Eight is a difficult age

There are times when I really don’t want to be in the same building as my eight year old. I’m sure I’m not the only parent who thinks this. Two nights ago, I walked into the bathroom following twenty minutes of intense prevarication on dudelet’s part and asked him if he’d cleaned his teeth.

“You’ve already asked me that!” he whined.

I know, I wanted to say, and I’m asking again because you ignored me. And because you’ll ignore me this time and then again until you finally get the reaction you’re looking for: an explosion of frustrated rage on my part generating dramatic tears and an even larger explosion on your part culminating in your slamming the bathroom door on me and screaming every time I try to engage you or attract your attention. The previous night I’d been foolish enough to tell him that I’d actually been waiting for half an hour and had triggered slammed doors and inarticulate howls of rage and sorrow every time I’d come near him until he finally fell asleep, still furious.

This time, I didn’t say anything. Ten minutes later, he cleaned his teeth. But I felt like I was walking on eggshells.

You can probably tell that we’ve got a bit of a cycle happening here – we ask him to do something, he doesn’t do it, we wait a reasonable amount of time and ask again and he explodes in fury. It’s unpleasant, it happens on a daily basis and we still don’t really know what to do about it. Eggshells, many of them broken, all over the house.

We know it’s related to a number of issues:

• Self-esteem

• Tiredness

• School

• Growing up

Growing up is the easiest one to accommodate. We know hormones and testosterone are raging throughout his (still) little body. He’s an increasingly independent being who struggles with that independence and the responsibilities. There are changes going on with his body and it’s both interesting and frightening for him. The good news is that he at least talks to us about him and the those conversations (that’s a whole other post) are going well. The bad news is that it contributes to the thunder and lightning of the other issues.

Tiredness is a big problem. Dudelet is an early riser. Four thirty isn’t unknown. At eight, he knows to keep the noise down and to find something quiet to entertain himself with and we’re lucky that he’s a good reader. But if he wakes up before five during a light sleep phase he just won’t try and go back to sleep again. There are simply too many distractions and short of stripping every book out of his room and putting a lock on his door (NOT under consideration for even a single moment!) there isn’t a lot we can do about it.

But this means that by six or seven o’clock, after a long day at school, he’s often cranky, grumpy and carrying huge bags under his eyes. He’s generally asleep before eight thirty but we’re pretty sure he isn’t getting all the sleep he needs.

School is another challenge. His tiredness is starting to impinge on his behaviour in the classroom (his teacher reports that he sometimes ‘loses it’ over the tiniest of things) and getting him to engage in out of school activities is a constant battle. He seems to be well socialise and popular but he’s clever and still hasn’t learned how to manage how he uses that cleverness. In other ways, he’s immature for his age – he cries more readily than other children. He’s physically timid (this frustrates supermum, who can be a bit of a Hemulen, a great deal) and avoids teamsports or physically activities like the proverbial plague. I suspect (and feel rather guilty about it) that he gets a lot of this from me. In other ways, he’s ahead of most of his peers ( a full stage above in areas like maths and reading).

Looking at books and commentaries leads us to believe that self-esteem, or lack of it, at the core of dudelet’s tantrums and difficulties in coping with everyday elements of family life. On some occasions he’s come right out and said it – “I’m no good at anything” “You don’t love me” “You think I’m rubbish” – and it breaks my heart.

It also makes me feel terribly guilty, as if my own feelings of inadequacy and failure have somehow infected him like an airborne virus

So what are we doing?

Nothing very spectacular. We’re biting our lip, we’re avoiding getting drawn into confrontations (which always end appallingly badly), we’re praising when possible and avoiding being negative. We’e already doing most of the things one finds on typical parenting checklists (except, of course, when we forget ourselves – we get tired too). I can’t help feeling that a lot of these tensions would dissipate if he could only learn to go back to sleep. But that’s not something we can impose – he has to learn to do it himself.

Anyone else find themselves trapped in this sort of a cycle? How did you manage to break out of it?

