Are all children this badly behaved?

[nairn]

I am preggers and had some friends with children round on saturday. One is 3 the other is 18 months.
They were a complete nightmare. Screaming, destroying my house, throwing tantrums. My poor mate couldn't even have a converstation for running around trying to stop them tearing down my Christmas tree - she can't have one because they would do the same in their own house.
I have been left feeling very worried that this is what the future holds for me.
I know kids will be kids but this was a living hell.
How do you stop that happening to you and continue to have a normal life of some sort?
I must admit I'm feeling really down about the whole thing now.
She said things like 'all this lovely stuff will have to go' and I couldn't' help thinking 'but I don't want my house turned into toys r us!' I like my nice home and I don't want a child - my own or someone elses - to destroy it!
Help! Tell me it's not always like this!

Kathy that post made me laugh - I'll make sure I remember that tip - thanks!

It will be fine Nairn.
You just prioritise, compromise, work out what is important to you and how to keep doing it, let go of the things that aren't....

my tuppence worth, "routine" and know your childs moods, dont go somewhere if they are likely to be tired / stressed by the sittuation.
think of it logically and practically.
kids need boundaries at home and in other peoples houses.

People used to say to me 'ooh you will have to move that once babe is on the move etc,etc'. I totally ignored them all and taught my DD what she could and couldn't touch/play with. I really don't understand it when parents move their entire life in to a cupboard instead of teaching their cild right and wrong. So many of my friends have done this and so as soon as the child gets taken to visit someones home, they destroy it. I can take my DD to anyones home and know that their 'best china' will be safe.

That's nice for you Sweetiesandcakes.

haven't read whole thread and suspect this may already have been posted......
darling all credit to you for being a firm believer in children fitting in with their parents' lives....... you just keep believing that! (do you believe in the tooth fairy too?).
oh, and good luck!

I dont think kids come the way u want them to be kids are kids i used to have a lovelly house cream sofas nice floors n some ornaments here n there now my daughter is 21 months i have had to change the living room about to fit in with her i have gone for fiber optic tree so if it falls theres nothig really to hurt her

my main point is kids are kids they dont fit in to what u like there all miss behaved sometimes id rather have a toys r us n let her play about rather than a palace

i also told myself when i was pregnant with her that she would be a angel and not turn out like my nephew who was a destroyer at the time and also said my child would never act up in poeples houses but looking back i was talking a lot of rubbish and now she does everything i didn't want her to do but she is a good girl really and i am now pregnant with bby 2 due in feb

Most likely it will be somewhere between the beautifully ordered, fitting-into-your-normal-life experience that you hope for and the full-on chaos that you experienced on Saturday. One child is very different from two children close together in age, and your own home kind of evolves into something where both you and your child feel at home, so it won't seem like such a violation as when you drop two random children into a completely unchildproofed house. But children (even your own) are louder and messier than you can really imagine before you have one, no matter how well-behaved. You don't tend to mind so much when they are yours, though.

DS has never been wilfully destructive, but stuff has got broken because he has never quite learned the habit of looking where he's going or of being entirely conscious of where all four flailing limbs are going (which I suppose is sort-of understandable given how quickly you are growing when you are a small child). And if we visit Houses That Don't Have Children we always bring toys with us to dissuade him from too much investigation -- for example, at DH's grandmother's house he always really wants to play with her telephone and her washing machine and her gadget for picking stuff up without bending down, but can normally be distracted with a sheet of stickers that he can carefully apply one at a time to her Zimmer frame with great concentration. You have to help your chldren by creating an atmosphere in which they can succeed at what you expect of them, IMO, rather than expect that they will magically resist their own childlike nature.

And (specific tip) if you have an energetic child you need to get them out of doors every day to let off steam, no matter how bad the weather, or you will all be climbing the walls by the end of the day (them literally, you metaphorically).

But again, you get to know their personality as they develop from a newborn and develop your own sense of what works and what doesn't and what the best strategies are -- you don't (outside adoption) suddenly acquire a fully-fledged toddler and have to cope right away.

your friends two kidws were probably very excited at being in someone else's house and went a bit crazy. Having said that, all children will be loud, actice etc - that is life - and you will not be able to carry on as if things are the same as they were. They never will be again!!

and your house honestly will turn into toys r us!

