Desperate times call for desperate measures

When I started at this parenting malarkey five and a half years ago, I devoured tonnes of parenting books and took everything the parenting gurus said as gospel.

 

I remember being horrified when my dad, who is very much of the old school style of parenting, told my precious Firstborn not to be so bold when she committed some routine toddler misdemeanour. She, not at all used to such harsh reprimanding, promptly burst into hysterical tears and came running to her mama.

 

My father felt the full impact of my over-protective first-time mum wrath that day. Labelling a child as ‘bold’ or ‘naughty’ was strictly forbidden by the gurus and I feared for the future psychological health of my child. Would she be forever scared by her grandfather’s use of the B word?

 

You should ignore the bad behaviour and praise the good behaviour, I tried to tell my father, who having reared three of his own perfectly well without ever reading a book on the topic, infuriated me even more by throwing his eyes up to heaven.

 

Fast forward five years, add two more sprogs and how things have changed! Now dad is the one telling me to calm when they are all screaming and roaring at the same time and I feel like screaming and roaring back at them (and often do).

 

Princess Firstborn was 18 months old when The Bruiser burst into our lives and two years later his baby sister, Baba arrived on the scene. The books gathered dust on my shelves for a while before being passed on to other first-time mum friends with the advice “take it all with a pinch of salt”.

 

There are days when I do fear I may have taken things a bit too far to the opposite extreme but desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. For example, The Bruiser, who is just four, was going through a phase of picking his nose recently. His finger had been wedged firmly up one or other of his nostrils for weeks and beginning to fear that he would become known as Booger Boy at playschool, I resorted to some slightly unorthodox tactics.

 

As he sat in the playroom contentedly excavating his right nostril, I loudly related a terrible story I had just heard on the radio to our childminder. It was about a mother crying because her little boy had picked his nose continually until it went black and fell off.

 

“Oh that’s desperate,” the childminder (who has two adult children and is also of the more old school parenting style) said, shaking her head sadly. “And there’s nowhere you can buy a new nose.”

 

“No,” I agreed. “Once your nose is gone, it’s gone.”

 

The Bruiser looked at us questioningly, wondering if we were only joking, his finger still in his nostril.

“Oh dear, is that a black mark on his nose?” I asked.

 

“Oh no, I think it is,” the childminder replied.

 

The finger slid slowly out. “Will my nose fall off?,” he asked, half curious to see what he would look like without a nose and half concerned.

 

“Not if you stop picking it now,” I advised. “Once it goes all black and falls off, you can’t get it back, but if you stop now, you should be OK.”

 

It has worked. Every now and then his finger will sneak up towards his nose, but the pleasure of a good root around is obviously not worth the dire consequences.