Southport Seafront, clichéd decay, weird paddle boats

The fact is, Southport isn’t anywhere near as bad as I remembered. Every toilet in every chain restaurant seems papered over in posters warning about meow-meow and suggesting one ‘asks Frank’ but the expected gangs of feral tweens wandering the seaside wastelands seem to keep themselves voluntarily confined to a large skatepark. Tottenham and Hackney could learn a thing or two there.

We’ve been here for three days, visiting my elderly relatives and taking a ride round ‘my old haunts’, as a obscure track by The Dream Syndicate might put it. There’s a decaying Victorian park sandwiched between an immense Travel Lodge and an even larger Best Western that offers a pleasantly melancholy tour of Southport’s former grandeur.

I had my iPhone so I took a picture of a decaying and pleasantly melancholy park gazebo (or meow-meow house).

In the distance, there’s the deserted coils of the giant rollercoaster in Pleasureland. I’ve no idea if it opens in winter. Probably not. It looks like the council decided to put a lot of money into it at some point and sort of…stopped. But not before they built a heritage centre. I walked around it (it was closed) and couldn’t really work out what it was for. It was surrounded by truncated lampost pillars, like a Greek ruin.

There’s a circular chamber at the back. Perhaps its the airconditioning for a vast underground system of tunnels and bombshelters. Perhaps not.

Dudelet and I took a walk while we waited for the arcades to open. There are rituals associated with seaside towns which must be observed at all costs and the exchange of money for noise, coloured lights and unreliable hits of serotonin is one of them. Dudelet, though he didn’t know it at the time, was about to win a jackpot amount of tickets* and acquire a memory which will remain with him for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, we passed a building with a sign proclaiming it to be the Smallest Pub In Britain.

Next to the Smallest Pub In Britain was an equally small sternwheel paddle steamer. I have no idea how they acquired it.

Back in the park, we found a deserted miniature railway station. It was a forlorn sight.

Elsewhere, the Most Gothic Hotel In Southport stood waiting R-PAT’s wedding party.

Then I discovered Hipstamatic and turned everything into the 1960s.

And here’s a picture of my family. They’re the cold looking little group trudging wearily towards Fun.

Later this week, I’ll do the happy post about the joyous, uplifting things. But today is all about the cliché and the decay. I suppose I’m listening to too many Cure reissues.

*If you don’t already know, it’s far too complicated to explain.

School, Little Elf, Change

Always different and always the same.

Four years ago, I had a turn at delivering dudelet to nursery. Supermum had actually taken him to his first day so by the time I walked him to school he’d already been ‘socialised’ into the norms of the nursery experience. Back then, parents could lead their children right into the large, awkwardly-shaped open-plan space with its 19th century hall.  Dudelet held on to my hand and showed me the hamster, the place where he put his bag, the sand tray and the funny-things-hanging-from-the-ceiling until the teacher clapped her hands and he toddled off obediently to sit on the carpet with his nearly-four-year old peers. He still sneaked me a quick “look-at-me” wave, though and a wide-eyed grin, amazed to be sitting there in the midst of a newly independent, mysterious world, at once circumscribed and vast.

I went outside, overwhelmed by the sense of gateways opening and closing and, to be honest, my own memories of more than forty years previously. It wasn’t the scent or taste of a madeline so much as the high angle of the ceiling and the low sticky-back plastic covered tables and…and…

Well, I cried a bit.

Little elf was different. Supermum and I took her together for her first day after we’d persuaded to put some clothes on (she’s very prone to naked protests). First we dropped dudelet off at the ‘big’ playground with the other Year Threes then  headed across the school to the nursery classrooms. Little elf showed me her hook with her name on but (different building, new head teacher, change in policy) I had to stop at the classroom door and watch her scamper off to join the other children on the assembly mat. She was already chatting and didn’t even look at me.

Earlier, she’d shared a few anxieties, mostly about lunch.

“I won’t be able to eat.”

“You’ll be able to choose something you like.”

“But how will they know?”

“You can tell them what you want to eat.”

