Fighting
among children is, of course, inevitable as skinned knees and bug bites. One of
the many challenges of parenting is dealing with these physical fights – both
real tussles, with punches, hair pulls, biting, crying, and “play fights.” My grandmother
once called this “horseplay.” If you witness a situation unfolding amongst your
child or children, when and how do you intervene, if, in fact, you intervene at
all?
Writing
for Direct Advice for Dads, Chris Ryan offers his insights my - and
entertaining – tips by way of describing how he handled his toddler son’s
various scrapes and altercations from ages two to four. He notes how fellow
playground parents run the gamut from being helicopter parents to being
completely focused on their phones while all manner of chaos transpires.
Right
off the bat, Ryan notes how most of the time, he does not interfere: “Usually,
I let the action play out. It wasn’t like I would be hovering around,
refereeing my son’s bouts – he had to learn to negotiate these conflicts
himself.”
It
reminds me of my older brother sitting back and watching my nephew tussle with my
two nieces – all of them not yet teenagers. From my vantage point – the parent
of an only child – I wondered why he didn’t do something for God’s sake. But,
like Ryan, it was his policy to let them work it out. And a decade on, I think
he was right. They are now thick as thieves, my nephew and nieces.
Ryan
draws the line when his son has a size advantage over another child. He doesn’t
want to raise a bully. He also advises
his son to walk away from a fight he knows he can’t win, something he does not
quite believe is good advice in his heart.
Ultimately,
we want our kids to be able to defend themselves, of course. And once you’ve
spent your kid’s earliest years protecting them, it can be hard to switch gears
and let them get hurt, while also letting them know you’ve got their back. But
it can be done, and according to Ryan, you can laugh along the way.
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