Dealing With An Angry Son

My son was angry with me yesterday which is not unusual since he is four years old and most children at that age do not have a good grasp on controlling their emotions. Normally he forgets about those kinds of feelings as soon as his attention in turned somewhere else. In other words, if you distract him from what made him mad he forgets about it immediately. In this case however it was for something that I said to him and he held onto that feeling for quite a long piece of time.

As we were pulling out of our driveway my windows were down and we heard some people talking who were walking in the street. It's quite normal for our neighborhood as there are no sidewalks there. My son yelled out something to them, he feels that he is the people police and when he thinks something is wrong he is not afraid to voice his opinion. At such a young age it's hard for him to understand that not everybody will take what he says kindly, some people get angry and others might even take a more violent reaction. Plus it's just plain rude to say things when something doesn't concern you.

So in that moment, where I knew I wouldn't like it if some unknown person yelled out at me, I turned to him quickly and told him to shut up, following it up with saying that what they were doing was none of his business. That was the first time that I can remember ever saying that phrase to him. I try not to say it to anybody ever, something that was instilled in me from the time that I worked at a Boys & Girls Club. Yes, I know that there are some extremely rare times that you may need to say it but this was not one of those times.

Several minutes passed by and then I said something to him but I could tell he was not happy with me so I asked him if he was angry. He said he was and when I asked why he told me it was because I told him to shut up. I confessed that I should not have said it but also reminded him that he needed to watch what he said to other people. He wouldn't look at me and in a moment of anger I told him he needed to learn about these things and that I wasn't happy with him and that I was done talking. It was childish of me but I was frustrated and in a moment of weakness I let it out.

At the babysitters house he wouldn't look at me or say goodbye and on the drive to work it really bothered me. Yes he shouldn't have yelled anything but I shouldn't have said things the way I did either, After all, I am the adult here, the one who is supposed to have learned some things in life. When my wife called me later she said that he had told her what I had said and she said that I shouldn't let it bother me so much, that I was the one who was trying to teach him these lessons and sometimes he would get his feelings hurt. Like me, he is very sensitive.

After getting home my wife woke up and told me that he was still angry and had told her that he wanted her to sleep with him, not me, even though he knew he would be asleep long before I got home. She agreed with me that he would be over it by the next day. True to form, the next morning all was well between us even though he made it clear that he remembered what I had said. I just tried to let him know that he couldn't go around yelling things at strangers. In this world we have today you never can tell how someone will react and I just want him to be safe. Nobody ever said it would be easy to raise a child and it isn't. He's a good kid, very intelligent and very inquisitive and he loves to help. I just hope I can arm him with enough life lessons and common sense that he'll be prepared.

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

The Week In Review, Health Scares And So Forth

Last week proved to be a difficult one in my household. My wife had been having symptoms that sounded like they were TIA which is also called mini-strokes. There is no lasting damage but it can be a precursor to an actual stroke so she went to the clinic and had an MRI of the brain scheduled. Five days before the MRI she stopped having her symptoms but decided to err on the side of safety and went ahead with the MRI. Once there they saw a dark spot and sent her to the Emergency Room and due to a mis-communication (happens a lot in U.S. healthcare it seems) she was admitted. The doctor thought that she was continuing to have her symptoms. It was determined that she had a blood clot but that it was old and wasn't currently bleeding so she was allowed to go home. The followup MRI is on Tuesday and hopefully it will show that the clot has decreased in size otherwise surgery may be needed.

She was understandably upset and her nerves were on edge and then she developed something new. She said her head felt like when you fall down and scrape your knee, that sensation, and she was almost sure that it had started to bleed again. On Wednesday she went back to the clinic and they did the neurological tests and determined that she was fine, what she was feeling was brought on by stress and worry. Since then she's been doing much better. Perhaps she just needed to hear from another person to relieve her tensions. Around this time our son started sounding like he was getting a cold but really it was nothing to hold him back. He took his medicine every day and since we caught it early it's almost all the way gone now. He's at a wonderful age when little things like being sick are not enough to hold you back or slow you down.

As for me, well I had a follow-up appointment at my doctors office so that he could check on a few things. He decided to take the decision out of my hands and started me on medicine for high blood pressure since it seems to be getting worse instead of better. He also put in for me to have another sleep study so that I could get a new C-Pap machine for my sleep apnea which as he remarked, is quite severe. I stopped using my C-Pap machine over four years ago after my son was born and it then later simply disappeared. I have my suspicions about what happened but in the spirit of keeping harmony in the house I'll keep it to myself. For now.