“But what if I can’t tell them?”

“You can point.”

“BUT I CAN’T POINT!”

This time, I didn’t cry. I don’t know why. Perhaps we suspect there’s something more resilient about our daughter? Or perhaps we’ve just grown thicker skins? There are so many transitions, so may never-to-be-turned-back motions of the clock and we can’t cry about them all. There aren’t enough tears in the world.

Gateways

Dudelet is digging into his bowl of Hoops and humming to himself. I have the same habit.

“How do you feel about Year 3?” I ask him. He’s only got a week and a bit of Year 2 left.

“Well, I’m a bit worried because we’ll be the smallest in the playground.”

He’s not joking. All this year he’s been one of the biggest – the Year 2s tower over the Reception class and amiably lord it over the Year 1s. But next year, he’ll literally pass through two gateways into the Big Playground where the mysteries of Years 3 to 6 lurk, tooled up and ready to rumble. Also, how typical of my son to say ‘smallest’ instead of ‘littlest’.

“How do you mean?”

“The Year 6s are really big! Even bigger than you!”

“Well, some of them. People are sorts of sizes at that age.”

“I’m a bit nervous.”

“Hmm. I know it’s scary but there are always going to be those gateways. Like when you went to Reception or when you go to High School. I can’t remember my first day at primary school – your Year 3 but I still remember when I went to High School.”

“That’s funny! I was just going to ask you that!”

I look at him. He’s actually interested.

“Well, you know how teachers at your school, when you squabble…”

“Squabble?”

“Kind of argue or push or shove each other for some reason. You know how teachers tell you to be friends and perhaps make you sit in the thinking corner for a bit?”

“Yes. I suppose that happens. Sometimes.”

“Okay. Well, on my first day at High School, I got into one of those squabbles with another boy in a craft class and we got sent out. And the craft teacher – a really huge man who looked like he should have long fangs like a goblin – grabbed us and threw us out of the classroom. So we were a bit nervous and we decided that we’d explain to him that we’d made it up and sorted things out and so on. And…”

“And what happened?”

“He came out, whacked us both on the side of the head – it really stung my ear – and told us not to do it again or we’d be up before Brother X, the Headmaster and he’d give us six.”

“Six?”

“Look, you know they used to hit children in schools? And how they aren’t allowed to do it anymore?”

“Yes I know. Phew.” He shakes his head solemnly.

“So, anyway,” I finish up, a bit lamely. “Year 3 is nothing to worry about.”

“Okay. Can I watch telly now?”

“Okay.”

I sit down for two minutes to eat my toast (I can hear that little elf, who is a complete grump in the mornings, just like her mother, is in-bound). I don’t want him to pass those gates any sooner than he has to. But here they come.

Three things I tell dudelet each night

Warning: Contains parenting. And sentiment. And a teeny bit of very un-Dad Who Writes-like slush.

Something which supermum and I noticed a while back (and continue to struggle with) is how a bad day with dudelet (nearly seven years old at this point) can overshadow all his many wonderful qualities, actions and general all-round fabulousness.

So, much to my surprise, I introduced a little positive thinking practice into our bedtime routine. The last thing we do before “lights out”* is for me to tell him three things he did during the day that I loved. I’ve set myself a few parameters

• No reference to anything bad that’s gone on, like particularly naughty behaviour
• No comparison with his little sister
• No use of something I’ve heard from supermum – they all have to be from actual, real, concrete interactions I’ve had with him.

On work days, this can be tricky. But I manage it. If I forget, he reminds me. Ands recently, he’s started asking me to add three things that I’ve done during the day that I think where pretty good or worthwhile (I’m paraphrasing). So I suppose he’s now reforming me a little.

Is it working? Who knows? I suspect all parenting techniques are essentially homoeopathic, if you see what I mean.

But at least we both remind each other that every day, he’s given several new reasons to love and value him so it’s probably doing some good somewhere.

*It’s actually “Lights turned down a bit” as dudelet often reads himself to sleep