Parenting the Second Middle

In my opinion, Peanut's birth position has a lot to to with her behavior, which can be best described as "HEY! LOOK AT ME!" But her birth position also has a lot to do with the way she gets parented.

When Buddy was her age, if he had a concern I would focus my attention fully on him, give him social and scientific evidence to back up my stance on the outcome of his concern, and possibly pull a video up from the internet to further support my claim.

Peanut gets: "here's a cup."

She got an eyelash in her eye during dinner last night. And I really did try. I did. I told her how incredibly unlikely it would be for her eyeball to fall out. I told her it would be the first time doctors ever saw such a thing. I did. But she just would not let. it. go.

She got up from dinner and went to stare at her eyeball in the mirror. Then came running out frantically to tell me that her eyeball was shaking. I tried to explain her eyeball was shaking from the strain of staring at itself in the mirror, but apparently this was not considered plausible information. So, I handed her a cup. I told her if it fell out, to put it in there so it didn't get lost, and I would put it back in after she woke in the morning. She walked around for the rest of the evening with the cup clamped tightly over her eye.

I'm not sure I would even have thought anymore about the incident, except for the unfortunate coincidence of Josh playing with a voice recorder at the same time. He said, laughing, "come listen." And there, recorded for all posterity (and for my daughter to play for her therapist as an adult) was Peanut frantically obsessing about her eye falling out while she slept and me calmly, with a slight sound of exhaustion, saying, "so go get your cup."





"The purpose of parenting is to give you child a reason to leave home and something to work out with their therapist."
-Dr. S.