I do not know if you have done them now that you are waiting for a baby or if you did them before becoming parents, but many couples, either because they have spoken, either individually, get an idea of what type of parents they will be or how they will do it before they are and promises are made about it, something like "when I am a father I will do this ..." or "when I am a mother I will not do that".
These are phrases, ideas and promises that appear when we think about how our parents raised us and, above all, when they see other parents take care of their children. Your friend, who "looks at how she talks to her son", your brother, who "looks at what he feeds him", your brothers-in-law, who "are all day with the child in their arms" and thus with various circumstances or events what do they do to you make several promises before being a father that… well, then, we don't keep.
My children are only going to eat healthy food
Look, I've seen a baby in the street eating worms, and a little boy there, give him that I hit the candy, and my sister has taken the children to McDonald's, and my friend celebrated the child's birthday, with the children Children of the class, in the Burguer, and I have seen your nephew with a cupcake of those roses, to know what it takes.
And hey, they are absolutely right, that the industrial bakery to know what it takes, that it smells like oil or wax, that what a young child needs to eat candy, that fast food is not good for children (like more fast food, worse learning ability), that birthdays better to celebrate with homemade snacks, and not in a place of hamburgers and fries, and that children's snacks, today, leave much to be desired (where the hell is the sandwich of a lifetime?).
But telling yourself that your children will only eat healthy food is a difficult promise to keep. Not impossible, of course, but unlikely. Because the day comes when you don't have time to make food and you say "well, today we buy food." The other day I even read a graphic joke that said "sometimes I am so tired after shopping for food that when I get home I don't feel like cooking it!" It's like that, there are days that you look, you don't arrive, or you don't feel like it, and you end up catching the child and getting into a place like those with dirty food. That hears, I know it's wrong, but today I skip the rules and put it between my chest and back, and the child, well, the same.
(By the way, for the record: the father Armando is speaking, not the nurse Armando. If he found out what I just said ...).
Only eat sweets on birthdays
Continuing with the previous promise, he will only eat candy, and drink Coca-Cola and Fanta on birthdays. Yes, until the grandmother brings you candies or yourself, so that he stops at once, you let him take in the supermarket's queue, next to the box, where they are within reach, a candy or a chocolate bar. After taking 127 things and you put them back in their place, to see that the one in front has a car that looks like it is going to be put in a bunker for 6 months and that the next thing is to lie on the ground or throw everything that is at his hand he takes, walks, a "patchouli" and fix it. And there will other times of the day with more peace of mind to educate your tolerance for frustration.
He will dress as he wants
This is me. I have always said that my children will go as they wish. If you want this or that shirt, let them decide. If you want this or that pants, go ahead. But look, then when you have children you just act as a filter, because it is not the same to go for a walk than to go to an important event and it is not the same to go to school, where they better wear comfortable clothes and can easily get off to to pee or poop, to go to eat at grandma's house, where his cousins also go, who always go so handsome that yours seems to have just rescued him from a war.
And it's not just what I think, it's that in this clothing there is also the woman, and that yes that is an inescapable filter (I am generalizing, always there are exceptions).
- What do I wear, honey?
- What you want. A pair of pants and a shirt ... (Minutes later) But what have you put on it?
- Well, pants and a shirt.
- Go, but if that doesn't work. Can't you see that this pants goes with that shirt that I bought the other day, which has blue tones like the pants?
-…
And it is that a woman can not allow her children to go around the world poorly dressed, and less if she goes to her mother's house or your mother to eat. Why? Well, as one psychologist explained to me one day: "Women make a final review of how their children are doing because they unconsciously feel that the image projected by their children will show how well or badly their mother takes care of them", that is to say, that he will not let you take him around the house if he runs the risk of someone thinking "look at that child, how his mother carries him".
I will not let them jump on the couch or in the beds
Well, that. The bed is sacred and the sofa has cost us a lot of money, so nothing to have them as wild jumping on the sofa. Nothing, until you realize that they have much more energy than you and that, or you take it to burn it somewhere (to play with it on the street, in the park or anywhere), or it will jump on the couch. And sometimes, even when you've done it, they jump the same way. So you end up letting them jump because in total, the furniture is getting worse (scratches, bumps, tribal paint, etc.) and so the sofa doesn't catch up.
