Stephen Koch

Professional Speaker, Mountain Guide, Snowboard Instructor, Alpinist and Family Man

Stephen Koch random header image
← →

Open Mouth Kiss

November 14th, 2008 · 517 Comments · Fatherhood

Axl giving dad a smooch

What do you do when your child kisses you with an open mouth? Just go with it. Above is a photo of Axl giving me a wet one this morning. I don’t think he does it intentionally. It is just the way he kisses. I guess I could make a big deal out of it, which is my inclination with other things but I am learning from Mom to simply divert. Diversionary tactics work very well. I find that having a son who is very strong willed gives me ample opportunity to work on my tactics. I have found that rather than get into a battle of wills, I simply change the subject by diverting his attention to something else. If that fails, tickling usually works well.

An example from this morning: Axl was pushing a large wall hanging back and forth and there is the danger that it may fall on him, hurting him a little, breaking the wall hanging and/or something else in the room. I told him to please stop doing that. He did it again. I looked him in the eye, as I had done earlier, and said again “Axl, please do not push that because it may fall down and hurt you or break.” (i regularly try to give a reason for what I am asking so he can understand my logic and reasoning behind my requests/demands/suggestions). He did it again. Now there was a little battle of wills brewing. My inclination is to demand that he not do that again or he will be punished or to raise my voice (both of which I had learned from my parents…there was a lot of yelling in my family…you do what i say because i am the parent type of thing, which sucked because i didn’t usually agree and wanted to know the logic behind it), but instead I told him that if he did it again he would be “going into the other room to sit alone” (time-out without saying time-out). He knows that he does not like to sit in the other room alone for a minute or two, but he went to push the wall hanging again (he is learning/flexing to see how far he can go). I chose to pick him up and distract him with his new to him (hand me over from Emily and David Coombs) rubberesque dinosaurs and animals rather than continue to fight with him and then be forced to give him a “Time-out.” I learned this from his mom and it works well. The alternative is to be constantly punishing him. I felt like I was constantly being punished as a child and I remember that it did not feel good and I did not like it. I am trying to learn to parent in a way that works better and is better because I am thinking about it and not doing the knee-jerk thing that I had done to me. I am trying to break the chain, one little step at a time.


Tags: ·····

517 responses so far ↓

Leave a Comment