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I can tell you with great certainty, that I don’t ever yell at my kids to, “Get me a drink! Kids fight when they feel something isn’t fair or when they feel unheard. When children feel heard and when they feel that their emotions are validated, then they start cooperating more, they start acting more polite, they start being more helpful. If a child is swears, demands, yells, is aggressive or does other obnoxious things, parents, don’t feel like it’s you that’s modelled the wrong thing!

The ‘newer’ popular version of this advice is that if you just toughen up, set clear boundaries, or use a systematic discipline system, then the power struggles will go away… except what often happens, is that the power struggles DON’T go away, even after following any of this advice! This attitude of maintaining control over our children to avoid power struggles, is something I’ve consistently read in popular parenting books…. Little opportunities to GIVE our children power will go a long way in helping ‘power struggles‘ later (can you tell I don’t like using the word ‘power struggle? ! ). But, I think what people find is that once you become aware that most of the ‘power struggles‘ we encounter in our parenting journey are ones that we’ve created.

Family bed time means my husband and I get more sleep because we go to sleep at the same time as the kids. I sleep next to my 2 year old son, he’s so warm and cuddly and I can feel when he drifts off and then it’s my body’s cue to do the same. One particular popular parenting book I read, which I don’t even want to mention the name, suggests that it’s ok if your 4 year old child cries for 1-2 hours at night alone in their bed, as long as they’re physically ‘ok’ because you can just make up for it by positive parenting during the day. Time goes really slow for a child, so if they’re sitting there at night or in the morning, waiting to be allowed to get up out of bed, even if it’s only half an hour, that half an hour can feel like an eternity for them!

And, my little one, who isn’t even 2, had used the phone enough that he could turn on the phone, open the app he wanted and play or watch something (and I’m so against letting little ones on screens)! Probably this ban could have been better, but I definitely limited myself and only used the screen for work or for a short amount of time doing other brain numbing activities, like social media. They ENJOYED the break and asked for another week break in three day’s time! On the week that our ban was over, my 8 year old, the one who I knew would be feeling the screen ban the most, actually said, “Can we use the phones for three days and then have another week break?