On the third night of Sukkos (Friday night), my family was invited together with several others to the sukka of the rabbi of the city.  I stayed home with ds12 who was at the beginning of his chickenpox saga, but the rest of the family went and enjoyed themselves very much.  They told me the rabbi’s wife was very nice, and yesterday at synagogue (the first time I went out with the kids in a week, because they still have pox marks on their face), she saw dd15 and asked her if I was there , since we hadn’t had a chance to meet yet.

So I finally met her, and she really is very, very nice!  I like her very much. She told me how impressed she was with our children – she couldn’t believe how nicely they behaved without a mother there to keep them in line – and I told her how nice that was to hear, since I think they need a serious workup in  behavior right now. 🙂

Recently, my older kids complained to me about the behavior of the littles – they’ve told me that they’re on their way to becoming spoiled brats.  They’re a bit strong in how they’re phrasing it – they’re far from obnoxious little kids – but they’re right that there’s definitely plenty of room for improvement.  With six months of preparing for our move to Israel, and then two months of being so busy setting up our lives here, I’ve been mentally less focused on the family itself than usual.  And what that has meant is that I’ve let my standards for the kids’ behavior drop.

I was conscious of making the choice at a very busy time to keep the time I was with the littles positive rather than sporadically discipline them (dd14 at the time was frequently watching them while I was making calls and organizing things, and I couldn’t ask her to do what I would have done), but my older kids saw this as letting the littles get away with things that I’d never have let them do. This was mostly about the attitude rather than actual behavior.  I believe it’s important to pick a standard of what’s acceptable in your home, and then to stick with it.  If you can’t stick with it, you’re compromising yourself, because your kids won’t trust that you mean what you say. And so I decided to let some things go rather than be inconsistent.

I know quite well what’s involved with a major retraining process – I took on this process once before, six years ago.  At that time, I looked at the kids and thought, everyone thinks they’re so well-behaved, but it doesn’t feel like it to me, and is parenting supposed to be this hard?  I wasn’t enjoying being with them, and a big part of that it felt like I always had to correct someone about something, break up some argument, or whatever.  But that wasn’t their fault, it was mine because I hadn’t taught them better.  And I’ve recently been feeling the way I felt six years ago.

This process of consciously raising the bar of your expectations for your family is very, very intense, and it’s the only thing you can plan on doing for about a week.  This has logistically been challenging since we were dealing with a few weeks of Jewish holidays, guests, and six kids with chickenpox, in addition to the usual stuff.  So you can understand my reluctance to start this process.

And then it has to stay a high priority for about three months until the new standards become second nature, and of course you have to continue to maintain these standards.   Part of the approach is based on total focus, and I was unsure how well this would work with everyone in school; in fact, the last couple of days the littles went back to school and it’s slowing down the learning process (because there they see behavior and attitudes that are unacceptable in our home).

The reason it take a huge amount of time, energy, and focus, is that during this stage I feel it’s critical to be 100% consistent to follow up with every single tiny issue.  Usually this level of consistency isn’t necessary as a parent, but when redefining boundaries, it’s very important.  This isn’t a common approach, but it’s my approach.

And so the last few days have been very draining.  (Which is why I haven’t been blogging; I fall into bed exhausted at night! :P)   This process means a parent has to expect some major power struggles, the kind of thing that we otherwise don’t see.  I knew this, and that’s why I needed to be fully mentally present to deal with it all calmly, and not to be so busy that I couldn’t see it through.

We had a guest for the last three days of yom tov (well, it was three days for her), and her time with us coincided with the first few days of this process.  She probably thought I was incredibly controlling and nitpicky (since I was insisting that things be done exactly as I asked, to teach them to listen to what they’re told).

In the beginning,  there’s a good bit of resistance and testing from the littles.  They want to show me that they’ll do what they want, and I need to teach them that they need to listen to their parent.  So this process means I had to expect power struggles at a level never seen before.  And I mean never.  (The two power struggles from six years ago have now become the stuff of family lore. :)) But that’s okay, I actually welcome these because I see them as a chance to show them that I will calmly outlast them.  After holding ds4 for almost two hours straight of crying, screaming, kicking, hitting, and squirming – because I told him to stand next to me and he wanted to do it his way – I was exhausted.  But it’s okay, because once there’s one major blow up, it kind of gets it out of their system – they see you mean what you say and they don’t need to keep pushing you to see how long they have to tantrum before you give in.

Then yesterday was ds2’s turn to escalate.  Ds2 is amazingly sweet and helpful, always running to do whatever I ask, even when I’m not asking him!  But yesterday he lost it over a pair of underwear.  I gave him a choice of two pairs, he chose the one he wanted – and then went to ds4’s drawer and started screaming for one of those. His tantrum was shorter – not quite an hour, but it sure felt like a long time!  I held him on my lap in a bear hug for the entire time, reminding him that he could wear the underwear he chose and that’s it.   What was interesting for both of these tantrums was that as soon as they finished screaming, they took a deep sigh, went off my lap, and then came back right away to sit on my lap, facing towards me with their arms around me, and stayed there for a long time.  Being strong and being loving aren’t contradictions; our kids need and want the security of knowing we can and will enforce what we say.

This is a retraining for me, too, because this process isn’t mostly about discipline.  It’s about being with your kids, enjoying them, and spending lots of time doing stuff together.  Versus letting them play while you get the things you want done.  So it’s a lot of togetherness, and that takes adjusting to since over the years, my older kids have been so involved in the fun stuff with their younger siblings that I became less involved in the hands-on activities and did more of the not so fun stuff, like running the house.  But now the older kids aren’t around as much, and it’s a shift back to how it was years ago, when I didn’t have older kids around.  It’s a very significant shift for me.

My hope is that I’ll have the strength and emotional fortitude to hold out for what I think our family can be, rather than letting it be whatever it turns into, and that G-d will give me the desire and ability to see it through.

Avivah