My Son Had Fun While Being Punished.

Raising kids is no joke. And if you’re anything like me - a proud parent of wild, loud, feral children - then you know this s*** really is B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

I am extremely fortunate to have family who is very involved in my children’s’ lives. It is not lost on me how lucky we are to have grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends who live close by and make the effort to be a consistent friendly face. On days off from school, they often volunteer to pick them up and have special days full of crafts and trips, as well as special treats they don’t normally get on a daily basis.

This one particular day off, we had a plan in place for my two older children to have special time with their aunt. The days leading up were… hell… to put it kindly. For my eight year old, especially. To be honest, I don’t remember what the final straw was, but we had reached a point where I had to sit him down and say, “Hey listen, I can’t let you go with this kind of behavior.”

Maybe it is to a fault, but I typically do try to give my kids multiple chances to make better decisions before I fall back on taking things away. Unfortunately, the choices being made were unacceptable and I knew I had to keep him behind while his sister left for the day.

In anger, I fell back on familiar patterns in which I was raised in. These patterns looked a lot like wanting to make his day as miserable as possible in order to “teach him a lesson.”

In anger, I had plans to make him do chores from the moment his eyes opened.

In anger, I wanted to remove every toy and device he loved from this house.

In anger, I WANTED him to have a horrible day so that he would never make these kinds of decisions again. I wanted him to learn the hard way.

Here is the thing though, kids don’t possess logic or critical thinking skills at the level my anger believed he needed to learn at. Their frontal lobe, which is responsible for decision-making, is almost non-existent until adulthood. They literally rely on us to be their frontal-lobe.

So, here I am, in anger, thinking I’ve cracked the code to what will teach him a valuable lesson and then my brain did this thing it hadn’t really done before.

I paused and revisited all the moments I was in trouble as a child. How losing one toy often led to losing another. How terrible it felt to be punished for an entire day, or longer, and not being able to make the connection from my behavior to extremity of the punishment.

He already lost the trip. He understands why he lost the trip. I don’t need to make his life hell for being nothing more or less than a child.

What I can’t tell you is that losing this trip prevented him from ever making another mistake. What I can tell you is that having a living room picnic, hunting Pokémon on a walk, and watching a movie together while he simultaneously missed out on a trip reinforced that it’s OKAY to make a mistake. It reinforced that our actions do have consequences, but we are not bad people for making a mistake. It reinforced that I love him, regardless.

What I can also tell you is that a small piece of my inner child healed that day. By knowing I chose not to continue a fragment of the chaos I was raised in, I glued a tiny piece of myself back together.

It’s so easy to forget that our kids ARE KIDS; I have sweatshirts hanging in my closet that are older than him. I am as guilty as the next person for sometimes treating him as if he should know better, when in reality, he shouldn’t and doesn’t.

I’m proud of myself to being able to take that teeny pause before letting my anger win. I am proud of myself for doing the hard work, consistently, every day, to be able to break up the generational trauma cast upon myself and those in my lineage.

It’s a small win in a big puzzle. But a win, nonetheless.