All We Need is Just a Little Patience

Gun n' Roses said it best. We all could certainly use more patience. I find this to be more and more to be true as I get older. Patience is something that I have a challenging time dealing with. This is especially true when it comes to dealing with the hellions at home that we refer to as children. My patience is constantly challenged and it often takes every bit of willpower to prevent myself from screaming at my kids. Sometimes that doesn't work and I let go a primal scream that could shake the Pillars of Hercules. What makes this even worse is that I have a fairly moderate case of OCD and when things are out of place in my house it can literally keep me up at night. I know, that's more of a me problem and I admit to it. But I have been trying to change and allow a more rambunctious household. To a certain point of course. The testing of my patience wasn't really an issue until my second daughter was born. I have been told, and have since realized that I was lied to, that a second child would keep the first child busy and would allow more time not focused solely on the children. Boy, was that way off the mark. I'm not sure how it is in other families but my children will gang up on me to provide a mental beatdown that would make the Gestapo seem like a talk with your local priest. It seems like my children have become more needy even though they have each other. Of course there are also the fights over who gets the cotton candy flavored yogurt or who received more ice cream. When I yell at my kids I begin to feel like I'm a bad parent. Calmly responding to children seems to come naturally in other families. Why can't I do it all the time? Or does screaming ensue behind closed doors and I just don't know about it. Either way it still makes me feel like I'm doing an awful job at dealing with patience. I have been trying to come up with some exercises and techniques to deal with it, to varying degrees of success. One is to let the kids make a mess. It can always be cleaned up later. This is not always easy, especially when you're tired after a long day of work. But you know what? Our parents had to do it too. I've also learned not to get upset when my kids want to play in the mud. They can always be cleaned off, not a huge deal. We do need to set limits however. We can't let our kids run into the street, something that my youngest thinks is hilarious to do. Having limits makes it easier for our children to accept that not everything is okay to do and that we are strict for a reason. You must stick to those limits though. Your kids will test them each and every day. One of my newer techniques is to think like a child. I already act like one so this wasn't too difficult to achieve. Our children live in a completely different world than us. The ills of the world are nonexistent to them. Maybe not as much as they were to us growing up but the negative effects of society don't connect with them as they do to us. And kids don't know that there is danger around them. They don't think about a car hitting them or someone kidnapping them. This is something that never crosses their minds. When kids make a mess they're not truly thinking about cleaning it up when they're done, as opposed to the parent who only sees the mess and not the memories being made. Us parents need to take a deep breath and let our kids be kids. They only have a brief period of time to be completely innocent without care and worry. We adults long for those days so why try to hurry our children to adulthood. We can all use a little more patience.