Sleeping with the enemy

Quite frankly Jonah’s being a right little shit lately, and I don’t say it lightly. Toddlerdom was bad enough but as we hurtle toward his tweens, I haven’t got the physical strength to deal with his tantrums and does he ever know it.

I have implemented a ‘rise above it policy’ duplex wide. The alpha male rears up from Tom’s habitual beta mode, fed up to the back teeth of the cries of “it’s not fair” that are hollered around our small living space. As my handmade liberty cushions are hurtled around in a show of immature aggression when all we’ve done is ask Jonah to brush his teeth,  my husband has begun to bite back through gritted jaws.

It is pointless to respond. Any reaction will elicit a repeat of the behaviour. It is a fact I observed when the children were babies. Throwing a dish off the table was an experiment in human manipulation. React, and undoubtedly the behaviour would be repeated. Ignore it, and the behaviour would soon enough cease to become an interesting game for your pint sized psychologist.

Children are arch manipulators, skilled in getting their parents to dance to their tune. I see it with friends’ kids, slave to their bawling infant, they repeatedly obey their toddlers’ insistence on getting into their bed at 5.00 am despite a broken night of shrieking demands for milk.

Stop allowing it, and eventually your demi despot will give up and go back to sleep. You may need to wear ear plugs while the tiny tyrant is assimilating this new regime, but assuredly, in two weeks time, your little angel will be sleeping peacefully through till seven.

It gets boring hearing parents complain about their kids. In most cases, the behaviour has been entirely enabled by them. I am aware of this, which is why I am happy to accept my fair share of the blame for Jonah’s objectionableness. But when he melts down in the public domain, my cheeks burn for the perceived judgement of others, who I assume on some level blame me too for his behaviour – after all, it’s a meme – ‘blame the parents’ – and to my shame, I do it all the time.

However, experts agree I am dealing with a force of nature that I have not entirely been in control of with Jonah. My best efforts at good parenting have resulted in a child who is defiantly determined to get his own way at all costs, and in the end, that’s almost what I allow – having tried a variety of other methods. It’s easier, and he self regulates if he’s left to his own devices. And I have also raised the most well behaved child in the whole world in the form of Ava, who I have systematically ignored since birth, and my god, I can testify to its effectiveness as a parenting policy.

I know that Jonah is baiting us when he hurls cushions around the room – particularly as he knows it generally gets my goat when I find my beautiful silk handicrafts – homemade to boot – on the floor.

And let’s face it, I’m no saint – he’s seen me lose it  on a fairly regular basis but if I lose it over this  then cushion hurling will become a regular part of his tantrum repertoire whenever he fails to get his own way. Ignore it and it will cease.

It’s the same hackenyed line parents spin generation after generation about bullies, and I never personally found it to work all that well, but then, I’ve never been the type to not want to have my say… But I have at least learned to keep schtum with Jonah, and most of the time, it’s a pretty effective counter weapon.

At the end of the day, despite having hurled childish obscenities around as well as cushions, he still wants a mama cuddle  in bed before he goes to sleep.  There are days when I’m not that up for it, believe me.

But yesterday, with Tom out for the whole night (at a “Now We Are 40” school reunion that was too naff for me to get bothered by – yes he hits a big birthday next week which I’m not sure how I feel about) and I, tipsy on spritzers having met up with the rest of the reprobate mums and their unruly offspring in the park before heading to the pub for the first sunny bottle or three of the year,  was on my own to do dinner and bed and was wondering how I’d cope without my right hand man. So I fudged dinner and curled up in bed to shut my eyes while Jonah watched The Cube– it was a Saturday and he’s old enough to cope with the odd late night.

Once I’d explained how to hug me – it doesn’t come organically to Jonah –  he’s all angles and bones – so “bottom into my tummy Jonah, no, bottom, not elbows…,” we settled down and drifted off to sleep together for the first time since he was a babe in arms.

He woke me having a violent tantrummy nightmare at 1 am-ish, and again at 7.00 am, wanting me to get up and play Pokemon, but the parental uber dictator in me knows better than to allow him too much control, so I sent him on his way and enjoyed an extra hour and half of drift.  But it felt nice to sleep next to him… despite, and because of my hard and fast rules, there are only so many times I will be able to sleep with my child until it becomes weird. So it’s okay to bend the rules once in a while. Just not too often or else they will own your arse.