Parenting mood

I don’t know why I never shared stories about coping with your toddlers’ “rebellious” (no, not naughty, the word rebellious is even too harsh as they only want to be independent) acts when I was in Jakarta. Two possible reasons.

First, I was not in the group at that time. I was a hard-working, hard-partying selfish woman. I have always been fond of children (and I do think children like me :-)) and want to be a kindergarten teacher even when I hardly had time for myself and had to work from 4am to 2am everyday, but I always avoided a group that discusses children’s behaviours and which soap should they use for the children (seriously?!).

Second, many of my friends in Jakarta rely on nannies or pembantu or, well, those women in the baby blue or pink uniforms with big emblems from the famous nanny companies (one child one sitter, usually, so 3 children equals 3 sitters.. oh well..). Many of my “friends” are the ones I usually encountered in the office (well colleagues, but they are all also friends), so obviously those friends don’t deal in the daily nitty-gritty of their children. They are busy in the office with me. They would call their children or the nannies from the office or from where the out-of-town event is and ask about this and that, but they don’t deal with the children directly.

For whatever reason, I sometimes do wonder why I heard very little from my friends about how “nakal” their children are. Is it because Jakarta children are just generally well-behaved and those stories from the English language blogs and websites only happen in those other countries? Or simply because I never heard the real stories because of one of the reasons above.

Melati:

• Sleeps alone since she was born (except of course when she was a baby and we fell asleep together when I was breastfeeding her in the afternoons) 
• Eats by herself in a highchair, no one has to chase her around to feed her while she plays (as I often see with the pembantus or the nannies with uniforms in Jakarta). If she refuses that, then she simply will not get any food. 
• Does not eat those chiki-like snacks that are full of MSG. Her snacks are cut apples, raisins, pop-corn, milk-biscuits, cookies, cut cheese, etc. 
• Is not allowed to watch TV at all at home. No ipad or any kind of tablet for her (I know some friends bought ipads for their balita children for education purposes). She can play with my iphone sometimes or watch youtube as I work, but very very limited, basically to make me able to do MY work. 
• Brushes her teeth since she was 1 year old 
• Does not like candies and juice because we did not make her like them. But she loves chocolate, ice cream, and ice tea :-) 
• Since a month ago the little miss independent insists to take off her shoes, open the doors for everyone, get her own drinks (water, milk), take off her clothes, choose which clothes and diapers she has to wear, etc. 
• Hit me and bit me everyday 3 weeks ago for the whole week whenever I asked her to take afternoon nap (she stopped now after I caught her hands and face whenever she tried to hit or bite me). Bit her friend at the kindergarten some weeks ago only to sit in the “thinking chair” as she was the only child who had not been on the chair. 
• Bit her friend at the kindergarten 4 days in a row this week and she bit her very hard yesterday until the friend was bleeding! Broke my blackberry charger because she insisted that it was HER phone. 
• Woke up in the middle of the night, walked into our bedroom and INSTRUCTED me (with that  tone and gesture!) to move back to her bed. 
• Corrects me, ff, and her friends in saying some words. She even corrects me on how to pronounce Indonesian words and FF on how to pronounce German words! “Anak sok tau”, in short. If we don’t want to follow what she thinks is correct, she would scream like hell. 
• Fell 3 times in a row around the swimming pool because she did not want to stop jumping and running around the slippery pool 
• Since a week ago already floats in the swimming pool and moves her legs and blows bubbles into the water - she is able to swim, yay! 
• Sets the ipod/iphone speaker volume higher (too high sometimes) by herself when she listens to her favorite songs and argues with us if we tell her not to.
• Able to complete 24-piece puzzles by herself 

No, this is not to brag about her – I also wrote down the bad attitudes she is having now, which is my main point actually. I made the list above just to describe her and the way we are bringing her up. Wonder if it is different with the ways my Jakarta friends do it. I just wonder if I spend too much time on learning about parenting knowledge and on thinking about her than my friends do on their children. I read about democratic parenting, toddlers’ discipline, how not to spank (or “cubit” in my case) your child, and so on and so forth bla bla bla. But nowadays I am worried very much by the ways she insists on her opinion. She has my stubbornness and FF’s combined! She would have quarrels with my friends’ children whom we had playdate with only to insist on how to eat lychee or how to say “mama”. She is a dictator in the making! :-) I have to carefully reshape her character, really.

What I was trying to say by putting the above list is that we do apply some discipline. My mom often says that maybe she is "naughty" because I am "too soft" on her (she never saw me cubit melati, when she played with her food I told her to clean up the floor instead of cubit although I said it with a very angry tone). And I did see many friends would yell and cubit their children when they were "naughty" (naughty as in running around the guests like crazy or spilling some water onto the floor, seriously?! they are just children, guys!). But I don't believe in that kind of discipline. To me discipline is about setting the limits, not the (hard) way to set the limits. To me the way is the "democratic" way, to start introducing the values of respect and the ability to reason and choose, though of course with some parental "direction" (she is only 2,5 years old for goodness sake, B! :))).

But then again, I keep on having questions in my mind: is it the right way to do it? Is there anyway such thing as the right way of parenting? Maybe there is not, but why I never heard the same complaints from my friends? Are their children angels? Do I have too much parenting mood in my blood (just like all those blogger moms :-))?