For the
last several days, Polly has been in a tonal funk. Everything she says seems to
come out with an edge of shrillness, whininess, or disdain. Her attempts to be
funny come off as mean. Her patience for anything that does not go her way
exists somewhere in the range between very limited and non-existent. She has teared
up at not having as much pepperoni on her pizza as she might have liked and has
complained frequently about being tired or cold or hungry - though not for the
food that’s in front of her. And she’s been pushy about being right, making an
issue of silly things such as the time being 6:47 instead of 6:45. On the whole
it’s been a rather unpleasant week.
This kind
of harshness is symptomatic of a person who feels a bit off, and Polly has
certainly had her share of annoyances to manage. To start with, she has a tooth
in her bottom jaw that is exceptionally loose. For the past week, it’s been
flopping around in her mouth and jabbing into her gum whenever she tries to bite
into something. At least once at every meal she’s been giving a small yelp of
pain and having to swish blood out of her mouth. On top of that the
replacements for the two front teeth she lost a couple of weeks back have
started to push their way into view. While this kind of cutting doesn’t keep
her awake at night like it did when her baby teeth came in, it seems to be
enough of an irritant to disrupt her sleep from time to time. She got up in the
middle of the night last Thursday to use the bathroom, something that she never
ever does, and spent an hour or so after that rolling around trying to get back
to sleep.
On top of
the pain from teeth going out and teeth coming in, Polly is also dealing with a
case of the sniffles. She had a mild fever during the middle of the week and a
hacking cough towards the end that led us to keep her home from school on
Thursday. (We dealt with an extended cough this past spring and wanted to head
this off before it got too established in her lungs.) The cough hung on
throughout the weekend, and Polly still felt off enough on Saturday to skip out
on her gymnastics class.
Lastly,
amidst all the off-kilterness of being sick and having a mouth in pain, Pip had
his last two soccer games of the season. Polly enjoys the idea of going to
watch Pip play soccer, but I think she feels left out as well. It isn’t an immediate
or conscious reaction because she gets excited for him and asks to go to the
games. However, I think the waiting around and watching, the feeling of being
outside of the main action of the day, wears on her in subtle ways that wind up
making her feel unfulfilled and anxious. As a result she often gets snippy and short
towards the end of a soccer day. When you combine this with an already volatile
situation, it can make for a very unhappy child.
***
This is not
the first time we’ve cycled through such a situation with either kid and in the
process we’ve found that the only real solution to all of this irritation is
patience. The loose teeth will fall out. The new teeth will come in. Her cough
will subside. Pip’s soccer games will end. Polly will get a couple of good
nights of sleep and she will return to being the happy, effervescent sprite who
draws animal pictures for friends and sprints joyfully out the doors of school
each day.
The
challenge is what to do in the meantime. The habits of making mean faces and using
harsh words have a tendency to hang around long after the irritants that initially
triggered them are gone. If you’re not careful they can become normalized to
the point where no one in your immediate circle even realizes how ugly they are.
At the same time, we know that constant correction only grinds everyone down
and runs the risk of grounding in a child the idea that they just don’t do
things right. This latter result is the worst of all worlds in that the child may
stop even trying to do what you ask of them because at some level they’ve come
to believe they’re incapable of it.
Being aware
of this balance Ava and I have made it a habit to frequently tell Polly that
she’s a “good kid” even in the midst of another line of whiny complaints. We work
with her to come up with non-inflammatory ways of correcting unwanted behavior
such as asking her to tell us what kind of signal we should use when she’s
doing something wrong. Her current choice – a single finger tap on our chin - is
a good one because it’s wordless and allows us to smile at her while also
providing the necessary reminder about how we want her to act. We’ve also used
taps to our noses and talked about throwing a hurtful phrase or negative
attitude “out the window.” She seems to particularly like this image.
How much of
this effort really matters in the long run is difficult to discern. As with any
parenting technique, we don’t have a control group against which to measure the
true effectiveness of any of these interventions. At the same time, it feels
better to be doing something positive than just sitting around waiting and
wondering when things are going to get better. Perhaps keeping ourselves from grinding down is what
really matters in the long run.
No comments:
Post a Comment