Game-changer

I am getting the sneaking suspicion that we are soon to enter a new stage of parenting, and I don’t think I like this sequence of events at all.

This weekend the boys went to the Nana’s house. It’s tradition that they spend at least a couple of days of their spring break with her, and this year was no exception. Despite the fact that she puts them to work each and every time they come, the boys love it. They drive tractors and haul things. They trim bushes and pull weeds. They fix equipment and build things. They are on the lookout for snakes and raccoons, lizards and field mice. They love it in the way that only my boys can.

That Nana is one smart cookie.

This brief parenting reprieve gave me time to breathe, to think. With the boys out of the house, and J working this weekend, I had the space I needed to rearrange the things in my mind. I had the quiet required to inventory my priorities and my goals—pulling out each one, evaluating it, and then mentally placing it in the keep or discard pile.

That’s a bit of tradition for me as well.

It made me start thinking about the stages my children have been through, and the stages left to be undertaken, especially for Ant. It seems as if they keep changing the game on me.

I operated for quite some time under the false assumption that raising a second child would be easier just for the fact that one gained some experience with the first. In some instances this is true, but not in as many as I would have thought. Yes, I was better prepared (and less irritating to my pediatrician) when Ant would become sick, or not sleep or refuse to eat one day and be ravenous the next. I was a calmer parent with the second child, especially during his infancy. That’s about the extent of it, though. The boys are such radically different people; they require such radically different approaches, that beyond the basic level of care and safety, I feel as if I am on a completely different plane of existence with my second son than I was with my first.

K is articulate and well-spoken, even when upset. Especially when upset—which can be a great disadvantage to the parents of a teenager.  Ant is intuitive, and relies more heavily on the non-verbal conveyance of emotions during a conversation. He’s likely to internalize someone else’s bad mood. K took great pride at this age in even being asked to accomplish household chores, and Ant balks. Being the youngest means being bossed around by more people. Not only does he not like to be bossed about, he also worries that the way he does his chores is not satisfactory. He sometimes feels that he does not meet our standards because his bed is not as neatly made and his bookshelves are not as straight as his brother’s—no matter the difference in years of experience.  Where this would have inspired K’s competitive nature, Ant sometimes wants to give up.

Ant is to the place that he wants more privileges, more rights, which is a normal stage for this age. I know many kids in his grade are asking similar questions of their parents. He wants more extracurricular activities, he wants to ride the bus home each day, and he wants to give up after school care. Some of these things would have been a no-brainer with K, but Ant is a different person, and requires different things. It makes the decisions we face right now all the more difficult—especially when I thought I would be better at reading the clues of what he is ready for and what he is not.

And then—the hardest question of all-- you have to ask  yourself if you might be holding the second child back unconsciously, just for the fact that they are the baby and perhaps it’s you that is not ready to give that up.

It’s a chapter that should have been included in that ever- allusive parenting manual.

So I open it up to the parents of more than one child: How do you gauge when the second child is ready for something that the first child received at a similar age, especially if they are two completely different people? How do you tell your second child that perhaps he is not ready for something his older sibling did at that age? How do you ensure that the second child has the opportunity to accept responsibility like the first did, in light of the fact that there is an older child who tends to go behind the second child, fixing any mistakes or items missed? How do you decide if they are ready or not? How do you know if you are legitimately concerned about an issue, or just irrationally holding on to the ‘baby-ness’ of the second child?