To Spank or Not to Spank

When Sam and I were getting ready to build our house, people were constantly telling us how stressful it would be. We were engaged at the time, planning to get married in the middle of the building process and a number of people went so far as to say that building a house with a partner caused their marriages to end. I had only one person, one lone person, tell me that building her house with her husband was fun. And I’m grateful to that person still because she gave me hope that it was possible.

Approaching Quinn’s third birthday was a similar experience. Everyone, leading up to it, made a point to tell us that “the terrible twos aren’t that bad...it’s three that’s the worst!” The horror stories about toddlers at age three are ominous, to say the least--enough to make you hate the year, before you even get there. This is how self-fulfilling prophecies work. You imagine dreading the phase and so you do. 

Or, you don’t. I’m working to tune out the doom and gloom.

I will confess that it’s not been entirely easy. Quinn is tenacious, intense, even prone to fits of violence. One night, determined not to take the bath that she so obviously needed, she grabbed a mason jar from the edge of the tub and threw it at my head. Fortunately, it missed my head. Unfortunately it did not miss the porcelain toilet; it shattered all over the bathroom. I was so stunned I didn’t immediately react; I just gasped and turned my head to look at her. What I saw next was the scariest part: Quinn was initially surprised too, but when she saw me turn to look at her, she quickly composed herself and looked me directly in the eye. Her gaze was threatening, her eyebrows bent, her message clear: “Don’t push me, Mom; I’m not taking a bath.”

The past month or two has brought increasingly frequent meltdowns, increasingly furious outbursts, and increasingly angry reactions from both me and Sam. Quinn has spent a lot of time in “time-out.” And when she’s in time-out, I can tell you, she is not thinking about what she’s done wrong, she’s thinking about ways to kill us. She pounds on the walls and she screams.

But let me back up a bit. The other thing I’ve been struggling with in the past few months, in addition to my raging toddler, is an increasing feeling of pressure from other people about how to handle her. In fact, some of that pressure goes way back to when Quinn was probably about a year old and she was doing something my dad thought was inappropriate. He looked at her, with wide disbelieving eyes, and then at me...back to her, back to me. “When are you going to spank her!?” he demanded. The idea seemed laughable to me at the time; I definitely wasn’t going to spank her at that age and I wasn’t even sure I ever would. Hitting her seemed absurd.

I’ve had other questions about my parenting choices since, some direct and some just implied. There were a number of challenging moments this summer, in front of family or friends, when Quinn would misbehave, demand attention, refuse to go to bed, or slap me across the face in front of a room full of people. In each of those moments I was simultaneously trying to figure out how to deal with Quinn’s embarrassing behavior and how to also manage the observers’ expectations and in some way explain or justify my choices. What people often don’t understand is that the kid behaves worse because they are there, and I parent differently because they are there. Instead of making a scene, or getting really angry, I found myself trying to smooth things over calmly and positively, so as not to disrupt the mood any more than we already had. But sometimes, I found, people expect you to lose it--they want you to blow a gasket because that’s how they did things, or how things were done to them. In their opinions or experiences, that’s the way you have to react in order to maintain control and raise an obedient, well-mannered kid.

By the end of this summer, as Quinn kept doing things that frustrated us, I started to wonder if all of those people were right. I started experimenting when no one was around to witness my angry-parent reactions: I stopped tolerating any misbehavior, I got mad quickly, I put her in time-out often...I even, recently, tried slapping her hand when she hit me, so the sting of it would send a message. And the other day, after allowing this pattern to repeat for a while, I slapped her on the face. “How do you like it?” I asked her. “I don’t like that,” she blurted out through shocked tears. “Then don’t do it to me...” But as my sentence trailed off, so did my conviction. I realized why I had never reprimanded  her in these ways when people were around: because I felt absurd and ashamed.

I always imagined that I would be the tough cop with my kid. I’m a stickler for right and wrong, I don’t put up with b.s. from anyone, and there have been plenty of times I’ve yelled at people. But I don’t like yelling at Quinn. Here’s why: three short years ago she came into this world weighing only seven pounds, with her skinny little chicken legs, and every day since I’ve watched her set her sights on doing new things and apply her persistence to accomplishing them. At this time last year she was just starting to be verbal. By now she can have sustained conversations with people on the phone. She has memorized every single word of a handful of beloved books. I can tell her something once and she’ll remember it and apply it repeatedly with ease. “May I please be excused?” she’ll ask after a meal. “Thank you for making me my dinner, Mom,” she’ll say as she climbs down from her chair with a big, proud smile. 

And when Quinn screws up, or hurts your feelings, she knows it and she manages to process through her anger much more quickly than some adults I know. When she’s given the time and space to do so, Quinn almost always makes a point to apologize. At three she still lashes out when she is feeling emotions that need an outlet, but she is also beginning to develop a sense of how other people are feeling too. And while the time between a strike and an apology might seem long to some observers, the fact that one inevitably follows the other is something that I admire. Frankly, she behaves better than a lot of adults I’ve dealt with in life, but because she is a toddler, there are a lot of people who think she should be kept constantly in line.

I can tell you for certain that if someone threw me in a time-out and then immediately got in my face and demanded that I calm down, “use my nice voice,” and apologize for something I felt justified in having done, I would lose my f’ing mind. And that’s the key for me right now: I can empathize with her. I don’t respond well to belligerent displays of authority, so why would she? I have to find a way that feels more natural and, as I do, I’m confident it will work better than what we’ve been trying lately. I won’t speak for Sam; he and I have always had a really different style as teachers, and we’ve both found what feels right and natural with our students, with generally positive results for each of us. I know he’s going through these parenting questions right now too, and I suspect he feels a bit envious of the dads of old who simply left the day-to-day parenting to the moms; he’s not so lucky--everything in our house is shared, including the parenting books that are starting to pile up.

When we left Quinn’s three-year check up with her pediatrician today, we both felt a bit deflated. Quinn behaved as I suspected she would: she did not want to be examined and she did not fall for the nurse or doctor’s coy attempts to trick her into “playing a game” or taking a bribe. She wanted to do her own thing and, when Sam tried to hold her still on his lap, and the doctor leaned into her personal space with her instruments, Quinn wriggled one arm free and slapped her right on the face. I was disappointed and apologetic, but not entirely surprised. Sam was mortified. 

I had really been looking forward to the appointment--to hearing what the doctor thought about Quinn’s progress, to being able to brag about the fact that Quinn gave up her pacifier herself, and that she was the one who decided she wanted to stop wearing diapers, and that since then, she’s been wearing “unnies” almost all the time. Instead we got bogged down in talking about the challenges of dealing with her behavior. The pediatrician said, in a tone that implied she thought we had long-since figured this out, that “Quinn is obviously a spirited child,” and it was clear that spirited was a euphemism.  And it is, I looked it up: spirited is the nice word for “high needs.”

So that’s what we left with today: a label. That and the business card of a family counselor who specializes in “spirited” children.

I know I’m at a turning point because while I was disappointed with her behavior today, I wasn’t mad. I'm done being mad at her all the time. Instead I feel newly determined to help her find ways to channel all of her passionate emotions in life, to keep finding ways to grow beyond the bounds of anyone’s labels, and to evolve into a civilized but still authentic version of herself.

Five minutes after we drove away from the doctor’s office, with no prompting from us, Quinn said, “Next time, I’d like to say ‘I’m sorry’ to Dr. Parker.” 

I think three is pretty incredible.