Friends are good, right? You want kids to have friends, right? They are supposed to drive you crazy, right? Right?!
My kids are driving me crazy these days with behaviors I can track directly back to their friends. Eve has been full of the baby talk lately. Baby talk, baby behavior, baby, baby, baby. My “baby my baby” plan works sometimes, but more often I find myself annoyed and asking her to please, please use her big girl voice. We had a playdate last week with one friend and I realized that the baby talk Eve now uses is exactly the same as how her friend talks, and how her friend’s mom talks to them both. Ugh. This week we had a playdate with two kids from her class and I noticed that they both use baby talk. I guess maybe I’m just spoiled at how verbally advanced she is. Perhaps most three year olds do still talk with baby talk. Ugh. I really like when she uses real words. Really!
Our neighbor came over the other day.The three of them played for about an hour and at the end both of my kids were making fart jokes and calling each other “big fat poop heads.” Lovely conversation. We now have a “potty talk belongs in the bathroom” rule. I guess kids will learn such stuff, but it bugs me when I can so easily track it back to their friends. Maybe that’s a good thing though, maybe it would be worse if I didn’t know their friends and had no idea where the behavior was coming from.
Lex came home with a note yesterday on his sheet. He was really upset and kept telling me he was very angry about it. Apparently he was calling other kids names. “Big fat…” is what the note said. His teacher had him apologize to the other kids and she said it took him a lot of effort to do so, but afterwards he was fine for the rest of the day. I’m not sure if Lex was angry at his teacher for the note or at himself for the behavior. Either way, I don’t think he’ll do it again. I was secretly happy it happened because I’ve been asking the kids all week to stop with the name calling, but they don’t care. Clearly I need a better strategy, or a teacher to back me up! It was nice for him to get a chance to understand why I’ve been asking them to stop and to see that other people also have a problem with the behavior.
A friend yesterday was telling me that she’s working with teenagers who are homeschooled and she said they are super well behaved and studious and polite and and and… It made me wonder if exposure to bad behavior, like exposure to the chicken pox, is best had when the child is young and still moldable by a loving parent. Or is it better to wait until a child is older and potentially able to make more mature decisions… Love and Logic says it’s best to help kids develop those critical decision making skills (like don’t call classmates poop heads) when they are young and the consequences are still small. My mom says “small people, small problems. big people, big problems.” I guess I’d rather have them learn these behaviors, and their consequences, now when they are young. I’m hoping it will result in polite, well behaved teenagers. I can hope, right?!