this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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Oh go on, share it.
The woman in question told me that in order to help my toddler through his tantrums and general toddler-ness me and Mummy should opt for a strict 'mimic the crying' strategy.
She wants us to cry when he cries. Won't be trying that one. My 'gentle parenting' philosophy may have been abandoned at the birth of my second child, but I'm not sure I'm quite ready to traumatize my child in such an overt way just yet.
I'm not a parent, but my solution to tantrums is to send my imaginary little fucker to the local coal mine for the rest of the year. Have you tried that?
Do i need /s? :D
OK, she's clearly never met a small child.
Just being devils advocate here, but my granny did something similar for me and my cousins. I don't think she did it in public though, people watching and all that, and never when it was 'real' crying, like getting a scrape or other injury.
If we were crying, she would fake cry, like obviously fake, crearly audible 'waah' sound, almost like making fun of the crying. Every time I saw it when I was older, the child stopped crying and looked at her with a, "wait, is THAT what I sound like?" expression.
As I said, just playing devils advocate, and it's not something I would expect to work every time, but it's worth contemplating.
The thing is crying is a perfectly healthy way to express emotions.
Even if we think the reason is silly.
You can't control how you feel, only how you express it.
Mocking a child for expressing themselves isn't great generally.
Oh for sure, that's why I mentioned she didn't do it for 'real/genuine' crying. Like falling and scraping your knee, or your best friend saying they hate you, things like that she's be sympathetic to.
The situations she did that to were silly tantrums like "I want juice now, I don't want you to get it for me cause that takes time, I just want to have it now cause I should always have it!" type things. You know, the truly dumb stuff that kids do cause they don't yet understand anything.
To me it's just a way of teaching them what's worth crying over. What can be helped and what can't and all that jazz.
My mom tried that with my sister once (30 years ago).
It made the tantrum 10x worse.
The old make your child hate and fear you, tried and tested classic.