She didn’t hit him, or box his ears or anything physical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, she opened her bag, pulled out one of his toys, put it calmly on the floor…and stamped on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How appallingly cruel, and shit, and gutless is that? How much of a pit have you got to have crawled into in order to lose your rag that much at your child? What a completely stupid, fuckwit arsehole of a parent are you to be that far out of control?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, I haven’t got a 6\/7 year old (yet). But I’ve got a 2.5 year old, and yes, he can test the patience of a saint at the worst of times. But always – always – there’s a sense of keeping control, having to rise above it, remembering that kids are still people, and little ones at that. Sometimes it’s hard – really hard. I’m not as good as I could be, and sometimes I lose it and shout when I really don’t mean to. But I have also learned that kids always test the boundaries, and a losing-the-plot type moment does absolutely nothing for anybody – in fact if anything it gives them more attention and makes it more likely that they’ll do it again next time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take what happens when you stamp on your childs toy, for example: Small boy goes apoplectic. Screams get louder and more obscene (he starts calling his mum a “willy”), mum stomps off down the street. Neighbourhood is treated to 5 minutes of boy lying on the floor crying before he heads off to do some more shouting. Street covered in broken-toy litter. No one wins. And that’s all the practical stuff, without even mentioning the damage done to the poor kids’ psyche.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Enough ranting. I hope it works out. But I’m betting after another 10 years of that, he’ll end up being the one kicking the shit out of someone else smaller than him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You know, this was never meant to be a space where I banged on about how best to bring up kids. Yet here I am, post #2, and I’m about to rant. I was sitting upstairs in my office just now when my ears started pulsating with the sound of what sounded like a murder … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1425"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Nunzilla!\"](\"http:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/08\/nunzilla.jpg\")
<\/a>Anyway. The shouting continued, so being a top curtain-twitching kind of person, I snuck through to our bedroom so I could see what was going on. Across the road was a small boy, probably 6 or 7 years old, not being murdered, but screaming – and being screamed at – by his heavily-tattooed mother. I only caught the end of the argument and it had all got a bit heated by then but what happened next shocked me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n