Thank you all so much for your comments on yesterday’s post, I love that I can just blab my feelings all over the internet and have friends chime in with support and stories that make me feel less like I should apply for Poor-Parenting-Of-The-Year-Comp and more like we are all in this parenting thing together.

I am not quite sure why I felt the need to explain myself on the smacking issue. Its a subject that has had a lot of media coverage here in Australia recently with a call to ban smacking based on new research that physical punishment by parents is to blame for a third of all child murders in the last 14 years in New South Wales.

Personally I don’t judge anyone else’s parenting choices but it has been a suprise to me to realise that smacking doesn’t work for me. Like many other parenting decisions I had strong opinions about discipline before birthing Amy. I remember driving back from a friend’s wedding over Easter in 2006. It was very late at night, we were driving back to spend the rest of the weekend with friend’s, it was dark and the roads were quiet and Ron and I passed the time talking about how we wanted to raise our children and we both agreed we didn’t want to practice angry parenting. That didn’t mean that we disagreed with smacking at all, but just that all parenting decisions needed to be made in a calm state of mind and not in the heat of the moment. I certainly wasn’t against the thought of a smack on the hand or leg in an appropriate situation.

Fast forward to raising the actual child and its a different story. Smacking Amy or losing my cool when dealing with her has made me feel so much worse than I ever anticipated and as a result I strive even harder to remain calm and to walk away the moment I feel myself losing my cool. Its hard not to lose patience occasionally and even though I have AMAZED myself with the amount of tolerance, patience and gentleness I have discovered in myself since becoming a mother, there is no doubt that the nagging banshee that once threw a kebab at Ron’s head in the middle of a heated argument on Clapham Common has been known to make an appearance during bathtime, or a rather difficult naptime!

After last night’s blog post a great friend sent me an email which really got me thinking. In this email she quoted a writer who made the comment that children raised in a household with no real shouting or fighting often struggled to deal with conflict later in life. With no life experience to deal with anger or frustration they dealt with their emotions in other more negative ways and as some of you commented, needing to explain your own regrettable actions to your children allowed you to be held accountable for your behaviour. This is a great way to teach children about their emotions and how to control them, deal with them and manage the fallout from them. The email went on to quote the writer (I paraphrase) that we should strive to to be a great parent 80 percent of the time and the remaining 20 percent we should allow ourselves to admit that we could do better and to move on!