KMZ223

Pick your battles. You will not be able to fix everything at once so decide what you really care about and pick a consistent response. Throwing food was one of ours– every time he threw food, we pulled his high chair away from the table. We found the physical signaling does more with a younger 2 year old than words alone. One of our other “battles” is hitting mom/dad or grabbing hair. We put him down (gently) and turn away from him and say something simple like “that hurts mama.”

I have no idea if this is the “right” way, but I’ve found it helps to save up your disciplinary energy for the stuff that really matters to you and to use consistency and physical signals to communicate.

What a small world! What year was that out of curiosity? Our neighborhood was redistricted to Wilde Lake in the late 90s and my friends largely remember it fondly, but obviously high school is high school so your results may vary.

Anecdata to the school conversation:

I went to a majority black high school in a largely white, affluent suburb in Maryland. Nearby neighborhoods work hard to avoid going to my high school to the point where it became a NYTimes story (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/us/howard-county-school-redistricting.html).

As the upper middle class White daughter of two lawyers, it was an incredible place to go to high school. Strong community, excellent arts program, great sports, and I was able to access the exact same AP classes as my peers at neighboring schools. The diversity of the student body and the high level of engagement of the staff meant that we avoided the “pressure cooker” feel of a lot of nearby high schools. And, for those who care, I had exceptional SAT scores and had to choose between multiple academic full ride scholarships when I went to college. I don’t feel that my education “suffered” one iota.

My experience has given me a lifelong suspicion of choosing schools based on test scores. Not all high schools are Wilde Lake, but there are many gems out there that are similar. I believe in school visits and word of mouth and availability of certain subjects (APs, algebra) way more than I believe in judging a school by the affluence of its population or the color of their skin or the test scores and I hope my example might encourage other parents to do the same.

I know this is the standard advice and in many situations it is true, but there can be exceptions. My husband has a difficult and ornery older brother. He spent his entire life stepping back and staying quiet so that his parents could deal with his brother’s whims. Even though he has no problem expressing his feelings to anyone else, I watched years of him shutting down in front of his brother and still expected him to set the boundaries because it was HIS family.

The day that I accepted that I had to be the boundary-setter because my husband couldn’t break with 30+ years of a learned coping mechanism was the day our relationship with our in-laws improved.

Go outside! Even when it’s cold, rainy, snowy– buy the gear. Our whole family owns rain pants and rain suits and snow suits and we go to the park in nearly all weather other than just above freezing and rainy. When we all start to get those Saturday morning crazy eyes, on go the layers and out goes our family.