Playdate non-disaster

[walkitout]

It wasn't looking good for this afternoon's playdate. T. wanted to cancel (wow, was there a lot of demands to cancel, and zero acceptance of alternatives). A. did not want to cancel, got sick of her brother yelling, went upstairs to lay down in my bed and watch Despicable Me 2.

Playdate facilitator arrived. She's lobbying for more 1-on-1 with T. I'm not happy because I am paying for playdate facilitation, NOT more adult-child time. My kids get too much adult-child time already. Other family arrives. I deploy the pre-planned 10 minutes on the iPad then you have to play with the other kids for 15 minutes ultimatum to the oldest arriving boy, J. J. is good with this, because it means iPad now. Middle kid, Z., wants to watch J. play, but is distracted by facilitator to go do other stuff upstairs with my children. Littlest, A., is running around having a good time.

10 minutes in, I pull J. away from the iPad and we all play for about 20 minutes, so that went really well, then it's back to the iPad. I'm playing with A., but there's a whole lot of let's get J. back off the iPad and then figure out how to transition him out the door at the end of the hour. Too much distraction for me. A. wanders off. *sigh* Snacks are deployed. Z. plays on the iPad for a while next to her brother J.; my kids check in with them and continue to engage with the adults. After the time is up, I pull J. off the iPad and a tantrum occurs. I let that go for a while, and there's some discussion about what to do next that doesn't seem very useful to me. Eventually, I pursue J., with the goal of converting his high-energy I-want-iPad/I-don't-want-to-leave tantrum into something more entertaining: the Monster Is Gonna Get You (always a good game). Whenever I'm about to catch him (frequently -- it's my house and I'm fast), I stop, and do Monster: roar, stand up tall, lean over, make a face. J. finds this hysterically funny (duh. Like there's a kid who can throw a tantrum who won't find this hilarious).

Meanwhile, J.'s mother and the facilitator have gone from discussing how that is not going to work (but not stopping me. Yay!) to OMG I can't believe that worked. We Discuss. It was a really great discussion, but somewhat surprising, because the facilitator Totally Got my theory (converting high energy negative to high energy positive) but had not believed it would work with a kid who was that emotionally disorganized (you should have seen him; he was a mess. Adorable, but totally lost it. I've been through much worse with my own kids, so no biggie. I've been through _much worse_ as a person, so _really_ totally got this one). So we talked a while about rough housing, and the trickiness of negotiating boundaries in this kind of interaction and so forth. And the facilitator Really Really Got It. But also had not believed it would work.

Weird.

So I called my sister, and she did somewhat recognize the technique and has used it on occasion herself (altho not as often as I do), and she knew other people who used it (altho she couldn't come up with them offhand, we did think of them together). We even put together a theory about where we learned it from (a maternal uncle is our best candidate -- it's very much in his style, and he was around a lot when we were young, and his children use the same technique as adults on children). But we suspect that it's kind of a dying art. Professionalized child care can't really do this, because it's a high risk/high skill exercise. The litigation risk is probably crazy high -- plus, when you do this, you really look like a total fool until it works, at which point you go from zero to hero so fast that some people have trouble believing what they just saw happen. And so many people have kids late in life and not in a lots-of-kids-around context, so it's hard to imagine how the technique is learned. The reason my sister and I knew it is because we babysat a ton when we were young, so we hadn't forgotten it being done to us and we were able to flip it.

I'm happy this worked out, and I was pleased to get the chance to discuss it and it's really nice to get some credit for some skills. But I'm a little weirded out still that this is not a Normal Parenting Technique.

Comments

why it's not a Normal Parenting Technique

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I suspect there are kids it wouldn't work on. I think I would have thought the adult was making fun of me and gotten seriously mad. (Partly because I spent a lot of time getting made fun of, having so many older siblings.) Also, it superficially resembles (and I do get that you are Totally Not Doing This) that thing where the adult won't let the kid have their own feelings and keeps joking to try to make them cheer up.

There's also the question of when, relating to their energy levels, particular kids tend to flip out. My kids usually did so when they were really over-tired. They'd actually (particularly P.) be very *charmingly* energetic right before they hit "woops, better go home now" status (if we took them out the door while they were a little manic but still grinning, they'd be fine, but go to sleep in the car -- we referred to this as "getting to the carriage before it turns into a pumpkin"). Kids who flip out in the *middle* of the high-energy state (a friend of P.'s was like this when he was younger) probably need completely different handling.

But of course I don't know for sure how my kids would have reacted, as I never tried such a thing (other distraction techniques, yeah, but quieter ones). I asked E., and she said she thinks she would not have liked it.

Re: why it's not a Normal Parenting Technique

[walkitout]

I've been around your kids and you on and off over the years. Of your children, the only one I would even _contemplate_ using this technique on would be P., and I doubt the occasion would ever arise. Your kids don't have the kind of really high energy (like, ran all over the house, up and down stairs, dodge, kick, hit, throw things) associated with frustration/anger that was characteristic of T. when he was younger, and seems to occur occasionally with this other child.

We could speculate as to _why_ (different genetics, different parenting style/choices, etc.), but I just never saw anything like the kind of energy in your kids that I saw in T., many of my close relatives, and in J.

What did your/your kids' tantrums look like when they were pre-k/elementary age?

Re: why it's not a Normal Parenting Technique

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

They didn't tend to run or throw things (well, once P. threw all his shoes down the hall, now that I think of it, and had them confiscated). The girls did a few times get into pushing each other or wrestling (not for fun). Screaming, crying, slamming doors, that kind of thing was unfortunately very common (it was a rare, rare day that there was no fighting or crying). The all-time classic scene I remember is S. running into her room, slamming the door, opening it to shout, "You're all meanies, meanies, meanies! Everybody in this house is a meanie!" *slam* *open* "Except ME!" *slam* B. and I were huddled in the kitchen trying not to laugh audibly because we knew it would hurt her feelings.

Oh, and I knew the Lutheran preschool had been a mistake when I found four-year-old E. sobbing at being sent to her room for something and saying, "This [meaning her being sent to her room, not her own behavior] doesn't please God at all. This doesn't even please Jesus." (I was, however, pretty impressed that she got it that the same behavior standards were supposed to apply to adults.)

The girls used to completely climb the walls at home and then settle down and play very sedately at the playground. It used to frustrate me because I wanted them to burn off energy outdoors instead of calmly messing around in the sandbox -- surely they could play calmly at home? But of course that was about as much use as telling a baby when to poop, i.e., none.

[amy m yasuda (from livejournal.com)]

I'd rather overtly discredit my child's feelings than do it in a passive aggressive manner cloaked in punishing 'the behavior and not the feeling'. I think I knew that was a total crock when I was about 4, so I prefer to err on the side of at least respecting my child's intelligence.

(I'm not trying to be oppositional but I know I am, sorry.) (It's just how I FEEL...)

I think it is great if you found a technique to help short-circuit/redirect tantrum/hyperfocused behavior. It takes alot of unconscious intuition and finesse to accomplish this- which is why we probably don't see more parents engaging their children this way. I know you are talking about a certain level of physicality/intensity but that is child dependent and redirection can look like a whole slew of different things. The trick is being able to gauge that intensity and which direction to channel the energy (for one of my kids, it is getting her moving physically... for the other it might be getting her to do something that is soothing from a tactile perspective- petting the cat, running her hands under water- just as examples).

I think the important thing is opening that line of communication in a way the child can hear- if you have to match tone/intensity for that to happen then you are awesome for figuring that out. I know lots of parents that never do and you can see it in their kids.

This is all my opinion and with a penny, would be worth about 1 cent. :)