Apparently, You’re Not Supposed to be an A$$#%le to Your Kids.

I’ve never been an asshole to our two-year on….. on purpose… that’s not to say I never asked him what the hell he was doing? It’s called Pottymouth Parents for a reason, our kids will be fine… chill.

I found, however, that I was hurting my child’s feelings. Not because of my use of curse words (he’s totally desensitized to that (OOPS))… but my TONE was hurting his feelings… a LOT. I could see it in his face, but it was unbeleivably frustrating to watch his tantrums evolve into something I was on the verge of not being able to remedy. It was frustrating as F%#k and I felt like a MONSTER.

I discovered that I’m not a monster, but that didn’t excuse my behavior, or my frustration with him for something that was essentially outside of his control. Cole has a speech delay, so he can’t tell me WHY he is upset…. I was the one with the power to modify my behavior, so I had to be the one to fix my relationship with my toddler.

Alex and I decided to take a different approach. We became consistent with timeouts. We became consistent with taking things away when he acted out. That consistency was what made all the difference. We still had to give him bear his to keep him from head banging, but not those occurrences are fewer and farther between. Doing actual parenting was all it took to get our little shit back on track.

It wasn’t overnight, and its still a work in progress, but its coming along. Another HUGE thing we did was pick our battles. If he felt like we were complaining about everything he did, he acted out more. Maybe this sounds like common sense, but being in the middle of it was rough. Watching our toddler hurt himself was rough.

I’m so proud of his progress, but I’m also proud of ours as his parents. Changing my behavior… admitting I was failing my kid in some way… that was really hard, but we changed our behavior for him, and our family is so much better now. Better and Stronger.