Do you do things/activities as a family all together?

[staryeyed]

If so what do you do and how old are your children?

so was I - i had to be taken out of the cinema to calm down and then had nightmares for weeks.

fivecandles - obviously there are decisions that you make on your child's behalf because they are not yet developmentally able to make the decision (eg which school) or they have no experience. But the point is - if they are ready, they should be involved.

My daughter is perfectly able to decide which restaurant she wants to go to - or even to suggest we go a restaurant. Obviously I decided which school she was going to go to.

She's perfectly able to decide what clothes to buy for herself - she chose her own jeans yesterday, tried them on in the changing room, modelled them and asked her father and brothers' opinion etc. before deciding which ones to buy. She can decide whether we take the bus or metro to school. Why on earth not? Why not involve children in decisions that concern them?

I can assure you that ZeffifreakinRelli is not an alternative though.

My point, such as it is (apart from the obvious cathartic pleasure in airing this trauma with you all) is that I do think kids like kids' stuff. I don't think the reason my daughters enjoyed Horton Hears A bloody Hoo this Monday is because they live in an infantilised hell-paradise constructed by their parents and Disney. They liked it because they are seven and four. And therefore, er, childish.

I don'tthink anyone disagrees with the idea of allowing children to choose.
Where it is appropriate !

My daughter gets asked her views on a lot of things. She chose the cafe we went to this morning. She chose her own sandels for holiday and she asked if we could hit the park on the way home and i happily agreed.
But if her brothers were with us I would have done things differently and she would , frankly, have to lump it.
It is called being a part of a family where as much as possible we try to meet everyones needs. And that may well include not going into the ELC because I have a headache, or not going swimming because I can't watch her and her brother together.
And when I say no that just means no - because I am not going to negotiate for ten minutes while DS1 has to just hang around and DS2 gets very very stressed.
This is what most people do.

pagwatch - but isn't that a huge part of this discussion - where "appropriate " sits? What "boundaries" is supposed to mean?

Oh, commiserations on Horton Hears a Who MI
We're off to see Solaris tomorrow - dd chose it

Anna.... is this a wind up? Why do you want to make your DD sound so precocious? She is 3 isn't she? But she decides what jeans to buy... what if she liked a designer pair costing £100 - I presume that would be OK.

And she decides which mode of transport to take to school? You are joking, you really must be. Sometimes, just sometimes, children need to be told. Believe it or not, in the long run, they actually like the security that gives them. It makes them feel safe.

And as for your comment to me how much you like negotiation in your house... that is pretty obvious!

When your DD is 19 and she wants a big party with loads of teens and the run of the house.. I presume she will negotiate a 'yes' to that from you too.... madness.

Actually it isn't
it is about you making sweeping statements about how telling children what to do is terrible and that you negotiate everything.
And then gradually changing your position to admit that there are 'non-negotiables' and 'boundaries' ...

until it turns out that you parent exactly the same as everyone else except without any sense of humour and slightly more Barbra Cartland language . And that you have much more time than most of us as your 'negotiable' is twice as long as everyone elses.

I just don't really understand why you were bludgeoning everyone who said that they control their childs behaviour when the truth is that is exactly what you do.

We've gone around the houses to reachthe conclusion that this whole thing was semantics

I sidestepped Horton but DH has lined me up for... Kung Fu panda ! ffs

Kung Fu Panda, tsk. It's clear your dh has been permanently scarred by being infantilised and deprived of choices in his childhood.

pagwatch - well you and helliebean haven't reached the same conclusion, anyway

yep !

( actually he had really 60's studenty parents. He always said it was like a debating society where there would be a 30 min discussion to decide who made the taost. And once when he split his head open in France his mum and dad got a map out to decide on the best route to the hospital. He nearly bled to death while they negotiated 'centre ville' or 'payage'
. It suddenly all makes sense)

helliebean - we were in Gap, not a designer store and everything is affordable. She knew we were there for jeans, so she went over to the jeans and chose which ones she wanted to try. At 3 that is perfectly possible.

As for deciding how to get to school - yes, of course she often decides. And sometimes she doesn't. But I the point is - I really want her to know all the possible ways of getting to school and what they all involve and to know her preference. So that the journey is as stress free as possible for her.

that was to marina btw

semantics

yes indeedy !

Yes... choosing jeans is perfectly possible - of course it is. But there is no getting away from the fact you are setting yourself up for a fall IMHO. How much choice can a 3 year old cope with ... her little head must be buzzing. I bet she would like to take a rest and have Mummy decide for her.

