Monday 16 June 2008

Another moment of Parental Inspiration

Intellectually and theoretically I know it. I advise others about it often. I'm pretty much aware every time I fall foul of it myself - and berate myself endlessly about it. But actually doing something about it invariably proves extremely difficult.

What am I talking about? Quite simply, the blatant, unassailable fact that kids don't deal very well with distracted parents.

When parents become distracted and preoccupied, we lose patience with our kids, as our attention and focus are elsewhere. If things are anything like our house, as parents we become increasingly reliant upon siblings, computers and TVs to provide our children's entertainment, so that we can have some peace and quiet to devote to our current distractions.

Sooner rather than later the sibling rivalry kicks off in time-honoured fashion with squealing and squabbling, as it becomes increasingly apparent that our children cannot be in the same room as each other without World War Three breaking out. In reaction to the bickering we temporarily awaken from our preoccupations to shout at them and tell them to behave themselves, so that we can go back into our own extremely important parallel universe of distraction and preoccupation.

All in all the children end up feeling not a little abandoned and "got at", which in turn triggers a feeling of insecurity. This then triggers attention-seeking behaviour in them, which in turn pushes the parents to impose increasingly punitive measures, until we've nowhere left to go short of locking our children in their rooms and forgetting about them for a bit. We all know that feeling of utter exhausted helplessness when we've literally run out of sanctions and threats, and our kids are still driving us up the wall.

If you can relate to this in any way I recommend you take a moment to step back and assess how distractedly you are behaving towards your children, and how much you're trying to put them off in favour of "more pressing and important" things.

It all came to a head for me this weekend when my own feelings of guilt at putting off my own kids yet again finally imploded. I decided that a family conference was needed and that we all needed to pay more attention to each other instead of hiding ourselves in our separate rooms to indulge our separate distractions.

I told my son that he needed to spend less time on his computer as it was making him forget how to relate to people rather than machines (Oh physic - heal thyself!!) And I told my hubby that we both needed to make more of an effort to be with the kids when they come home from school so that we can start getting on better as a family.

Of my daughter I shared my observations that her listlessness and disinclination to eat properly at mealtimes is directly linked to how much time she was getting to share with us after school instead of being mesmerised by the Cartoon Network.

My request was that this week we try an experiment - that we all try to resist electronic media as much as possible so we get to do other activities together and we get to talk more.

In response to this our five-year-old daughter became extremely animated, and started making suggestions about all the things she's been dying for us all to do together if only we'd been less distracted - "We could play a game, or go to the park after tea, or go swimming after school, or we could all go to the playing field and you can play cricket while I ride round on my bike without stabilisers...."

It's heart-breaking really.

Meanwhile our ten-year-old son has already become a bit of a hardened cynic and he began his habitual snarling at each of his sister's suggestions (except maybe the one about cricket). For this he received a severe dressing down from his father, who also agreed to make more of an effort when the kids are home from school to do stuff instead of languishing in front of his PC.

So, as a result of our family conference we have enjoyed an extremely pleasant weekend. On Friday afternoon we went to watch some Twenty20 Cricket in Bristol; on Saturday afternoon we went to watch the kids play golf in their respective tournaments, then in the evening we played Sorry instead of putting the telly on; yesterday for Fathers' Day we did a bit of a cycle ride around Swindon, called at a pub with a playground for a couple of drinks, then came home for a barbecue.

The kids have been a lot calmer, brighter and happier, they have played together really nicely, and to top it all our daughter ate 3 lamb kebabs for tea last night, which is some kind of record on her recent eating form.

The only reason why changing our experience is ever difficult is because habits are easily formed but tricky to break. It's so easy to fall into lazy habits as a family and not take the time to share activities and be together. Playing board games, joining in their play and enjoying the long days to go out for a walk or bike ride after tea are little ways to reconnect with our kids and put our own distractions to one side. I've noticed that not only does it help our kids behave better, it also makes the distractions far less preoccupying and significant.

The more we're aware of our habits, the more chance we've got to change them.

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