Enforcing House Rules

As hard as we may try every parent is guilty of loosing their cool with their child at least once during correction. Now I'm not talking about going over board on a spanking here, rather when we as parents fall prey to our child's natural talent to turn the tables on us.

For example, you discover your child has been emailing a friend you disapprove of and have told your child they can't email them. You approach your child calmly and confront their behavior. Ideally you will give your child their consequence and go on your merry way, but that is rarely the case!

I have 2 kids at home, a 16 year old daughter and a 9 year old boy and I am having real trouble setting limits on computer use. For my daughter she wants to constantly be on the instant message boards chatting with her friends. For my son it's games, games, and more games.

They fight over who gets on (we only own one computer) and both refuse to get off for the other one. I personally think they spend way to much time on there and have attempted to establish time limits.

What time do your children go to bed at night? My boys, 8 and 6, go to bed at 8:00 on school nights and 9:00 on the weekends. Eli's always really good about going when it's time. Aidan always wants to stay up later. But I think those are reasonable times. I've talked to friends and there seems to be everything from 7:30 bedtimes up to "whenever they're tired."

I know this can be a very touchy and delicate subject for a lot of people. And I'm definitely not raising the issue to judge anyone at all. We're all here because we know there's never just one right answer when it comes to parenting. We all need to make decisions that work for our family, based on our individual personalities, beliefs, temperaments, etc. So what I'm asking here is really out of a genuine interest and curiosity. People can sometimes have very strong opinions--on either side--about this, so it's not something I'll usually bring up with other mothers I see all the time.

My 3 y/o is not a picky eater. He eats everything from sushi to mexican. Yay! But lately we've been having issues with him asking for something specific to eat, taking two bites and then announcing that he's full. 10 minutes later he wants a snack. We've told him that if he doesn't finish his meal he can't have anything else to eat until the next meal, however if he finishes he's allowed to have a snack. It doesn't seem to make any difference. Even when he knows he's going to be hungry he'll still insist that he's done and then cry the rest of the morning that he wants lunch.

I've probably been letting this go on for far too long, but it's a very passive-aggressive behavior and I've been letting it slide. Now it's blowing up into a full-blown issue. Bedtime is a classic battleground. Aiden hates to sleep and miss out on the action, but obviously he needs to sleep. So when naptime comes he begins moving VERY slowly. He rarely directly defies me because that results in swift punishment. Instead he carries on crawling up the stairs and pretending as though he can't go from one step to the next.

Yesterday evening I went back to my room to pull back the blankets and crawl into bed and as usual my bed was covered in toys and the blankets were thrown in a delicately crafted ball to make caves for the mini dinosaurs and barbies. My kids prefer to play on my bed over any other spot in the house (okay, my son equally prefers to cover the dining room table with hundreds of dinos too) Undecided