Nerd Pride Radio

Those of you with more than one kid or who grew up with siblings, I have a puzzlement over the kid raising. What do you do about the fact that some of your kids are more labor intensive than others, but they all need your attention? In our particular experience, the middle child gets short shrift. In part this was a pattern dictated by nature because she was an easier baby to care for than the others, and inevitably you're sorting out new experiences with the oldest and doing physical work the youngest needs more of, while those in the middle are rolling along without as much of your time.

The pattern still harms all of them in some ways - e.g. the oldest becomes independent and gets less attention with respect to homework while the middle one still needs help, the youngest requires more help to ride a bike than the middle one did, so you're more likely to just let the middle kid go riding than to halt your whole day for an hour to help little one catch up on the skill, etc.

But when you have limited time and energy to divide amongst your kids, they respond in interesting ways. For instance, one kid is often praised for being good compared to others who are doing something naughty, which means that kid ends up being less labor intensive and requires less of your time. But eventually that well-behaved kid learns to play up the good/naughty contrast in ways that reap a reward. Now the good kid is the one you go to when you need to accomplish certain things, and the kid cooperates in such a way as to ensure this continues. That's great, except it leaves out everyone else, which means they're likely to continue doing things that make them more labor intensive to deal with. One kid learns that negative attention is attention, and then devises various ways of getting that while hopefully also minimizing the negative part of your response. One kid learns that simply refusing to do things until you reach an intolerance point is a good way to get you to engage with them in great detail. I sort of see this dynamic developing and playing out, but it happens in very slow motion and it's very hard to figure out how to counteract the overall tendency, even if you were capable of doing that.

You prioritize and divide your efforts where you see the most need. And you reevaluate constantly. One of my kids who was one of the easiest to care for for years became much more labor intensive when homework suddenly became trickier. So a kid who got less attention for a long long time suddenly began eating up a couple hours of one-on-one time four or five nights a week. And then he caught on, and after a few weeks, that pattern changed again.

And don't worry: you're not going to be perfect. You'll never feel like you got to spend enough time/attention/money/etc. on any of the kids as what you would like. Do your best, let your kids know (frequently) that you love all of them, and it will work out. If you hold yourself to an unattainable standard, you're just going to let yourself down, and if the kids see and sense that (which they will), that will cause more harm. This has been the way of things forever, so do your best and forget the rest.

Only having two, we avoided the middle-child syndrome. Our kids also are four and a half years apart and are massively different in temperament. (To the point where we all joke about it. My son, the oldest, was a colicky baby who never slept. Luckily for him, he has a father who also doesn't sleep who could deal with that, but until my wife quit her third shift job and decided to get her RN, it meant that I got functionally NO sleep instead of the insufficient sleep that I usually get. It was tough... My daughter... let's just say we had to buy a video baby monitor so we could make sure she was breathing without going into her room. She was so freaking quiet! If they had come in the other order we would have wondered what the HELL we were doing wrong, but instead we were just blissfully happy to have one that didn't scream at us all the time. She screams at us more now though. She has some anxiety issues.)

I don't think our kids ever had any issues with thinking the other was getting more attention than the other. My daughter might have been a bit peeved about being hauled all around Central Illinois during my son's hockey years, but she understood that was just the way it was. After he finished hockey, I got to coach her robotics team and things like that. I think, if anything, they both would have liked us to back off and be LESS involved. LOL (My wife was always volunteering to do things at the school, because she worked three 12 hour night shifts at the hospital as a full time RN, frequently two of them on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night, leaving many weekdays free. She eventually shifted to three 12 hour DAY shifts, but that isn't much different.)

Now, when I was growing up, that was a bit different. I was the youngest of three and, frankly, I don't think my brother got over my being born until sometime in his twenties. I never really felt a problem with the way my parents distributed their time between us, but, then again, I was that kid that really liked to take my dominoes and the animals from all of my play sets and build towers and forts with the dominoes and create epic fantasy stories in my room. (And this is before I really even read fantasy books... I wasn't really a "reader" until I was junior high age... I just made things up... Usually with lots of cheesy romance. I guess I haven't changed much. LOL!) I was pretty much "self-contained" or, as my mom called me, "the creative one". Because I totally didn't pay attention to the attention I was getting, I REALLY didn't know what kind of issues my brother or sister might have had about parental attention. I did figure out in adulthood that my brother DID have some. I think they were all in his head, or caused by the fact that, during the years between his birth and when I was born, my dad's work was really tough and he had to work a ton of overtime, from what I heard, and he wasn't home a lot. I heard that, as a baby, my brother was afraid of my dad at one point because he didn't really know him. I think that may have been part of the issue. Then this little, unplanned interloper comes along and takes what little time his parents had away? But I totally didn't notice it when I was a kid. I was just totally doing my own thing. (At least that's how I remember it, to the extent that I remember ANYTHING from back then.)

Don't know if that helps... I guess the point I'm trying to get at is, you can never be all things to all people. I think BOTH my brother and I would say that our mom was one of the absolute best moms you could ever wish for. But it didn't stop him from having drug and alcohol problems and totaling three cars before his twenty-first birthday. (That, however, did prevent ME from doing stupid things in high school. He was an extremely good object lesson in what NOT to do with one's life! The fact that he graduated from college with higher honors than I did, with only one term sober? Well, he's a bright boy. Always was! And he knew how to time-manage, even when drunk. LOL)

Also, no matter what you do, you will always find ways to wonder if every future problem or eccentricity or whatever is somehow because you were an ineffective parent in some way. All human beings have issues, because they are human beings. And if you are a normal parent with normal worries, you will always wonder how those issues in your children connect to something you did or failed to do... even when the truth is that you did the best possible and having issues is just part of being alive.

Yeah, I am not looking forward to the parenting-of-teenagers bit. Inevitably you blame yourself for every fault you detect in your kid, forgetting that as kids they are kind of supposed to have faults and be developing and learning things. You either assume that some genetic defect in yourself or your spouse is causing behavior x, or you decide your parenting methods have failed utterly. This occurs even though you know that three kids parented by the same people with mostly the same methods end up being radically different in personality, inclinations, behaviors, and so forth. They eat different things, they interact with people differently - all of it. My son is for about 12 days on a tear of bad behavior that none of us can understand. I don't know if the Thanksgiving holiday just magnified something already brewing, or what his deal is, but he is deep in the mischief. He tries to ride the dog, he painted (! yes, painted !!!) the bathroom in a manner that caused me considerable frustration, he utterly refuses to go to sleep at night no matter when he was wakened in the morning, during his sleepless periods he tries to make chemical mixtures of whatever he can find, presumably to poison himself or all of us in the process, he tries to acquire nail polish above all, he destroys things randomly in an effort to "investigate" them, he manages to screw up every setting on any electronic device he can manage to sneak himself to, ninja-style, and worse. Worse! I have had to install new passwords on everything, which is also frustrating when you are old and sleep deprived and stupid anyway. I have to constantly monitor him with the dog, which is exhausting when you have other business to handle. And generally I'm just worried about him. I don't want to go into all his frustrations in life but the basic problem is, he's bored senseless in the intellectual department at school, yet refuses to engage with any of the things at home that might prove less boring, if he tried them. His big sister is teaching him the multiplication table, and he is actually learning it. She makes him multiply big numbers on the board. But when she's not around, all he wants is do is put on my makeup (or, as he did last week, use a dry-erase marker to give himself blue "eyeshadow"), meddle with our electronic devices, pester the dog, cover his entire body and hair with hand lotion (far from the worst thing I have found embedded in his hair...), and plot bizarre plots much like The Brain from Pinky and the Brain.