grrlcookery replied to your post
May. 1st, 2020 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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grrlcookery replied to your post “today’s installment of the mouths of babes”
Good for you! I would appreciate a letter, and a transcription, and not give a rat’s twitching arse about the spelling if I were a grandparent. There’s time for spelling. Making reading and writing worth doing for a kid is invaluable <3
My thinking on the spelling issue is that it’s important for the kids to feel confident in composing things by themselves. Especially this girl, who often refuses to make a choice about basic stuff– she’s constantly begging someone to tell her what to do in simple cases like “which cookie of these should I eat first?” and like, won’t choose what she wants to eat for any meal (but also won’t eat unless it’s the thing she wanted, which she won’t tell you)– there’s definitely some kind of anxiety disorder warping her entire tiny personality, and I really really really want to support any self-confidence she’s got.
(You’d think maybe this would make her biddable, but no, it makes her impossible, because like, you beg her to go try the potty, but she’s got something she’s anxious about surrounding that, and so will deny and deny that she needs to, or will just pretend she can’t hear you telling her, until she pisses herself, and then she’s super upset, so like. Oh my gosh. You are five, kid, which means you’re simultaneously too old and too young for this shit. This past week she confessed that it’s that she doesn’t like washing her hands? She doesn’t like them being wet? Which is bullshit because she plays in the creek outside and sucks on her fingers and does all kinds of things that get her hands wet without complaint, and giving her hand sanitizer for her to use instead hasn’t actually changed anything, so obviously there’s some OTHER thing she doesn’t know how to tell us about and the handwashing thing was a ploy. I suspect it’s that she wants someone to come into the bathroom with her and pay attention to her and tell her she’s doing well, which nobody’s really willing to do because it’s not possible or sustainable to constantly attend upon her in all situations.)
Anyway– I want to help her, of course, and I want to teach her how to spell things, and I want her to have success in communicating, but I also want her to practice figuring things out on her own and for the most part, her figurings are correct enough for the purpose.
She signs her letters “FRUM [NAME]” and I feel like that’s understandable. She used to sign them “FUM [NAME]” and I have successfully in the past two weeks taught her more to listen to the Rs she’s not pronouncing yet– and i’ve also determined that she can, mechanically, pronounce them, so from here on out it’s just going to be convincing her that she ought to make the attempt. Fun side effect of whatever her anxiety deal is, part of it is that she wants to be a baby, so she has actually directly refused to stop talking like a baby in the past, so appeals to that don’t help. I’m working with her on aspiring toward being more grown-up because she also very transparently wants control of everything [without ever making any decisions! the dream, kid], and I’ve pointed out that the more trust you earn from your parents by acting grown-up, the more stuff you get to be in control of, so there’s a good genuine reason to abandon baby things like needing to be told to go try the potty instead of doing it on your own, and not pronouncing your Rs or Ls.
A lot of this stuff is going to need to be handled by professionals– she does have a therapist, but the video conferences are hard to get any benefit from, and the speech therapists at the school had just started a little work with her before this, and she’ll probably need them again when she can go back. But, in the meantime, she’ll be literate and (hopefully) entirely potty-trained, and an absolute codependent wreck by the time all this is over, but at least she won’t have re-melded with her mother. (Really she’s the reason I’ve come out here, because her immediate response to the homeschool order was to just meld herself physically to her mother and refuse to let go of her no matter what, and her mom was having to literally lock her into her bedroom so that she could steal half an hour a day to go over the boy’s lessons with him without the girl screaming all the way through them because she wasn’t being paid attention to, because if she’d been directed to play quietly in the room she instead had to force herself between her mother and her brother and pitch a fit, so then she’d get to instead pitch a fit unrelentingly for the entire time in her room.)
(I actually pointed out that the common thread running through all of her actions is that she wants to have as much direct control over her mother as possible at all times, and the therapist was a little startled but admitted that did seem to be plausibly the thing. Surely this stems from an anxiety problem, but that’s the thing everything’s got in common. Every thing she does is designed to maximize her influence over her mother, and every step forward she takes, she punishes her mother for [like, in exchange for being sent to kindergarten, she no longer will sleep in her own bedroom], and people keep telling Mom it’s her fault somehow but how could she have simultaneously given this child enough support that she wouldn’t feel she had to do this, while also giving her enough discipline to make her feel she couldn’t? That’s not possible, you’re either going to give the child a complex or give the child a complex the other way, but I see everyone judging her like that. You’ve both been too yielding and too firm with this kid, so that she doesn’t feel she can rely on you but also feels she can push you around. Listen, that’s not the mom’s fault and you sound ridiculous for saying so.)
grrlcookery replied to your post “today’s installment of the mouths of babes”
Good for you! I would appreciate a letter, and a transcription, and not give a rat’s twitching arse about the spelling if I were a grandparent. There’s time for spelling. Making reading and writing worth doing for a kid is invaluable <3
My thinking on the spelling issue is that it’s important for the kids to feel confident in composing things by themselves. Especially this girl, who often refuses to make a choice about basic stuff– she’s constantly begging someone to tell her what to do in simple cases like “which cookie of these should I eat first?” and like, won’t choose what she wants to eat for any meal (but also won’t eat unless it’s the thing she wanted, which she won’t tell you)– there’s definitely some kind of anxiety disorder warping her entire tiny personality, and I really really really want to support any self-confidence she’s got.