Deciding how to get to school is utter madness as far as I am concerned. Of course a journey should be stress free but it doesn't always work like that. Do you always put your childrens choices way above anything you want to do? Do you not have a choice as to which mode of transport you would like? You are a person in your own right too and you have choices. Straight guidelines and rules really do work sometimes... it must be exhausting for her to have all these choices all the time.

actually anna helliebean and i agree perfectly.
You have far more time to spend negotiating than the rest of us ( and perhaps no other siblings to accomodate as well?)and you look for negotiation in areas where we would not.

So?
She thinks you are barking and making a rod for your own back. I just think that you are burdened with spare time

Agree totally pagwatch.. couldnt have put it better meself!

TBH pagwatch we are signing off the same hymn sheet! I am just PMSL at what my DDs (19 and nearly 17) would have turned out like had I let them have all this choices at age 3.

My very verbal bolshy 19yo would be running rings round me now and the vision of it is not pretty!

Ditto
self preservation

What am I missing about shopping for clothes?

Unless it's school uniform, then I'm pretty sure we all solicit our children's preferences when out shopping with them (jeans with diamante, applique, or embroidery - who gives a toss? Of course let the little darling pick if it makes them happy). Little girls love to show off their new clothes - my girls can do 5 complete changes in 10 minutes.

I don't think you have invented anything new, Anna.

My DD is exactly the same age as Anna's. I just put her to bed after two nice stories. There was a little bit of negotiation about how many cuddly toys could fit in next to her, but that was all.

There really really is not negotiation about her bedtime. This is the time I need her to go to bed

Anna, we are truly grateful for your insight that it's a good idea to involve our children in decision making when it affects them when it is appropriate. Thank you so much for that since none of us could possibly have thought of that without your help or indeed have been doing this for years.

Having said this Anna, we also all know that you also make decisions on behalf of your child (making you human and in this respect, at least, just like the rest of us even if some of the decisions you do make are suspect because however precocious your dd is she certainly never asked to go and see Atonement or walked into a restaurant and asked for foie gras entirely independently) so I'm starting to wonder what on earth you are arguing about.

The fact that you have been so tenacious and unwilling to concede defeat with a bunch of strangers also makes me find it hard to believe that you never 'lay down the law' with your own child.

The reality is that all good parents will make some decisions on behalf of their children and without consulting them and some with consultation and will present their children with some choices and veto others. I took my children to the park this evening (my decision. I knew they would want to go which they did). I asked them whether they wanted to walk or take bikes (they chose bikes). I let them go pretty much where they wanted in the park (although they actually automatically chose pretty much the route we always follow that I established years ago) and then I decided when we would all come home (otherwise they'd still be there building birds nests).

May I say I rather enjoyed Horton Hears a Who? - specifically the entity entitled "Katie", who managed, surreally, to be a compound of both my children (who are so orthogonally different that the very idea of compounding them is surreality itself).

May I also say Hello MrsWobble? - if you are still calmly surveying this (equally surreal) scene.

May I finally say, further to ScienceTeacher's point, that Anna does not (though she may think so) of course have a monopoly on totally fabulous wonderful trouble-free little daughters. The point being that those other little girls are not being raised exactly the way Anna's raising hers ... and therefore Anna's way is not the only one.

I also recognize anna that your family situation is not like mine. As you've said you are the stepmother to 2 older boys and you cannot 'lay down the law' to them. I appreciate that. I also assume they don't live with you all the time so since they have a different mother from your own daughter, have another home also (presumably), are older and of a different gender from your dd the family dynamics will be completely different from those in my own home and possibly some of the other posters here.

I can also dimly remember a time when I thought I'd got it right as a parent and my dd was a model of perfection. She was sleeping beautifully, past the terrible twos, able to articulate what she wanted, able to sit nicely at the table and eat like a dream and just starting to learn to read while her sister was a really amenable baby. I think I looked at my sister whose kids were older in horror and assumed she was getting it all wrong. This period of bliss lasted seconds BTW. Needless to say dd1's sister became a toddler and since they're close in age but not close enough (2 and 4 are such different stages of development) everything became a lot more complicated and full of conflict. Sometimes when I only have one or the other of the dds (rare) and we're all on holiday I do think not how lucky mums of singletons are (cos I always wanted 2) but how much easier their lives are and they don't know it.

This is all a roundabout way of saying I can kind of imagine how anna could think she's got it right and we're all just misguided, old harridans. But really this is just a lack of understanding about different circumstnaces, the impact of siblings, the pressure of work (I'm assuming you don't work anna) etc and the strange desire to prove a point to a bunch of strangers on the internet.