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Thank you everyone for your great posts so far. It's much better than what i thought it was going to be when i started the thread. Keep sharing, as there are many valuable lessons in the 3 pages we've got so far!
Based on my own parents actions and habits, I would hope that more parents who decide to rely on max power as the major card in raising a child would stop to think: Will this be another time I get my way, or will it be the time I lose my child?
Child #1 - I didn't push hard enough at her school when she first started, to get her appropriate services. I naively assumed the school would see her needs and respond in her best interest. They didn't, and I waited longer than I should have, to get involved.
Child #2 - When she was 5, she had a bad cold, which I thought was nothing, turned out to be an asthma attack which ended up requiring emergency treatment and hospitalization. She had come to me in the middle of the night saying she couldn't breathe well, and I assumed it was because her nose was stuffed up, so I told her to breathe through her mouth. She laid beside me for several hours that night, breathing heavily and not sleeping. She had no history of asthma and I thought she was being dramatic because I couldn't magically cure her stuffy nose. In the a.m. she also complained of an ear ache, and as she did have a history of ear infections, that's what prompted me to take her to the doctor. When we got there, she did indeed have a double ear infection, but her oxygen levels were dangerously low and they called an ambulance to take her to the ER when they couldn't stabilize her.
Child #3 - I let him watch too much TV. I was so much better about this with my older two, but he wears me down, and his watching TV is a break for me, too.
Dumbest thing I have done as a parent (both my kids are under 6) is not feeding them what my husband and I ate at mealtimes. I stupidly bought into the whole Gerber/special "kid" foods and that they NEEDED those foods as children- DUMB DUMB DUMB. Now my youngest is super-picky and my eldest is just now starting to eat some things that we eat. The hubs and I have put our feet down, though, and only don't serve them foods that we're sure that they won't even entertain, i.e. really spicy stuff. If they don't eat what they're served, they don't eat until the next meal. Puts my stomach in knots when they "go hungry" and the mommy guilt seeps out of me but I don't want to back down because I want them to just EAT, LOL.
Spending a ton of money on a beach vacation when my son was just under 2. He was miserable the whole time, missed his own bed, was afraid of the water, and there was really nothing for him to do there. We couldn't eat in restaurants because he wouldn't behave for more than minutes (one of us always ended up outside with him), and basically the place that was always so relaxing before was anything but.
Now I plan only kid-friendly vacations - it's not a vacation for anyone if the kid is bored.
Seems like a lot of people do this
I rather do a small vacation that my kids enjoy than a big expensive vacation where I'm gonna be stressed out and nobody enjoys.
My daughter had a dee-dee. It was a favorite receiving blanket. My mom, planning ahead, bought two extra "just in case". (Smart Grandma.)
By the time DD was six she'd managed to reduce all three of them to nearly a handful of strings. Mostly she didn't use it except for nap time and bed time.
I honestly don't know why I thought I had to take it away from her. She didn't ever take it out of the house and I don't remember it annoying me. But just before she started first grade I told her that now she was a big girl and she didn't need her baby stuff anymore.
I've got to be careful not to beat myself up about this but many has been the time I've felt badly for taking away from her a source of security and comfort for any reason.
After that she had trouble going to sleep and still has difficulty calming down to rest at forty-two. What was I thinking?
Thanks! I never stifled my children. She's 29 years old now and about to be engaged.
I guess the moral of the story was to refrain from putting our own bad experiences, biases, and fears onto our children. Their life experiences will be different than ours.
Of course, we should counsel them not to date that druggie or bad boy, to stay in school; things like that.
Actually, after that happened and I realized how my ranting was affecting her, I stopped thinking about my experiences so often, and it has been very good for me to let go of all those negative feelings!
In so many ways this is just the neatest story. I'm impressed. It's always out of my most unpleasant experiences that I learn the most.
I'm not a parent, but this stuff is really nice to read. I think there are a lot of really great parents on these boards. My mother has never expressed a single regret or mistake in her raising of me, and that kind of hurts because there were actually a lot of failures. If I ever mention anything in passing, she gets crazy-defensive falls back on "I did the best I could" which is really kind of ridiculous, because it wasn't like she was under any great hardship. She was unhappy in her marriage, and she took it out on me.
My father - not the biggest guy for self-examination - said to me recently that he really should have handled the divorce better for my sake when we were talking about my long-ago depression issues, and I almost fell apart. It wasn't the cause of my depression (or at least it was only a minor cause among many bigger causes), but I just appreciated that it was something he thought about and could acknowledge, because it's not in his nature to do that. It's kind of like my father is not at his core a really good person, but he always made the extra effort to be the dad I needed. My mother just tried to live vicariously through me and freaked out when I didn't make the same choices or develop the same tastes she would have.
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