Cheryl and Beth have a unique mother-daughter relationship. At any given time, any one of these labels may seem appropriate for Cheryl’s relationship with Beth: friend, rival, taskmaster, pseudo-sibling, mentor, nurse, maid, and cook. Of all these titles, the most surprising one was added yesterday afternoon, secretary. I would have sooner expected Beth to be doing aerial acrobatics from the…
The third law of child rearing states: if your child can hurt themselves playing with something, they will hurt themselves playing with something.
Now picture my daughter announcing that we were out of soap in her bathroom. I tell her to get a fresh liquid soap dispenser from the kitchen. She walks past me, gets a new soap dispenser, and walks back past me on her way back to the bathroom. A few…
On this, the last day of school, I wonder what tomorrow will bring. No, I’m not talking about the next school year. I’m really talking about tomorrow. My daughter is the kind of child where you can’t take any day for granted.
Yesterday evening after school Beth was excused to go to her friend’s house. Like a good parent I watched her walk down the street, presumably to make…
Beth was sitting in the bathroom requesting assistance. We told her that she was too old for that kind of assistance and that she needed to do it herself. She spent the next twenty minutes not doing it herself, asking repeatedly for the assistance that would never come.
“MOM, ARE YOU IGNORING ME?”
Mommy answers with more silence.
“MOM, YOU CAN’T IGNORE ME!”
Mommy…
Last year our daughter’s school suggested testing for intelligence. They offered to test her to determine if it would be appropriate to place her in the Gifted Program. Cheryl was all for it. I wasn’t so sure.
How much harm does it do a child to be labeled? Does it matter if the label is good or bad? Is the end result the same? Are expectations placed on someone that may not be…
There was a time when I told Beth to leave the T.V. on. We were listening to a digital cable music channel, so Beth felt that the T.V. was unnecessary (the sound was going through our stereo at the time). Our discussion went something like this…
“Beth, what are you doing?”
“I’m just going to turn the T.V. off.”
“Beth, I don’t want you to turn the…