i think what the commune people did to your aunt was very cruel and cowardly. the mother should have spoken to the kid about the issue, not pawn it off on poor betty. that sucks. if i were that kid i'd be mad, too.

again, i will re-iterate that the "big kid" motivation is useful if and when the child is *ready* to do whatever it is, ie: use the potty, give up the bottle or binky, sleep in their own bed. the kid has to be ready for this to work. you have to parent the individual child. if you force a kid to do something they don't want or aren't ready to do no argument is going to be positive.....everything will be coercive.

evi

>>>so he looked at her and said his first words: "Fuck you, Betty" <<<

holy cow. wow. smart kid.

as i said in the other thread, i have my own early memory of this, which is that i was told i could wear a certain dress if i would stop drinking out of a bottle. and i remember being pissed off because the bottle was necessary for comfort and joy and the dress was so beautiful and it seemed plain it wasn't hurting anyone for me to have both of these joyous things. i could not have been more than 4.5 or so.

i was a precocious child in a lot of ways and was very clear about how i wanted to be grown up and when. i wanted my period, pantyhose, leg shaving around 9. earlier than that i remember primarily wanting not want to be punished, sent away, treated punitively. i wanted to not be excluded from conversations. i wanted words not to be spelled so that i could not understand what was being said. i wanted to know about anything that seemed secret. i wanted to be able to eat when i was hungry and i did not want to eat dead animals after i was five.

i remember the feeling of climbing into the warm spot left by either of my parents when they got up in the morning. i have very few positive memories of my parents together, but that early morning bed time is one of the few. it must have been a special place and feeling for me. i think it might have been very nourishing to be able to actually sleep in with them, though i understand parents' need for space and privacy.

my partner and i are talking about the difference between living in a safe community where there are lots of kids running around playing, resting, whatever in communal space. part of what makes isolated nuclear family so difficult is that parents are often the only community the little ones have, aren't they? and so sending them away must feel so different from providing them an atmosphere where there are other, magnetic people and things going on.

on the other hand, i know that many of the kids who grew up on israeli communes (kibbutzim) a generation or so ago slept in kids' houses with adults taking turns in there -- and the kids still seemed to specifically want their own moms and dads -- and so this may just be the case that no matter how you set it up they want you more than anybody else a lot of the time or at bed time.

perhaps if a child can be persuaded happily out of the parental bed with an offer of making a bear or getting to sleep with a boobah, they are ready. i'm not sure how to think about this stuff yet. the uncomfortable feelings i have about it may be mere projection. i don't know. i think i would like to be careful about asking my child to make those kinds of choices and how to do it. i think sleeping alone, giving up bottles, etc. may be things that children go ready for on their own without negotiation, and if so why speed the process with negotiation?

I agree that if our worst failure is the occasional shortcut of using phrases like 'because I said so' then we haven't done too badly. I guess I worry, though, that lapsing into these shortcuts because it's convenient in the moment could snowball into a place of disconnection where my son doesn't trust me to tell him the truth or give him really useful information about the situations he is facing in life. I am lucky in that I am a SAHM and I have structured my life in such a way that I am sure to always have the time to do that with Sam. That doesn't mean I always have the patience!

He actually isn't at the age where he asks why a lot, he just yells really loud when things aren't going his way, but even though he's not very articulate, he gets what I'm saying to him so I always explain. Sometimes the explanation is no more than this--because I'm really tired and I feel really grumpy and doing this thing you want to do is going to make me feel even more grumpy, so I'm not going to do it. It takes a few more seconds than saying because I said so, and maybe means almost the same thing, but rather than being a top down edict with no reason behind it, there's some honesty about what I as a person am capable of and why I can't give him what he feels like he needs in that moment.

It's taken me a while to get to this place of realizing that I don't have to give a long detailed and often contrived explanation, like you can't stay up all night because it's bad for you blah, blah, blah, but that it is more honest and natural to just say, I don't have it in me to do this with you, I'm too tired and if we're going to make this partnership of ours a joyful one, I need to get some sleep and I need you to do that with me. Sam is not quite two so maybe it's early days yet, but I find that this is working for us.