Thank you! I do! My oldest has 2 children of her own ( 6 and 1 years old) and they are very sweet most of the time! She is the best mom and they have a wonderful daddy and she told me she learned from the best. She is also a nanny. My middle child just graduated with her education degree and is now teaching young toddlers! My youngest is 17 and a real stand up kid. Sometimes I get bad attitude, but I expect that.
I have always told my kids "I am your parent, not your friend!" "I can take your anger" "Make good choices"

Hamm, I'm not sure it's 1%, I think it's higher but not much! Too many parents don't want to offend their children, indulge them (sometimes out of guilt) and don't ask for help or advice from experienced parents. I did and there are a lot of good suggestions here.
The most important is love. The kids need to feel loved and valued. I always heard "It's for your own good!" before My beatings and I was Not a good kid! I knew I would parent differently and I am!

I was also one of those blessed families that people commented to nicely in restaurants. It was great to be validated like that and the kids needed to hear it also.

No indulged, entitled, self important sociopaths here!

Geeez! Rodney King is dead so I'll say it.

"Can't we all just get along?"

It's easy to sit at a keyboard and blast someone.

Hamm is a nice person, I met her while helping one of her friends.

She probably is. But she still thinks you stink as a parent. And her friends as well. 99% of parents she sees are failing their children according to her. She's a 1% so that doesn't leave much room for anyone else she knows.

BTW, Hamm knew exactly what she was doing:



Well, I'll let it go. Obviously there are others who feel the same way. (That the vast majority of parents are bad. But not them, of course.) I'm not sure where those people hang out but I'm glad the people I know are much different than the ones they know.

Kids will test you, especially out in public. You have no idea what a child is like at other times, in other places, just in this instant of time.

Tantrums? Someone said it - they don't have the words to communicate what they want and get frustrated. Especially for toddlers, it's just something that happens to many of them as they grow up. They have the tantrum, parent waits for it to end, and then move on. Don't make a big deal of it and it eventually goes away.

I have interfered with a child's behavior twice: once when the kid was going in and out one electronic door and was ready to get bonked on the head, and the second time when the kid was running up and down an escalator. I saw a two-year old get her hand mashed in the side of an escalator step at Dulles Airport and promised myself that I would always intervene in a case like that.

My diabetic child was a monster in the grocery store. He wanted to pick up everything and run off. At one point I put him in a harness to control him when we went out. Just imagine what people thought of me, treating my child like a dog!

I don't have any kids!

But my cat loves me.

She loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!!!

"ooooooohhhhh"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBbIRT_E ... afe=active

Enjoy the weekend!

And have some fun with your kids, and hope they have fun with you, in a good sense!

http://www.firecold.com/videos/a-cure-f ... Q.facebook

There's a new study in the journal Pediatrics that indicates a link between spanking and various disorders. This article discusses the study.

I am no expert, but here is how I handled these types of situations: I was a single parent with 3 boys seperated in ages by 5 years. I used a "reward" system, i.e. if we had "shopping to do", I would offer some type of reward for good behavior, i.e. an ice cream, candy, etc. And I didn't have a lot of money back then. A reward might be a a roll of sweet tarts split 3 ways. If we went to McDonald's the rule was you had to eat your Happy Meal before you could open the toy surprise. Same with homework - you could play all you wanted after the homework was done. During the winter when the sun went down early, we altered the rule, homework was done immediately after dinner. It showed them I was fair, since paytime outside was so limited. If we were in public and the behavior wasn't acceptable, we went home - no debate allowed. For instance, we had plans to go to the mall on a Saturday; I had a birthday gift to buy and some other items to pick-up. After I was finished with what I needed to do I promised them some time in the arcade. As we approached the mall entrance, my youngest son had a fit we weren't going to the arcade first. We never made it into the mall, I just turned around and took all 3 of them home, no anger, no screaming from me, just a "thats unacceptable, we are going home". Rarely did I as a parent ever have this problem. A couple of these incidents described above and they got the massage. Consistency is key, and don't make a threat and then not follow-up on it when an infraction occurs. Of course, don't make a threat that doesn't fit the action either.

The 4 of us were in a Pizza Hut, the boys ages were probably 2,5 and 7 and we had a waitress show up with an appetizer because a couple nearby was so impressed with how well the boys behaved. That was one of my "parenting" highlights. Another more recent highlight....my grown 26 year old son asking me to be his best man at his wedding! What an honor.

JMiller, you are a damaged unit...
Ah, where did you say the stuff is available??
Mrs. BGR

And I thought JMiller's link was going to be a commercial for industrial-strength Duct Tape...