My youngest child, my daughter, became a teenager the week before last, and last week my oldest son turned 21. Two very significant birthdays! My oldest and my youngest, the two children who were the biggest challenge for me when they were little. The two who really blew all my cherished myths of parenting out of the water and forced me to think again. Bless them! If anyone had said to me then ‘don’t worry, your children will turn out OK in the end’ I might not have believed them…
My daughter took ‘strong-willed’ into a different league, she was better at that than any little girl I have ever met, before or since. She was actually capable of taking on and running the household better than I was; she came equipped with a natural authority which was much stronger than mine. She had very definite opinions which my vague indecisiveness couldn’t match. She had already made decisions about things that I still wasn’t sure about after a lifetime of reading books.
As she turned thirteen, I looked at my lovely daughter and thought I have no fear of those ‘terrible’ teenage years to come. She’s great, and she’s already done all that.
My son when he was little just went round hitting and kicking and biting everyone. This was my introduction to parenting, and he busted my first cherished belief – that if you don’t hit them they won’t hit anyone else. He was constantly angry. Those early years were a blur of me apologising, sometimes tearfully, to every other parent.
As we celebrated his twenty-first birthday I felt so proud of this lovely young man. He’s such a great human being, has loads of friends, and doesn’t bite any of them.
So if you’re struggling with difficult and challenging behaviour, or lie awake at night worrying about your child, the message of this week’s blog, from someone who knows, is that old platitude: don’t worry, invariably your children will turn out OK in the end…
Leave a Reply