After another episode with my mother, I am really sitting down questioning whether there is any place at all for the way she treats my children in parenting at all.
My DD (aged 2) has been off on one all day today. She's changed rooms recently and is finding the lighter room harder to settle in. Thus she is sleeping later and waking earlier. This has a knock on effect on her behaviour, she's grouchy, moody and tantrumming at the drop of a hat. My method for dealing with her tantrums is to pretty much completely ignore the behaviour, unless it becomes violent or destructive, to which I tell her NO! and remove her to a time out area (her room at home, or a step elsewhere).
Yes it's loud, and inconvenient, and even outright annoying sometimes. But it's a natural part of development, I'm dealing with it in the best way I find for my DD, which is to not give her what it is she wants. I find that with her she mirrors behaviour, so if I get cross or shout, she often gets much worse and at almost bedtime I find it more constructive to just be firm, ignore, remove, then explain (when she calms down).
My mum is just awful. Apparently I am completely passive and my DD will learn nothing. If she was hers she'd have her up by the ankles and leather her arse (her own words). Her children would never have dared to act like this as we got put in our rooms with the door closed and locked at any sign of tantrums. She was saying all sorts of passive aggressive things to my DD, at one point called her stupid, and told her to get out as she didn't want to listen to her. Not to come back until she was nice again.
We had words of course, because I don't find my mother's tantrum any more acceptable than my DDs. My mother believes that you need to scare children, or have them be scared of you. She is not averse to screaming and shouting in their faces. She can be completely dismissive of them verbally, even outright offensive, and often flings them about a bit roughly when they are misbehaving. This is how she parented me. Full of love and treats and presents all the time, but the minute you show any bad behaviour it's all getting taken away by big scary Mum/Granny.
AIBU to think that you can raise children without scaring them and that belittling them is just wrong? Surely you don't need to be shrieking and walloping their arses to get the message through that you are cross with them?
I get completely paranoid that my mum is right and I am wrong because she makes me out to be so ineffectual, and yes I do get challenging behaviour from my children, but on comparison they seem no worse than other children their age, and in fact in many ways are very good in some ways.