Skip to main content

Cane or Dialogue

Starting October, my wife will start working half time, only in the morning and will leave the office at 12pm. She will take care of Jane in the afternoon. One of the main reasons for this arrangement is that we have decided that we will look after Jane ourselves to relief my mother in law. Also, as my MIL said it, her old method of child rearing is very different from our modern times - not just different but also conflicting - that she felt that she's not able to take care of Jane effectively. 

The surprising thing is, over the past 3 weeks, Jane was very well behaved. The first week was rocky. Lots of crying and screaming, which was usual for us, but my wife was adamant and would not give in to her requests. Jane would test her limits.. but after a few days, she knew her mother is not to be fooled with and in a surprising 180 degree turn, she became very well behaved and accommodating.

At one point, I have always wondered if raising and discipling a kid via dialogue would be more effective as compared to the cane. Who has the patience to dialogue when the easy way out is through cane and shouting and threats? But then, these past 3 weeks have really opened my eyes.

My MIL old ways are about threats (if you don't listen I will have to take out the cane), striking fears via warning (don't climb the sofa, or you will fall and hurt yourself) and that doesn't seemed to be working with this new generation of kids. My wife's way of listening and talking and guiding may seemed futile against a screaming kid but I guess in the longer run, it may be the most effective yet.

Instead of crying every morning when she wakes up, waiting for her mother to come up to pacify her, these days, Jane would wake up herself and go downstairs looking for her mother. Without any fuss, she would change to school uniform and get ready for school. Instead of just throwing things all over the place, she nows picked them up and put them into boxes when we asked her to. Instead of wailing for attention, she nows asked and speak her mind.

Too good to be true?

We shall see.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

One million daimoku

In April 2008, Anne and I started our resolution to chant 1 million daimoku in one year. It's already Jan - and I am only one-third of the way. I really need to WORK HARDER - coz I made another 1 million resolution from Jan - Dec 2009. The chart you see on the right of this post is a chart that we put beside our butsudan. It tracked our chanting progress. Every 20 minute, we coloured one box. Mine is the one on top, Anne's at the bottom - you can see that she made much better progress than me! Hmmm.. come to think of it, I am not even at one third!! --- Edit 22 March 2009: Thanks to Google, a couple of friends in faith found this post and they want to know how many hours of chanting is required to achieve one million diamoku. Here it is. Based on our publication in Malaysia, 20 minutes of chanting is equivalent to 1,000 daimoku. So, one hour is 3,000 daimoku. 1 million would take about 333 hours. --- Edit 8 April 2018: Checking my blogger stats, this post is pretty hi

Amazon Alexa in Malaysia - does it work well? A review...

Feels like Christmas in September. Thanks to Doktor Cinta, my friend who live in Australia. Back in July, Amazon Australia had a Prime Day. I joined the trial using my usual Amazon account and ordered an Echo Dot, Echo Plus (the taller one with a built-in hub) and a Kindle Paperwhite, shipping them to a dear friend in Australia. My friend visited Malaysia and brought the Echos with him two weeks ago. You can imagine my thrill to get my hands on Alexa and start using it... in Malaysia. As a side story, sometimes, you can't believe how events are aligned properly to prepare my place to be a connected home - I bought a superb new mesh network router, eero (by the way, I'd say it's one of my best electronic purchases after an iPhone! It is that good), which acts as a strong WiFi backbone as it blanket my double storey house with a reliable and fast WiFi. Then, maxis launched Fibernation program which let me to upgrade my internet from 6 Mbps (pathetic) to 100 Mbps wit

Who is the official service center for Seiko watches?

The Great Blue; Kinetic Auto Relay 100M I have a 15 year old Seiko watch which I love very much. It's a Great Blue series and kinda one-of-its-kind, because Seiko discontinued it as soon as it was launch. So, there are very limited number of units. The watch I own is a Kinetic Auto Relay which means it is powered by my arm movement. And the nice thing about it is that if I don't use my watch, it hands will not move but the Kinetic capacitor which stores energy (up to 4 years of inactivity) will continue to keep track of the time. When I picked up the watch and shake it a bit, it will wake up and auto adjust to the correct time whether it is AM or PM. But my watch is 15 year old. At that age, the capacitor cannot hold a lot of charges. These days if I left my watch unused for 2 days, the watch stopped keeping time. I need to get the capacitor replaced. But who is the official service center for Seiko? The thing about luxury watches is that if you don't send it to