Anger Management

Following the Mother's Day episode, I did in fact make an appointment for us to see a child therapist.  With all the mommy blogs and parent help sites I've been on, I would have thought I had this parenting thing down.  But if it were that simple there wouldn't be so much info out there I suppose.  It turns out my darling little 5 year old has been somewhat neglected in the discipline area.  And that's why he beats up on me.

I thought I had been disciplining him.  This is news to me.  For the most part I've been following the advice of the therapist.  But for all the times I've ignored the situation, like when I'm on vacation or with friends and just want his tantrum to go away, I've undone the good.  Meanwhile my husband has been absent from most of his outbursts.  But when he has been present, it's only made matter worse.  His way of punishing is to yell and make idle threats.  Enough to make my stomach turn and bring back memories of my father doing the same thing to me.  Not effective and not good for the long term relationship.  So now we must work on finding the happy medium.

As a plus for me, it will include my husband taking more control of the situation but with a structured approach.  When our 5 year old gets out of control, he'll be the one who holds him down until he settles.  With some practice and new-found patience he can recite the mantra to stop the flailing and by using the manly deep voice instill the fear of god, without being abusive.  My job is to be consistent with the consequences.  It's actually simple enough and since the first outburst on the day of the appointment, we haven't had any since.

When the therapist pointed out that this should have been taken care of by the time my 5 year old was 3, and that if it isn't resolved could result in even bigger struggles when he's 14, it was easy to implement.  The image of me wrestling with a 14 year old boy is as unacceptable as the flashback of my father yelling at me.