Laughing yesterday Correcting today

Driving home today, Kassi and I started laughing about childhood and how things I hated being yelled at or told not to do as a kid I said I wouldn’t yell about when my kids did them.  Ironically, today I was yelling.  Okay, ‘yelling’ is a strong word because I wasn’t ‘yelling,’ I was telling her to not do something. Have I confused you yet?

Okay – a few months ago we were at my in-laws’ house for my nephew’s two year old birthday party.  After a while, he had been joined by my three-year old niece and nephew, and his two year old cousin and they were all running around in a circle from the kitchen through the dining room through the living room and up the foyer back to the kitchen.  ALL the adults were sitting around encouraging them to play and have fun – not one of us was telling them to stop running in the house.  That was when I turned to Kassi and said, “You know everything you get in trouble for as you get older are the things we thought were fun/funny and allowed you to do as infants and toddlers.”   She laughed and asked if she could get up and play with the little ones. lol  We thought it might be interesting to see the adult reaction, but I did not allow her to experiment.

Today we were driving home and the windows were fogging up.  So I’m sure you can figure out what Kassi did . . . she drew on the window (front passenger side).  Of course, my gut reaction was to tell her to not do that, but why????  What is it really going to hurt?  You know they did it when they were little and we didn’t tell them not to.  So, why now is it such a big deal?  IT’S NOT!!

The other night Zack and Mackenzie were playing an outside game – of course adjusted to play inside, make shift basketball – in the living room.  When they were littler and probably couldn’t have done much damage it would have been acceptable, but now they are huge and they are much stronger, so they were strongly encouraged to STOP!!!

I’m not really sure what my point is.  But I really wonder why, as parents, we allow our little ones to do one thing, but then expect something completely different later in life.  Shouldn’t or wouldn’t it be more beneficial to our offspring if we were consistent in our rearing from birth.  Now, don’t get me wrong none of this is going to hinder our children from succeeding in life, but it just might make our life a little more relaxed as they get older.