A Monster of My Own Making

I joke that Penn Alexander and the entire School District of Philadelphia might not ever be ready for the arrival of one Asher Huang into their midst.  He is something else, a sweet boy with unending energy yes, but also someone with some behavioral challenges and high-maintenance tendencies.

For the former, Amy has been a stalwart in advocating for evaluations and services, and Asher is responding positively to them, for which I am grateful as well as cautiously optimistic.  Alas, I feel a sense of responsibility for the latter.

Some of this was unavoidable.  When you're a toddler, and the baby of the family by many years, it creates the ideal conditions to form a little tyrant.  Further, our attempt to adopt a fourth child meant that we hung onto our nanny for a lot longer than we would've if we'd known it would just be the three kids.  So while Aaron and Jada started going to day care before they turned 1, Asher didn't start until he was past 3 1/2.  Which gave him lots of life experience being the center of attention.

The very notion of being in a group, listening to a teacher and going along with what everyone else is doing: all of that remains somewhat foreign to him to this day.  Which is an obviously basic characteristic of how school works.

But I fear I've aggravated things.  I can be a disciplinarian, and I certainly know how to hold the line as a parent in that there are times I know best and cannot accede to a child's requests, no matter how much he doth protesteth.

Nevertheless, in so many ways and for so long, I have accommodated Asher's many whims.  I carry him when he asks.  When I am pouring honey into his oatmeal, I let him intercept it with his mouth.  I let him watch a tank cartoon that Amy finds far too violent.  And now that it's time to set boundaries and say no, I'm finding it hard to unwind these accommodations.

With kindergarten looming in just months, I am newly motivated to shift Asher into a new outlook on life and a new way in which he and I interact.  It is hard, less so because I am feeling like I want to cave in, and more so because he reacts to my resistance with volcanic tantrums.  This too is a phase that we will eventually exit, I am reminding myself.  I only wish I didn't make it harder and longer because of how I was before.  He's my little monster, a monster of my own making.  I love him, but some days he doesn't like me.