LIVING & LEARNIN G
Too old for the naughty spot?
My daughter puts me to the test. Can I walk the walk, or am I just all talk? Words and pictures by Katie Little
‘WHEN IS A CHILD too old for the naughty spot?’ I wonder. My middle child, the one who I am at this moment threatening with the naughty spot, is seven and a half. Believe me, I’ve tried other things. I’ve tried talking and reasoning with her. I’ve called a family meeting and sat her down at the table with her older brother, “Stop looking at me!”, she screams hysterically at him, then to me, “You’re being rude! I’m not listening to you!” I‘ve confiscated the toys she refused to pick up off the floor.
I’ve even given her a smack and shouted at her in the old fashioned parenting style my father would approve of. “It’s your fault”, he says whenever he gets the opportunity, “You let them get away with it”. The smack didn’t help; it just accelerated into more screaming and stomping up the stairs, and made me feel like shit.
I feel like I’m stuck in the famous Aussie picture book Wanda-Linda Goes Bizerk where the mother explains modern discipline techniques to the exasperated old lady, ‘We don’t smack out children’, she says, or something to that effect.
6 MAY 2015
‘Well, what do you do then?’ ‘We go right out of our minds’. I’ve sent Charlotte to her room; I’ve even threatened to send
her to stay with my father for a weekend, a fate worse than death, but every punishment seems to alienate her further, to widen the divide with the rest of the family. I worry that she is becoming ‘the squeaky wheel’. I can’t let this happen.
And so I start thinking about the naughty spot again. Charlotte’s always been volatile, swinging from an angelic child into a demonic fiend in the blink of an eye.
The naughty spot was a godsend a few years ago. But then lately I feel like I’ve been getting it wrong too... ‘Maybe I should put myself on the naughty spot’, I think. ‘Forty minutes left alone. Sounds like bliss!’ What would I do I wonder if I set the timer and had to sit
in that corner of the room? Close my eyes and try to centre myself, meditate on the lines of my last poem: ‘Remember...
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