One step forward, one step back

My parenting is often like crab walking, achieving progress by scuttling sideways back and forth to move forward. This foreshadows the M. story that follows. Be forewarned, there is no heartwarming ending.

You’ll recall "Rug-o-nomics”, my way of imparting some financial discipline in my kids and their taking responsibility for their actions. Continuing that activity, during the Christmas holidays I finally ran out of patience waiting for Marina's promised speech and issued an ultimatum. She had to finalize her Responsibility speech text, practice it, and deliver it by the restart of school in January. If not, she'd lose the chance to recoup her old monthly allowance level. 

The days ticked by with fun and merriment aplenty. I reminded Marina about the speech deadline and she’d giggle or grimace and say, “I’m working on it, Dad.” We both knew she wasn’t. I wanted her to succeed so we spent a couple of nights working together on the text, structuring her persuasive essay and morphing into a speech text.  

But it was hard going and I had to press her to do the work and take it seriously. In the end, we pulled together a text that was 90 percent her words. She learned about structuring her thoughts and writing for her audience. A small victory and one step forward.

Finally, it came down to the last weekend of the holidays. We told her if she didn’t practice and give some effort we’d flunk her and that would be it. Upon hearing those words, she nodded as she headed out the door to play with her friends all day. Uh-oh. Marina did deliver the speech before the deadline that night. Naomi and I sat down and listened intently. It was a rote performance. We agreed it wasn’t good enough. Yet, against our better judgment, we decided to give her one more opportunity to get it right on her own. Her reprieve was five more days to practice; one last chance.

Five days later, it was Speech Day. I knew she’d read the speech aloud a few times that morning based on my suggestion. Come the evening, it was painfully clear M. hadn’t truly believed we were serious that she had to focus, practice, and convince us she had learned something about responsibility. “It’s obvious Marina didn’t do much even though we gave her an extension,” said Naomi. As she neared the end of the second attempt of her speech, Marina knew it wasn’t going to be successful. To her credit, though, M. persisted through her emotions to the end and accepted the thumbs-down outcome.

With a heavy heart but clear head, I told Marina our judgement that she hadn’t exerted herself and we wouldn’t accept this half-baked last attempt. Naomi and I promised we wouldn’t nag her again, but she had failed. I felt gloomy the rest of the evening, with a dull hurt when I saw the defeat in her reddened eyes, puffy cheeks, and hints of tears. We left her in peace and said nothing further. What’s done is done. One slip-up due to laziness--one step back.

We would not be doing Marina any favors by letting her off the hook and being overly nice or ignoring the reality that she’d been lazy.

We are not SuperParents. We do our best, and sometimes we fail. We aim to set an example how to treat others; establish boundaries; preach delayed gratification etc. And to try to turn a stumble into a lesson learned for our kid…

I am working on the next step forward.