Hermykne and sweetiesandcakes thank so much! You are clearly on my wave length and hearing that is really helpful - inspiring even!
I plan to go big on routine and teach them right from wrong as you have. I want my kids to respect nice things not think they can destroy everyhting in their path. As for drawing on walls - no way!
Yes it might be hard work constantly saying 'no' until they get the message but I'd rather do that than live in chaos any day.

washable crayons are great

Seeing as my ds2 was crawling at 6 months and walked at 9 months I couldn't teach him much really so we had to move certain things. Mostly I spend my day moving him away from the sky box, dvd player etc, I'm sure when he's older he'll understand more but for now no way.

Personally we never had rountines and the children are well behaved when we go out most of the time. Good behaviour isn't the be all and end all either. I want my children to be children and not worry about making a bit of mess. I accept that for a few years (and the rest!) my house won't be as tidy as I'd like and there will be toys on the floor but it won't last forever. Toys don't take (too) long to tidy away at the end of the night and if you don't get around to it (as I don't some night, too tired) then it really doesn't matter. Happy children with happy lives are far more important that some mess Seeing them happy makes me happy too

can i just say, no one wants a child that draws on walls, no one wants a destructive toddler, no one wants to be housebound because you are too embarrased to take your kid out in public.....however none of us get to choose. Some of us deal with what we are given and learn to roll with the punches and take our kids at face value and not sweat the small stuff. Some of us are bloody lucky and get angels. I have twins, both raised the same way, both the same age (!!) and both at same developmental level, one is an angel, one is the devil child - it's nothing I've done, its simply personality and there is nothing i could have done to change it. I just have to deal with it as best I know how.

We all have BIG ideas and BIG plans on how family life is gonna be - for some of us its exactly as we planned for others, well, for others life is simply turned on its head.

The point is, you will think and feel differently once you have children of your own, and things will be very different from the way you imagine they will be.

But it won't matter because you won't be experienceing these changes from the perspective from which you are currently viewing them.

It won't be as you imagine - but you will have some degree of influence over the choices you make.

But there will still be mess and destruction from time to time, and conversations uninterrupted...well, have them now!

But Nairn, surely you don't believe that those of us who wouldn't trust our children with someone else's best china (for example) are in that position because we haven't bothered to teach our children right from wrong?
The fact is that children are different. If someone with one easy child reckons they are the world expert on parenting it's usually because they haven't grasped the full range of child behaviours and the extent to which it is chance what you end up with.

Okay, I am getting the vibe that you are not enjoying the tongue-in-cheek posts...

Don't stress it too much, it will be what it is and you will do the best job you can! Sounds like you have thought through the approaches you think will suit you and how you will deal with various aspects of parenting. Despite your best efforts though, some days will be chaos...it is all part of the adventure

Anyway, don't mind us cynics...we really have NO reason

Stop panicking. It's just nerves really.
You have no idea what kind of parent you'll be until your baby is born. That's what parenthood is like. Best laid plans and all that. But you won't believe that until it happens.
However your baby won't do anything at first except wail and feed, so you won't have to change much, except have some nappies and some kind of pram about the place.
Kids are always more difficult in someone else's house, because they are excited, usually bored (no toys, mum trying not to play with them because that makes the hostess roll her eyes) but there is some new and tempting stuff to touch and look at it. It's actually often very stressful for parents to go to childless people's houses, where they feel judged, have to look at the childless person's horrified face every time one of the kids moves, and have try to protect their knick-knacks from curious children while at the same time trying to have a coffee and a chat with someone who would get huffy if she interacted with her own children.

It doesn't necessarily help with clumsiness or general boistrousness, mind you. Teaching my DS right from wrong isn't going to make him look where he's going any more than the fact that my DH has known right from wrong for a good few years now makes him look where he's going (I had to take DH to A&E a couple of years ago after he had split his head open walking into a door frame when stone-cold sober... can't imagine where DS gets it from . Only two running-into-things-related A&E visits from DS so far, so they're fairly level there). I haven't had to move anything out of DS's way out of fear of his deliberately breaking it or fiddling with it, and we've only had one drawing-on-a-window episode, after which he doesn't draw on things that aren't paper, but we have had to move things on the basis of carrying out "hmm, what would happen if a 30-pound toddler ran into that while looking over his shoulder?" risk assessments.

