Here’s my latest response to an anonymous reader question…
A few questions: How do I introduce chores in a young family of three? What are best practices for limit setting? How do I get my kid to stop playing when he is overtired and needs to get some sleep? How in the world am I supposed to feed my family healthy nutritious food? How can I get them involved so that they will eat well and help out? What do I do to stop my kids from fighting with each other so that they won’t drive me crazy and I can feel like a good parent? What’s the best response to a kid ignoring their parent because they are on the iPad and can’t handle the stimulation but are totally addicted to it?
Dear Reader,
You submitted these questions a few weeks ago, and I’m just now responding to you. I’ve been thinking about what I want to say, and I keep changing my mind.
At first I thought I would pick one question and write an entire post about it. And then I thought I would address all of your concerns at once, with a few bullet points for each. But neither of these responses sat particularly well with me. Something wasn’t right.
I think it’s because I’m worried about you. You seem so stressed and overwhelmed by parenting, by how you should be setting limits and responding to your kids and teaching them and planning for their futures and keeping them healthy and making sure they’re solid citizens in the world, and just getting through each day without losing your mind.
Don’t get me wrong; we all feel that way sometimes. I was completely flattened just last night as I tried to figure out what to feed my girls for dinner. (After some rough calculations, I figure I’ve served up approximately 3,000 dinners in my years of parenting; you’d think I’d have a better handle on this one by now. Apparently not.)
But there is something about your questions and the way you wrote them that feels a bit more pressured than my nightly dinner freak-out. And that’s what I’m worried about.
You can read the rest of my response over at my PsychCentral blog.