Also, let's be honest: won't it be that we envy them because they didn't let us and now they won't let us do it?
I will never yell at you
This is me too. Until I saw myself at home with three children. Since then I have it very clear: when someone gives me paternity advice, before I continue I will say "how many children do you have?"Because if he tells me that he has one or two, he may grimace at mecachis, they are not enough." I had one and I never yelled at him, I never hit him and I never threatened him or punished him. I had two and I never yelled at them. I hit them and never threatened or punished them. I had three and I yelled at them, I have not hit them (I count for hitting those cheeks on time, those who say they are educational) and I have not punished them, but yes threatened. That's why I don't have a room, because of the risk of having to move to another country and change my name.
On other occasions I have talked about it here. I am not proud, every time I shout at you it is a shout more than I would like to have released, but They are children, they are three, they are beings in formation capable of doing things that I do not understand (I understand why they do them, because they are small, but I do not understand that they hurt each other), and that I cannot stand… I try to respect them and teach them to be respectful, and I think they are, and a lot, but in the moments of conflict, when they lose their papers, a lot of damage can be done and there I appear from the distance shouting like a possessed "Enough! Do not hurt yourself!" or when they are small and solve their anger by throwing everything on the floor "Ok!", or when you say "stay on the couch that I scrub" without need, because they were already on the sofa but let them know just in case and seconds later one appears running that goes for I don't know what you just need at that moment "Go back to the couch that you are going to kill!".
They are not screams with the message sent by other parents: "You are useless!" or "I told you! You never listen to me! Now you get mad!" or "You are the worst! A useless!", which are terribly harmful, because they are screaming and because those words are etched in a child's mind and self-esteem, but hey, I'd rather tell you things without shouting.
My children will adapt to our lives from the beginning
And when the baby is born I will take advantage of the maternal permission to do I do not know what and I do not know what and how much we are to go out with friends, because we will take it and make it adapt to our lives, to be one more.
Yes, of course, as if the babies had "On" and "Off", or as if they listened to you or came prepared to fit the lives of their parents. No, this is not usually the case. In any case, it is the parents who adapt to the baby, for its own sake (the good of the parents, I mean).
They will sleep in their cribs and not in our bed
I had my first child one or two months when a woman, mother, told me that many nights her daughter ended up sleeping with her in bed. I found it irresponsible and a woman with little willpower. That is why I understand that people do not see well that I ended up sleeping with my children, because if you have not done it, if you have not lived it, you cannot see it logical.
No, you get used to it, then you can't get them out of the room, everyone has to have their space, ... Look, there comes a time when you say "or sleep here in bed or we have to enter at risk something happens to us because of constant sleep deprivation, "and you even document yourself to see if it's really so bad. Then you jump for joy when you realize that not only sleep better with you and sleep well, but it is even recommended.
I won't let them get used to the arms
Those parents, there, with children all day in their arms. What a need! If they even hang them in backpacks and rags. With how well they go in the strollers of a lifetime. And you think you won't take them so they don't get used to it and then you have to take them for life and it turns out that when you are in the hospital you realize that, or you take, or your wife does not sleep. Or you take him, or the one in the next bed does not sleep. And you take him, and you have him there, with you, and he falls asleep while you look at him and say "hey, well, I even like this."
At the end you don't care if you get used to it or not, because the baby asks for it and, if he asks you, it will be for something. You still need honey! Well, you won't deny it, right? He's your son, and darling to him you feel a lot, so take love!
And then you find out that babies are born accustomed to the arms, that if you want to try something, if you have to get used to something, it is not to need the arms, because that is what will give you work to get. That's when he'll cry and you'll have to fight to achieve it, because it's not natural.
In addition, you reflect and say "are strollers really the thing of a lifetime?", Because we have arms since the beginning of time, but the stroller seems to have arrived a little later (only a few million years later).
When they don't eat the food, I'll keep it for the snack
And if you don't eat it on the snack, for dinner. Let them know who's in charge from the beginning, that if they don't get on your beards. That espabile, that he becomes independent, that he knows that in this life nobody is going to give him anything, that he knows that you cannot have everything in life, that he learns to suffer.
