The way I see it...

Being a Parent

I know I’ve said this before, but it’s hard being a parent! There are lessons you want to teach your kids and then there’s this fuzzy area when you have to deal with other people’s kids. Let me explain what happened.

We took the kids to a playground when we were in Sioux City and this older kid (maybe 7 or 8) was walking UP the slide (that is a huge pet peeve of mine, for the record) while my two-year-old son was just getting ready to go down. The other kid got to the top before Brody started to go down and told my son to, “Watch out!” My husband and I immediately both reacted about how to correctly use a slide.

You may be thinking this isn’t a big deal and maybe it’s not. Here’s the thing though: I harp on my kids about the correct way to use things like a slide or a swing. When they see other kids doing it the wrong way, they wonder why they can’t do what they’re doing. AH! Plus, isn’t an 8-year-old old enough to know better? I think so.

I had the same sort of incident happen here in State Center with a younger child. I politely told him he couldn’t walk up right then because my son was trying to go down. He (maybe 4) told me I was not the boss of him and I couldn’t tell him what to do! Wonderful. How in the world am I supposed to react to that? You know what I did? I bit my lip and just walked away, unsure of what to do.

Parenting doesn’t come with a manual and you just have to do what you feel is the right thing to do at that moment. I’ll just try to keep teaching my kids to do the right things and hope that it rubs off on those around them, but that’s just the way I see it.