Attitudes Abound

It seems as though my eight year old son is entering his adolescence stage years ahead of time for he has recently developed a major attitude. You know, the one where he is always right, never wrong, and must have the final say in everything no matter how ridiculous the argument, no matter with whom the argument is engaged. I told my husband that I am ready to pull my hair out and if this newly formed attitude is any indication for how the next 10 years will be parenting and living with my son, well, then, I'm taking a long vacation!

Having more than 10 years experience teaching and volunteering with adolescents, I often thought that observing teenagers would enable me to figure out how I should approach child-rearing so that I could avoid the "know-it-all" attitude and other malbehavior characteristics. Likewise, I used to observe parents' methods when their teens would throw a fit, engage in an argument, straight up lie, and just flat out disrespect their parents in public. I would judge and think thoughts such as, "There is absolutely NO way MY child will ever behave like that or I'll just send him back to stork heaven!" or "I'm gonna raise my child from the womb to never raise his voice to me and will implement consequences to ensure that my child is attitude-proof." Blah, blah, blah, blah...and so my thoughts went, falsely comforting me that I would do a much better job than many of the parents I was observing.

But, here I am sitting and fuming after yet another non-productive argument with my son and wondering how I came to this place. Why is it that my son seems to naturally obey his father but when it comes to me it's like I'm invisible or worse yet, the very ground he walks upon! So I've been thinking about this a lot lately as this week has been horrible in terms of my son having the last say, or at least trying to, and I have decided that maybe he's not the only one having an attitude. Is is possible that Mommy treats him with an attitude, the very same disrespectful attitude that she despises, abhors? Hmmm...nah, that can't be because I would never do that to my child! Well, maybe I have been a bit obnoxious, thus promoting and escalating these spats between my son and me. So, what am I to do?

I'll tell you what I'm gonna do...I'm going to be the bigger man (woman) and act like the grown-up! It's all coming back to me now...the observations I had of parents and teens...when the parent didn't act/behave like the grown-up, then the confrontations always headed south quickly and nothing was ever resolved. I've learned my lesson - I am the grown-up and I will model the behavior that I expect from my son. If he can't obey or chooses to be disrespectful than I can implement consequences such as no playing the PSP for the next day, extra homework, extra chore, etc. However, I will not lose my patience nor will I raise my voice but will calmly say, "This discussion is over" and walk away. Let's see how this works...