Well, yes, okay. Calm. That all that will learn sooner or later. You will have time to teach him and he will have time to learn that he will not be able to have everything he wants and that life can be wonderful, but also very hard. That, as Pedro Guerra says, "we come to be happy and to suffer." But hey, that you don't need to learn everything at lunchtime and that, anyway, when he leaves home he will not be so stupid to put on a plate of food and, if he does not want it, keep it for snack and if not, for dinner. He will directly do what comes out of his nose, and if he doesn't like something, he won't eat it.
So perhaps the most interesting thing is that at home the parents are a model, an example, and that we eat what we want the child to eat. If we eat healthy food, if we buy healthy food, the baby will eat healthy food. There will be times that you will not want from one thing or another. There will be foods that you will not like and will not eat, but if we do not insist with food, if we do not convert a basic need into an educational moment, and if we do not punish or reward, but live it naturally, we will end up eating in a relatively varied way: just insist on the vegetable saying how important it is for you to start looking at it suspiciously. If it is not a flavor that excites you, you already have two reasons not to eat it.
If instead we say nothing, but we put it to eat and eat all, it is easier not to reject it, to end up eating it or, at the very least, not to always reject it.
I will not let them just watch TV, or play with the tablet or mobile
Because we all know that television before two years is not advisable, to the point that it can alter the linguistic development of children. And you decide that they will not watch TV until then, and that they will not take your phone or have a tablet, or console, which all end up idiotized.
That he will spend time with you, that you will play, that you will talk a lot, that not much screen is needed. And you get it. The case is that you get it. Until it grows a little and you see that you do not reach everything, and that the energy is pulling down, and that one day you put a channel of drawings and it is hypnotized, and you begin to wonder if instead of sitting there With him, since he is in a trance, you could not take the opportunity to do something else. And you try it and you get it. You go back to the couch, but it's still there without moving, and you think you could do something else, and you see that it works ... And that's it. It has worked once, it does not have to work at another time, so when you need a moment of tranquility and peace, you put the TV, which now make drawings 24 hours a day, you give the phone to delete the programs and you leave the tablet to fill the screen with fingerprints and various substances. Well, you don't do it for that, that's the consequence, but you don't care. The boy is calm and hey, I've read out there that the games are educational and that stimulate creativity and reflexes. Well, pull, stimulate, son, stimulate, that I feel that I am exhausted.
I will not threaten you with things that I cannot fulfill later
Because threatening and not complying is putting the seed so that the threats are not taken seriously. And if you put a threat and it doesn't work, you must execute it, says the theory.
Does not matter. In moments of maximum tension, when the only thing you get is to do physical damage because your automatic mode has jumped but a spark of your reasoning tells you "don't hit it, animal", the force comes out through the mouth. A shout comes out, a threat comes out and you get to say stupid things that you don't even understand where they come from. Threats so absurd that they are unfulfilled, or that if you meet them, they annoy you too, or that you know you'll never comply ... Shit, come on. That you are there trying to educate in dialogue, affection and respect and when it seems best that you wear it, they make you lose your papers in style, taking out an inner "I" of the most regrettable.
The good thing is Over time you learn to control yourself and manage conflicts in a more civilized way and that, when you finally get it, they have already grown and have stopped making you lose patience.
Take it all with humor, please
No, I have not gone crazy. I have not been giving advice for seven years and explaining how to raise and educate children in the way that I think is better for now, in a single entry, to say that they can eat anything, that nothing happens if you yell at them, that if they are embobados with a perfect screen, etc. It's just a way to take the matter off and show that, as I said the other day, there are moments of weakness when you need to recover your life for a moment, or stop doing the perfect things, skip the rules, or forgive you because you have failed to live up to.
It's a "did you do it wrong? Don't crush yourself. It happened to me too. It happens to all of us." We will all try to improve, this is obvious, because one is maturing and learning to be a better person and to adapt better to his environment until the day he dies, but on the road, if you err, at least don't feel lonely or strange, because you will not be the only one.
Photos | iStock
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