anymore (and around the time I decided I had enough and started putting my hand up to block her blows – man did THAT piss her off).

I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t love my mother; I did. For the most part, she did a great job raising my sister and me and she was a very selfless, caring person. But if she just could have made her expectations more clear to me, I could have met them. Instead she said a lot of vague things about my “attitude” and did a lot of slapping. I wasn’t a bad kid – straight A’s for the most part, involved in lots of school activities, musically talented, with a group of other nice kids for friends. I just don’t believe that my personality at home was so different, so much more offensive, than my personality at school and elsewhere. I think I just didn’t know how to relate to Mom because she wouldn’t tell me. She would only yell and slap me.

So obviously, yeah, I want to avoid those mistakes with my own daughter. And I think it’s pretty clear, thanks to many years of therapy (my slap-UNhappy childhood resulted in more than enough issues to bog me down in my 20s!), that I understand what those mistakes were and how to avoid them. It will be work though – it’s so easy to fall into old behavior patterns that have been modeled for you consistently in your formative years. But that’s where the books and blogs and TV shows will help: little reminders of how not to become my mother.