Perseverance is hard. You don’t often hear about someone having to persevere through a vacation. Yet, its one of those characteristics people desire because its critical in so many areas of our lives. With this in mind, I’m PERSEVERING in teaching my boys about persevarance…. and its quite lible to kill me!
I hope any that read this, know by now my stance on mothering… to each their own. God gave me my boys, for me to raise, cause He’s got a plan for their lives no other set of parenting skills could help realize. If you love your kids, you are doing what you think is best for them. Period. So please don’t take anything I write out of context as superiority or grounds to question my parenting style.
We support independance round here. At a rather young age. We support the cry it out method for sleep modeling, the shake it off method for injuries not resulting in blood, dressing ones self despite the unique outcomes, etc… However, this is obviously an evolution from the 100% dependence of that first year.
Where we’ve found ourselves in the spectrum of this evolution is an entirely capable 4 year old that chooses to ‘quit’ when something get’s difficult. It wasn’t so long ago, that when the going got tough mom and dad would come to the rescue. I still get the nagging ‘mommy thought’ that he’s only JUST 4, he’s still my baby. Then I watch the news and see a society of ‘babies’ and KNOW its my job to practice perseverance and watch him fail, and get frustrated, yet encourage him to TRY again.
He’s not the only one getting his perseverance tested. We were at Barnes & Nobel today, and after reading him 3 books, I told him I wanted him to sound out the title of the 4th book with me “Trucks & Tractor’s”, and if he could do that, I’d read him the book. It started off successfully, he pointed and correctly named all the letters in the title, then we moved to the sounds of the letters, and it quickly went down hill from there. Mind you, I was saying EVERYTHING, and asking him to simply repeat. In the span of one minute I’d make the sound for “T”…. pause… pause… pause “Buddy, what did mama just say?”. Caleb’s response the sound for “S”. Try again. Fail. Try again. Fail. “Caleb, I need you to try, I don’t feel like you’re even listening to me.” I started to speed up the sounding it out, so I was basically SAYING “Trucks”, and asking him what I was saying, his response “Cars”.
Seriously?
So I calmly tell him to put the book away, I can tell he’s not ready to try this today and we’ll try again another day. He starts in with the whining of how he wants me to read it to him, yada yada yada… not gonna happen buddy.
Luckily after explaining this story to a girlfriend she recommended a book for me to try “Teach Your Child to Read in a 100 Lessons”…. She had me when she said it took 5 minutes a day. I’ll be picking this up tomorrow!