Most of my knowledge about child care comes from watching Hollywood films. The darling child gets sleepy at the end of the day. The adult reads the child a bedtime story and the kid gradually gets sleepier and sleepier, dozing off halfway through.
The other night I was visiting a friend. She was in bed with her 2-year-old daughter at around 8:30 pm, reading her a story, just like in the movies. Then the hospital called and mom, a medical doctor, had to drive in. “Do you mind taking over?” she asked. “No problem,” I replied, thinking about the warm glow around bedtime from all of those movies. I grabbed a copy of Peter Rabbit, took off my shoes, and got on the bed. The girl lost interest after two pages, stood up, and put out her arms to be hoisted down off the bed. I pulled her closer to me and started reading again. She wriggled away and went to the foot of the bed. I told her that it was sleepy time and she needed to stay in bed. She was insistent. There was crying. I asked if she needed to go pee-pee, but could not get an intelligible answer. Based on my experience with dogs, I figured I would put her on the floor and see if she walked to the bathroom. She walked to her toys in the living room. I tried to play with her, but she wasn’t responding. I started typing on the computer. Eventually she came over and fell asleep, face-down, on my feet.
Kids are like large distributed systems. They fail in ways you would never imagine.
I did a rotation with a child neurologist who I think sincerely advocated corporal punishment starting at a young age. She had raised 4 children of her own and has obviously dedicated her life to the healthy neurologic development of children. She said she started kind, but became progressively more convinced that swift, palpable consequences were better for the child’s overall learning curve, thus preparing them better for life in the long run, and she pointed to the careers of her children as evidence thereof: the eldest barely made it through high school, the youngest was an accomplished scientist in her own right. She was also extremely quick-witted, so I’m not entirely sure that she wasn’t just screwing with the pediatrics chief resident who was on service with me.
Niels: That just adds fuel to my argument that dogs are way smarter than kids! You can train a dog to be a wonderful companion without ever doing anything meaner than saying a sharp word or two. In watching my friends take on parenting, it seems that they break all of their original vows. During the pregnancy, they say that their kids are never going to watch TV or eat anything other than organic green vegetables. You visit a few years later and find the 3- and 5-year-old kids watching a Disney DVD for the 50th time and eating frozen fried chicken fingers. I wonder if they are also secretly whacking the kids when they get out of line!
Abandoned child rearing vows would make a long funny list.
As a parent of a six yr old I will make 3 comments:
If I’m not mistaken since I’ve never owned a dog, but don’t dogs see their owners as the “lead” dog and thus want to always be in their good graces, while a child’s instinct is to lead their parents’ focus away from everything except themselves as much as possible?
In regards to the specifics of sleepy time, I have observed that (at least with my kid) when they don’t want to go to bed they seem to sense that you will still be up and they will miss some fun activity they think you might do if they go to bed. What works with mine is simply to say that I will be going to sleep soon too (even if not true) and if they want to get up and play around in the dark all alone that they are more than welcome.
Finally, I agree with Niels’ neurologist friend. Egregious behavior should be responded to with quick and strong disapproval but instead of a slap on the hand I usually go right to a stated punishment (ie. OK if that’s the way you want it, then no bedtime story tonight) which still works well at this age.
Phil, dogs are *way* simpler than kids. That is the problem.
I have three kids, and a dog.
Two years olds can be especially … interesting. Not easy to deal with if you have no experience. Do not feel badly about failing with a two year old. Practice.
My kids *loved* being read to, far past the point where they could read to themselves. But when my sister tried to read to them … it did not really work. Story time is about more than just reading. Might be different if you’d spent substantial time playing with the child.
Kids pattern off each other. Our recent pattern (on an evolutionary time scale) of raising first-children in a complete vacuum (no other children present) is weird. My first was a *lot* of work. Any time he needed reassurance, it had to come from his parents. The second was a lot less trouble. (When very little, when something might have been distressing, he would look at his brother. If this brother was OK, then he was OK.) The third was even less work. Oddly, more kids are less work than one kid.
Relative to the other comments – I never ruled out corporal punishment. I suspect that repeated verbal abuse (manipulation?) of children could be more harmful. (The first time spanking my first child was one of the very hardest things I ever did.) Perhaps fewer words and definite consequence explains why I could count on one hand the number of times I ever exercised corporal punishment, in total, across three children.
Not that I claim to have got everything perfect….
It is my experience that kids love the computer. If they see you at the computer they will often want to see what you are doing and are often content just to be there with you. And there are lots of kid-friendly sites out there that are fun and educational. (Can you say, “My 3-year-old knows how to type?”) If the kid’s not tired you might as well make the best of it.
In response to part of what demetri said, I agree that kids do not want to miss some fun activity that they think they will miss if they go to sleep. In my opinion, if there really is something they might want to do (watch a movie with you, play a computer game, learn how to program is LISP…), why not? I personally don’t want to miss out on the fun of enjoying these activities with the kids any more than they do.
All that said…it sounds like you were truly a great babysitter.
Hollywood movies are a bad way to learn any real world skills.
Dogs definitely learn basic functions significantly faster than humans, but they have
less brain to get in the way. You don’t need to reason or explain to a dog as
a two year old, but a dog will never try to understand why.
This kid’s reaction wasn’t so much a message to you as a message to her parent
saying “I’m angry you left with this unknown bozo during our special cuddle
time” not “Philip doesn’t know what he’s doing”
Taking away bedtime reading as a “punishment” does not seem like a good idea.
What would your friend have done if you hadn’t been there when the hospital summoned her?
Karl: Contrary to the TV shows, when a doctor is called into the hospital the situation is not typically life-threatening (if it were, the doctors already there would deal with it). Dr. Mom would have called the nanny who would have arrived within about 20 minutes.
It’s even easier with rats than with dogs. When they misbehave, or when it’s sleepy time, you just put them in their cage. Give them a piece of uncooked pasta to chew on, and they’re in Rodent Nirvana.