Perhaps with a new C-Pap machine and the exercise routine that I started a few weeks ago I'll be able to discontinue the medicine as long as my health improves. The other thing that he discussed was my cholesterol level which is also high. As a matter of fact he said I'm in the pre-diabetes stage which means I need to make lifestyle changes now before it's too late. So I've been doing a lot of thinking about what needs to change and how I can make it happen. I'm already on the way with my commitment to exercise so now we have to see about a change in diet, even though I wrote last time about not doing so at this time. Karma has a way of biting you in the butt, doesn't it?

I believe the best way for me to do everything is to make a loose schedule of what needs to be done each day and that way I can have something to work towards. Since I agreed to teach in my men's quorum at church (two Sundays a month) and I want to start learning to play bass guitar, as well as needing to start to improve my pitiful Spanish language skills (after six years of marriage to a Peruvian woman it's way past due) I'm sure I can fill up the time that I have before and after work. And if I can't then my wife will be more than happy to assist me so I better do it on my own. We keep putting our heads down and are trying to move forward no matter what obstacles are put in our way. The only other option is to give in to despair and give up on life and I don't see that as an option. Life goes on whether we agree with it or not. Stay tuned.

Published by Don Leach

The Sad State Of Youth Today

I've recently seen an article on Yahoo about a mother being upset how her son's grade school teacher had sent a note home to her. It seems that the teacher in question had stapled a note to the boys shirt informing his parents of his actions. When questioned she stated that she had done so because she had previously sent homes notes and believed that he wasn't giving them to his parents. The mother said that she had received the notes but was upset because her son had been publicly embarrassed by this treatment and that it was unfair.

Now when I was young it was common for teachers to pin a note to your shirt so that it wouldn't be forgotten or overlooked and yes it was normally because you had done something wrong in their eyes. Since I'm not part of this situation and don't have all of the details the only thing that I can comfortably comment on is to speculate that if the parents say they had received previous notes and that the teacher was unsure if they were being given to them then it seems to be that perhaps there was no communication between the two parties. That would explain this disconnect between them.

Thinking a little deeper though this makes me think about how we are raising our children. Currently I feel we are raising generations of children where they don't seem to be able to take criticism at all nor do they understand why they are suddenly not special anymore. Case in point, athletic leagues. Nowadays every child on every team gets a trophy because sometime in the past some parents thought that it wasn't fair that only the top three finishing teams got trophies and that it made their children feel left out and that they weren't good enough. Instead of teaching them lessons that have real life implications such as you can't always be first and that sometimes your team may not be that good and it holds you back but doesn't diminish who and what type of person you are, they chose to try and make every child feel that they were all equal.

That's the problem right there. No matter how much we try to make it so, everybody is not equal. Some are faster, some are smarter, some more athletic, some bigger and some smaller. Some catch on quickly and others have to have things explained to them point by point. None of this means that one person is better or worse than any other, it only means that we are all different and can't be judged by the same standards. I may not be as good looking as others but I have things about me that stand out and make me who I am. So what if I'm not the best athlete or video game player? None of this matters in reality. Just find out what it is that you like and makes you unique, if only even to yourself.

Everybody cannot finish first in everything. It's impossible. There have to be people who finish last the same as there has to be doctors as well as ditch diggers. Simply put, we should be addressing ways to make the children understand that where you finish isn't always the most important thing, it's how you finish. It's the work that you put into it. We need to stop worrying if they get their feelings hurt so much because that's going to happen when they hit the real world. Right now most of them are unprepared for when they hit problems. They don't understand when their boss tells them that their work isn't up to standard or that they need to put forth more effort. They don't understand why they cannot immediately make the kind of money that their parents make. They just feel that everyone is being unfair and hurting their feelings.

So basically they are going to go through everything cruel and unkind in the world that all before them have gone through to some degree or another but they will have no idea how they should and can react. Instead it will be like a gate closing to them. Solid, unmoving and impenetrable. What do they do then? We need to be more understanding of what skills they are going to need to learn so that when this happens, and it will, they will be prepared and be able to solve problems on their own instead of coming running home because life isn't fair. It isn't and never has been so let's try to teach them something about this because it really is so important.

Published by Don Leach