As I type this, she is throwing shoes and clothes around because I had the audacity to ask her to dress herself for school. sighMy daughter is being raised by a village, so I'll start with that. She's with me (mom) about 75% of the time (maybe 80%) but grandparents and her dad are also a huge part of raising her. Her dad and I are supposed to be 50/50 but he always has something going on sigh and I won't get into that now.There's no family tension—her dad and I are good friends and co-parent well (save for this one thing where I and everyone else wishes he'd at least call when he's apart from his daughter for days.) The main tension for her (I'd assume) is that my boyfriend lives in California, and I also have several work clients out there (I'm a writer) so I travel for work/personal reasons about every 6 weeks, which has to be hard for her. She also recently started a kindergarten readiness program, so she's moving from preschool 2x a week to preschool/kindergarten readiness 4x a week for about an hour longer each day. So those are her personal stressors I can think of. (I try to maintain an awareness of them, since I know sometimes she can't communicate them.)I think one problem with the getting ready/dressed thing, for example, is that we all mix signals with her when it comes to what she's expected to do for herself. She can brush her teeth, she can dress herself, she can even make her own simple breakfast (which she did yesterday with great pride! And I was proud of her too! She got lots of high fives out of that. She wasn't even asked to make her own breakfast.) But sometimes when we're in a hurry, it's easy to just be like, fuck it, I'll dress you. Or I'll wash your hair. Etc, just things she can do for herself. (Dressing and bathing/toweling down are the two main things.)I know in my case, I tend to dress her for speed, but grandparents like to dress her because it makes them feel useful, I think. Her dad dresses her because he literally doesn't seem to get that she can dress herself, so he doesn't even think of it.A goal of mine is to raise a girl who feel confident in her ability to do hard things, and who can know that with practice, comes progress, and things get easier. Even at 5, she's very ambitious with wanting to build things to come up with stories, and I want her to just feel and have proof that she's capable of doing anything!I also want her to know that mom is always here and that her family loves her, and we're here to lend a hand when something gets really hard, or support her. We can't do everything for her (I have a saying I repeat to her a lot, which is that "I'll never make you do anything I don't think you can do") but I do want her to have courage when it comes to pushing through hard things in order to feel that sense of pride on the other end.Getting yourself dressed seems small, but in my head it feels like a big part of that journey toward being that person.This morning was rough (we've moved on since I started typing this and she's at school now) but she did eventually get herself dressed. We hugged it out and when we got to school I was like, hey, today's gonna be awesome for you cause you already got all the rough stuff out of the way in the morning! She's been urging me for piano lessons and she starts them today, which she's super excited about, so that had her in a better mood.I don't know what I can do at the moment though to help her through the tantrums when it comes to getting herself dressed or buckling her own car buckle or washing her own hair (all things she can do for herself but often gets done for her by other adults, occasionally me.) She also tends to get distracted in the middle of what she's doing (like me, when I'm writing a hard piece.)What have you guys done to facilitate reasonable independence? I'm mainly trying to find a good balance between building courage and perseverance but also showing that the grown ups in her life can be patient with her, are listening when she tries to communicate that the task is hard, without stepping in and doing it for her. I dunno.Maybe I just need to keep doing what I'm doing? I feel bad that I can get frustrated with her (like this morning) but I'm sure that's just kinda par for the course here. via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2rKiJ52
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