As moms, we often find ourselves proud of the strangest things. Like our baby’s ability to get a spoon to his mouth with some food still on it. Or our toddler’s first poop in the potty. This is one of those things. But if you’ve been following my blog, or have your own oppositional child, read on and clap along with me, because this is a HUGE milestone for The Challenging One!
The Exuberant One and The Easy One are playing soccer, and The Challenging One hates going to practice. Since he’s been doing so much better, I agreed to let him stay home. He treasures the peace and quiet, and it’s a lot easier on me; when I forced him to go to practice with us on Monday, he wound up on top of the dugout on the baseball field and was about to slide down the roof when he got busted. (And if, after reading that, you still think I’m a bad parent for leaving him home by himself, I was half a mile away, and he knows my phone number.)
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…
When we left for practice, The Challenging One had 15 minutes of Minecraft time left. I told him I trusted him to do the right thing, and he promised me he would. I had my doubts but decided to roll with it.
When we got home, he asked me if he could show his brother something on Minecraft. His behavior has been great, so I said, “Sure, just give me a minute.” But when I went to log him in a few minutes later, he was already playing. Oops. I called him out on it, explaining that the only possible way he would have been able to get on without asking me to log him in is if he had played right up until the second he heard the garage door go up. True to character, he denied it and expressed great righteous indignation that I didn’t trust him. I said, “OK,” in that mom voice that means, “I know you’re lying, but I’ll leave it alone now and bring it back up when you least expect it.” Because once The Challenging One takes a stand, he doesn’t back down. A silly little thing like hard evidence doesn’t even phase him. So it’s often much better to save it until the next issue of trust comes up. It saves a fight and stockpiles ammo at the same time.
But a few minutes later, out of the blue, he yelled, “OK, I played!”. While picking myself up off the floor, I asked him what he thought we should do about it. He replied that I should either send him to bed early or take away his game privileges.
At that point, I was so proud of him that I did neither of those things. I gave him a pass on any punishment other than having to use his game time only when I’m home from now on. And he actually thought that was fair.
So, yes….one of my best parenting moments is when my child admitted breaking a rule and lying. Because it alleviates two of my biggest concerns about him:
- He actually does have a conscience.
- He is able to be rational. He recognized that I had him dead to rights and that there was no logical excuse he could come up with. And he didn’t start throwing out irrational excuses like, “The computer is lying.”
And here’s the other thing: I would have done the same thing at his age. And I was no Challenging One; I was The Good Kid. I made straight As, never got in trouble at school, and rarely got in trouble at home. But, because of those things, I thought I had earned the right to ignore arbitrary rules. And that one would have struck me as arbitrary (if, at the time, I had any concept of “game time” as anything other than the moment of kickoff). So I knew I was leading him into temptation when I left him logged in while I was gone. But did he ever make me proud! 😉
I'm a mom to three stair steps (all 3 born in under 3 years), one of whom struggles with OCD, ADHD and a few other things. I wrote professionally for 12 years before quitting to stay home with my kids.
Life on the Stair Steps 
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