Circle of Trust

The stay at home order has been a difficult one for all of us to deal with and it affects us all in different ways. One way I wasn’t really conscious of was how it’s affecting our kids. We have 2 boys Mason and Max with a 3rd boy due in August. Yesterday my oldest son told his younger brother to go “kick some poo” (dog poo) and he did it and I came outside to find him doing that. I came down kind of hard on him and was about to dole out some consequences when my M chimes in and said they were just being boys. Usually it’s me saying that, so I knew this stay at home thing was starting to get to me. I decided not to give any punishment and laughed about it a few short minutes later.

I think the stresses of being home all the time with our family, can skew things out of perspective, so I encourage you not to do what I did and take a lesson of patience from it. Not every misstep by our kids needs to have a consequence. I’ve been trying more after that to use some of their behavior as opportunities to stress something or explain rather than punish. They test us a lot so I could be handing out punishment all day. But they’re affected by this too. I have to remember, they’re missing their friends, their teachers, their grandparents, their regular activities. That affects them a lot and I can be there for them now by being sensitive to their feelings and exercising some patience.