DS was crawling by five months and walking unaided at nine months as well as pp said, there's a big difference between dealing with a baby doing that and the more normal crawling at eight months, walking at 13-14 months, type of schedule in terms of what the levels of understanding are because much as I would like to believe that early crawling/walking was a sign of incipient genius in DS it wasn't. He was just a baby with the same level of understanding and fine motor control as any baby his age but the gross motor skills of a baby twice his age, which is something of a recipe for chaos no matter how much you focus on right and wrong.

Yes it will have it's up and downs. I completely expect that. I suppose it just comes as a bit of shock to think that your life that you are totally happy with will be turn upside down - and not in the good way you are hoping for.
Sleepless nights I can do - kids who look me in the eye defiantly before they trash my house I'm not so prepared to put up with.
I think someone said keeping the toys in the playroom and I agree that is a good plan - as is a family room for kids and sitting room for grown ups.
I guess it's just a case of doing whatever works for you. I'm not judging my friend as a parent, I know she tries her best and is a great mum.
And she has two much older children who are a delight.
I was just looking for a bit of reassurance that it isn't always so hard. But then to me what is hard what might be easy for someone else and vice versa. We all have different priorities and want to raise our kids different ways.

Oh it def depends on the child. My first was pretty textbook really, on the whole pretty well behaved, needed a lot of attention, broke a couple of things, one very minor trip to A&E.

my second has sn, was very withdrawn as a toddler, happy to sit and stare into space and didn't every break things and was generally very easy to look after.

then I had twins. One isn't too bad - the second is a nightmare.

All four of my kids have been brought up pretty much the same. Unfortunately I wasn't really planning nos 3 & 4, so by then I had bought some pretty nice things. Glass furniture, crystal, good quality electronics, - yknow the sort of thing you buy AFTER the kids have grown up.

dt2 has left his mark on everything! In the past week he has broken a denby rice bowl, stuck a dvd in the toaster, and broken the drawer on a £500 stereo. He has dented leather chairs, chipped the glass on the furniture, smashed cystal vase, jumped out the first floor window, taken heart tablets, blown the electrics, broken a wii and a dvd player, the grate on the fireplace, the windows on the playhouse, an electric quad bike, etc etc.

I don't think I'm a bad parent. I get compliments on how well behaved my older two are, and how well mannered they are. Some children jsut are extremely lively, and you have to go with the flow. You can try putting things out of reach, but mine seen it as a challenge! Luckily he is starting to slow down a bit now. Hopefully the house will still be standing at the end of it.

You really don't know what you will get. There will prob be times when you feel like throttling your child! But when it is your child, you find ways to live with it, even if that does mean turning your house into toys r us. For my sanity, I used to put everything away at the end f the day, so at least then I could pretend I was in a nice adult house once they were in bed.

Also I suppose this has a 'what's childbirth like?' element to it.
Some women will have had a terrible time and others will have found it a wonderful experience.
Then there will be those who want to encourage and reassure that you'll manage it and others who want to terrify new mums to be with horror stories - even though there is nothing to say anyone will have a dreadful or a wonderful time of it.
There is a luck of the draw aspect to it and preperation aspect. I guess it's the very same with how kids behave.
You can try your best to prepare, read the books etc, but there are no guarentees - just like anything in life.

got it in one nairn - bin the books!

I prefer to have either need no books at all or a range of different ones. That way you can decide what you want to do and find a book to tell you it's definitely the best thing

Look

you start off with a small defenceless bundle that can't even lift it's own head

then it learns to

and then it learns to smile

but it can't hold anything or roll over

then it learns to

by the time your child is able to move you would move / adjust anything to make sure you're giving him or her the best life you possibly can

don't worry it comes in stages .. small incremental changes .. you don't even notice that you are changing as your baby develops ..but you will