Little dictator

What do you do when you have a child who desperately needs to have their own way? They try to run the family.

When our son was little, he was always trying to tell us what to do. We used to say jokingly, “This child is going to grow up and become a dictator of some foreign country.” There was this constant tug-of-war between what he wanted and what we wanted.

We heard the saying somewhere – “Pick your battles” – and used it often. We would dig in our heels only when it really mattered.

As he grew older, we discovered other techniques that worked, too: distraction, bargaining and finally - discussions; we listened to his point of view and he listened to ours. It was often easy to find a solution then. The best solutions were the ones we agreed on together. He would sometimes surprise us with a solution that we hadn’t thought of ourselves.

Our son is grown up now and recently I began to wonder if somehow my husband and I fostered this personality trait in our son. We both had a parent that was unusually controlling and being the second born in both our cases, we grew up feeling we had very little control.

Is it a coincidence that we produced a child who has the same needs and continues to create that same tug-of-war feeling in us?