Become A Robot

I’m a bad parent. I’m impatient, I’m inconsistent, and I frequently fail to realize that my eldest daughter’s behavior is PERFECTLY NORMAL for a two-year-old.  I almost always make my daughter’s tantrums worse by responding exactly the wrong way when she starts to get frustrated. She’s smart, funny, and sweet, and all I do is make her world an even more confusing and disappointing place.

A couple of days ago she was showing me some recent accomplishment of her’s (likely the way she had arranged some toys). No tantrums; no power struggles; just a happy child interacting with her parent.

But all of a sudden she looked at me with pleading eyes and said “Daddy BE HAPPY.”  Without even noticing it, I was being short with her. You can probably imagine my tone of voice (“Yes honey, I see your Elmo… Yes, he’s standing on the garbage can… yes, Elmo’s standing on the garbage can”), seeing only repetition as she gives words to the world around her and the things she’s done.

I could share a hundred worse stories here, especially concerning tantrums in public places and arguments with my wife, where I’ve later been ashamed of how I treated (or behaved around) my daughter.  Zygotedaddy laughs at his two-year-old’s tantrums and demands and has fun watching him “turn into a real person, with all of personhood’s accompanying idiosyncrasies, neuroses, and tics.”  Aside from the deveopment damage I’m probably doing to her, I really need to turn myself around before she can remember this stuff for the rest of her life.

A blog I subscribe too posted about a couple who brought bribe bags of candy with them on a recent airplane trip to help ease the pain and frustration of nearby passengers should their newborn son cause any unpleasantness. (And giving credit where it’s due, my brother-in-law suggested to me this weekend that we could hand out earplugs to airplane neighbors when we fly with the girls.)

The post mentions that the story of these parents doing this was found via the ‘parenthacks’ tag on Flickr. People who think they have a photo (and hopefully an explanation) of some trick to make parenting easier or better can include the tag ‘parenthacks’ on their photo to have it added to the Flickr stream.

So it was through the this tag that I saw this solution for preventing toddlers from accessing a bookshelf and tipping it over (crushing themselves), jumping off the top shelf (breaking themselves), or emptying the shelves and/or destroying books. I rearranged some furniture last night to make room for some new, used, donations, and somehow it was decided that my daughter’s room was the best place for an 8-foot-tall, narrow bookcase. We could screw it to the wall, but then she still has a nice tall ladder to climb and plenty of grown-up books to rip and color on. Covering the shelves within her reach with some kind of adult-removable, kid-friendly surface (I’m thinking magnetic board/paint as opposed to confusing her with a wall-sized surface you can write on) is brilliant.