It’s one of those pieces of wisdom dispensed to every mother with a toddler: choose your battles. Its frequent repetition, however, doesn’t make it less true.
Of course, the things we choose to battle over will vary from mom to mom and child to child. But I think there are at least a couple things we can agree are worth fighting over—and a few that will only end in tears all ’round.
Worth fighting for
- Anything involving a real safety issue
- Serious property damage (Hayden’s entering a destructive/accident-prone stage!)
- Violence toward people or animals
Like banging your head on a brick wall
As Hayden becomes more and more fierce in his independence, I’ve realized there are some things that you shouldn’t or really, truly can’t make someone else do.
- You can’t make someone eat—at least, not safely. And bargaining (eat two more bites of vegetables or no dessert!) is supposed to reinforce the undesirability of the already-hated food item. Stupid psychology.
- You can’t make someone sleep—at least, not without drugs.
- You can’t make someone calm down—but I have picked up some great tricks here. My favorite is when Hayden is getting upset or whining and it’s the beginning of a downward spiral, I take a deep breath and blow it out in his face. Then I have him do it back to me. He almost always does this because he thinks it’s funny—but I just got him to take a breath.
Really, I guess, you can’t make people do anything, really, but as a parent we’re used to having some modicum of control (or being expected to have some modicum of control!).
These are just the first things I thought of—what have you found is worth fighting for? What’s not?