(You’d think maybe this would make her biddable, but no, it makes her impossible, because like, you beg her to go try the potty, but she’s got something she’s anxious about surrounding that, and so will deny and deny that she needs to, or will just pretend she can’t hear you telling her, until she pisses herself, and then she’s super upset, so like. Oh my gosh. You are five, kid, which means you’re simultaneously too old and too young for this shit. This past week she confessed that it’s that she doesn’t like washing her hands? She doesn’t like them being wet? Which is bullshit because she plays in the creek outside and sucks on her fingers and does all kinds of things that get her hands wet without complaint, and giving her hand sanitizer for her to use instead hasn’t actually changed anything, so obviously there’s some OTHER thing she doesn’t know how to tell us about and the handwashing thing was a ploy. I suspect it’s that she wants someone to come into the bathroom with her and pay attention to her and tell her she’s doing well, which nobody’s really willing to do because it’s not possible or sustainable to constantly attend upon her in all situations.)
Anyway– I want to help her, of course, and I want to teach her how to spell things, and I want her to have success in communicating, but I also want her to practice figuring things out on her own and for the most part, her figurings are correct enough for the purpose.
She signs her letters “FRUM [NAME]” and I feel like that’s understandable. She used to sign them “FUM [NAME]” and I have successfully in the past two weeks taught her more to listen to the Rs she’s not pronouncing yet– and i’ve also determined that she can, mechanically, pronounce them, so from here on out it’s just going to be convincing her that she ought to make the attempt. Fun side effect of whatever her anxiety deal is, part of it is that she wants to be a baby, so she has actually directly refused to stop talking like a baby in the past, so appeals to that don’t help. I’m working with her on aspiring toward being more grown-up because she also very transparently wants control of everything [without ever making any decisions! the dream, kid], and I’ve pointed out that the more trust you earn from your parents by acting grown-up, the more stuff you get to be in control of, so there’s a good genuine reason to abandon baby things like needing to be told to go try the potty instead of doing it on your own, and not pronouncing your Rs or Ls.
A lot of this stuff is going to need to be handled by professionals– she does have a therapist, but the video conferences are hard to get any benefit from, and the speech therapists at the school had just started a little work with her before this, and she’ll probably need them again when she can go back. But, in the meantime, she’ll be literate and (hopefully) entirely potty-trained, and an absolute codependent wreck by the time all this is over, but at least she won’t have re-melded with her mother. (Really she’s the reason I’ve come out here, because her immediate response to the homeschool order was to just meld herself physically to her mother and refuse to let go of her no matter what, and her mom was having to literally lock her into her bedroom so that she could steal half an hour a day to go over the boy’s lessons with him without the girl screaming all the way through them because she wasn’t being paid attention to, because if she’d been directed to play quietly in the room she instead had to force herself between her mother and her brother and pitch a fit, so then she’d get to instead pitch a fit unrelentingly for the entire time in her room.)
(I actually pointed out that the common thread running through all of her actions is that she wants to have as much direct control over her mother as possible at all times, and the therapist was a little startled but admitted that did seem to be plausibly the thing. Surely this stems from an anxiety problem, but that’s the thing everything’s got in common. Every thing she does is designed to maximize her influence over her mother, and every step forward she takes, she punishes her mother for [like, in exchange for being sent to kindergarten, she no longer will sleep in her own bedroom], and people keep telling Mom it’s her fault somehow but how could she have simultaneously given this child enough support that she wouldn’t feel she had to do this, while also giving her enough discipline to make her feel she couldn’t? That’s not possible, you’re either going to give the child a complex or give the child a complex the other way, but I see everyone judging her like that. You’ve both been too yielding and too firm with this kid, so that she doesn’t feel she can rely on you but also feels she can push you around. Listen, that’s not the mom’s fault and you sound ridiculous for saying so.)
no subject
Date: 2020-05-01 07:10 pm (UTC)I mean, it has been clear from what you wrote, before, that there were problems with the five-year-old, but seriously, I now get that it is a LOT.
And I take your point that there's no obvious formula for parenting that would have let MathMom simultaneously allay her daughter's anxiety and discourage her acting out.
Your choices re helping the kid to build her self-confidence and pointing out the advantages of being more of a big girl sound decent to me. And YAY, you, for sharing your insights with the therapist!
I also wonder if the kid would benefit from trying out some (healthy) self-soothing strategies...not that I am any expert on those. Just, in my own mental/emotional health struggles, it often helps me to remember that I have Tools for Feeling Better. Not sure how many of them would appeal to and actually help a five-year-old, but the mere fact that I know the phrase "self-soothing" and can think of it in relation to childhood means that someone professional has undoubtedly thought about this. Hm. Now I am curious about what's out there...
Edited to add: I did a little Googling and decided I would bookmark this one for myself: 50 Calm-Down Ideas to Try with Kids of All Ages. Thank you for providing me with the impetus to go looking, however unintentional!
If I were gonna try any of those with the five-year old, my intuition would be to try the blow-on-a-pinwheel one. (Do modern kids even know about pinwheels? How about button-on-a-string toys? Those aren't on the linked list—I think my dad taught me about them...)