As many of you know, I take part in a private Mommy Board online and frequently will mention it in passing. Today, a thread was started containing a handful of new articles pertaining to some outrageous stuff. A tattooed child, a 13 year old being charged with murder, and a mother who abused her daughter by super gluing her hands to a wall and beating her after she had a potty accident.
I had to leave the thread. I couldn't even get caught up in reading any more articles or I was going to explode.
Now, I'm a young mom. My husband and I started our family at young ages, and for the most part I'm grateful for that. I was 18 when we got married, he was 21. Our oldest daughter was born that year. So all in all, life smacked us in the face. A trend I've noticed is that younger parents tend to be more susceptible to immaturity when it comes to handling their children. For sure, I believe this is because they themselves are so young and haven't developed the mental capacity to control their emotions. Heck, at 18 I was still a child myself. That being said, I am learning every single day ways to adapt and evolve our lifestyle so that Husband and I are the kind of parents and people we would want our children to be.
So perhaps it's because I'm so young and because I don't have as many years under my belt with child rearing, but I tend to find myself in a very confused and overwhelmed state when it comes to discipline. I'm not against spanking. Never have been, probably never will be. I was spanked as a child and I'm no worse off for it. At least not that I know of.
I find myself wondering how to tell. How do we know what way is the right way? I mean, generations of people before myself were spanked, weren't they? Would my grandparents have hesitated to put their children in their place? Would they have feared that their children would grow up to shoot them with a loaded gun (heck these days you don't even have to grow up for this to be the case)? Now don't get me wrong, I believe that our grandparents still dealt with (to an extent) the issues of having a mouthy teenager. Or an insolent two year old. Heck, I'm sure they dealt with the same exact adolescent behaviors that we as parents deal with now. But no one was walking around telling them they would be arrested if they spanked their child. No one was telling them that their methods of discipline were wrong. So how do we know if it was actually right?
On the flip side, how do we know that there aren't lasting effects, and that the reason there is so much more abuse against children now isn't because of the confines generations before us were raised in?
I am seriously scared for the way the world is changing. I do believe that it's not so much that the crimes have increased, it's that the crimes have been exposed, however, that doesn't stop me from wondering why it is so common to hear of children committing adult crimes, and of adults committing crimes against children. All of it makes me sick to my stomach and causes me to almost question everything I do as a parent. How do I know that what I'm doing is right? How do I tell if my "effective" methods aren't actually setting my kids up for failure as adults?
And am I suddenly going to start exhibiting traits of mental and emotional instability because of the way I was disciplined? Am I quick to anger because I was spanked, or because I am young and my hormones are still unbalanced?
Does every parent feel this way?? Does every parent wonder if they are doing it right? Does every parent fear that someone is going to snatch their children up if they make a mistake? Why does this world suck so much and who is right about how to handle these rising trends of misbehaved children and out of control parenting?
I'm at a loss readers. I don't know what is right, and I don't know what is wrong. I wonder to myself if the child who grabbed a gun at 13 and shot his grandparents was lacking discipline, or had too much. I am wondering if the mother who beat her two year old was at her wits end and lost control, or if she too could have been a victim growing up.
As for the tattooing, hell, I don't know what to think about that. Clearly someone believed that mother wasn't capable of deciding what was o.k. for her child and what wasn't. And clearly that mother believed her child had developed the mindset to understand the permanence of a tattoo, which in my opinion is ridiculous. But does that mean her rights as a parent to decide should be stripped from her?
Next thing I know, people will be arrested for something as everyday as piercing their daughter's ears as a baby, without her consent. That however, is a whole other playing field. Perhaps my follow up will be "Are we as parents giving our children too much room in the decision making process?"
For now I'm going to just sit and stew. I'm going to reflect on how to "Properly Raise A Child". I will research all the different methods, and perhaps the ones I scoffed at are worth a shot. I mean, I wouldn't want to make my kids unstable would I? I wouldn't want to contribute to anger issues and emotional trauma.
And of course I wouldn't want to be that mom who has lost all control. This is a conundrum friends, a real conundrum. Feel free to let me know what you think. I'm curious about all the different methods out there and if you all are figuring out things that work!
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