Boys will be… boys!

There’s no denying it, boys is troubles.

If they’re not fighting over some silly toy or which TV programme to watch, they’re arguing with us, the wife and I.

It doesn’t necessarily matter what I’m actually talking about, as you, the reader, can simply pick an element of ‘life’, and use that in the imagination part of this blog post. For instance, they’ll argue and scream blue-murder about something as trivial as whether there’s too much water in their cup, or the food is too hot/cold, or whether there’s too much or too little on their plate to eat.

Ignoring the fact that whatever they are actually arguing about, the ‘problem’ itself could be rectified immediately, but they insist on dragging things out, as tired little boys do.

All of this arguing, to’ing and fro’ing, has made me remember-back to how things were when I was their ages, and how life was different in some ways.  It’s difficult to stop one’s self from this, and I’m sure I’m only remembering the bits I want to remember, but nonetheless, I’m still dragging myself back all those year, for the simple sake of comparison.

Yes, we all argued, me and my brother, Russell, or my and my sister, Emma. Or Emma and Russell, or any other combination of the three of us against each other.  We fought, screamed and argued our way through the foundation years of our lives, which has inadvertently become the Brett Rigby Benchmark, used for the comparisons of life mentioned above.

We were probably no different to how Jack and Oliver are now, in that we, too, were very spoilt little children who had almost EVERYTHING we could dream for and more, and had no idea about the values of things… as children don’t.

Our parents worked. They bought us lots of things, and we didn’t go without.  They’re in the same boat.

But the other thing I keep reminding myself about, is that we’ve not done this whole ‘parenting’ thing before, and there’s no manual that helps.  As an IT geek, there are rules for making things work; but life ain’t that easy. And so, we’re trying to find out how to do this for ourselves. 

By and large, we’re doing ok with it – not amazingly, like people dream and envisage whilst the lady is still carrying, but ok.  We have our good days, but we’re probably outweighed with our days of late, in shouting at an angry, argumentative (spoilt) child. 

Of course, we want to do the best we can, and Claire and I are always talking about something that’s recently happened, and what we can do as parents to fix it, or make sure it doesn’t happen again, etc. We spend nights awake talking about this stuff, but sometimes I think it’s also a little of Jack/Oliver learning for themselves, too.  They’re learning the same boundaries that I did as a child; they’re learning that bad things mean good things are sent away for a bit; they’re learning who they are too, just as I did.

So, maybe boys will be boys, but we’re trying to help them learn from the mistakes we made in the past too, and sometimes, they need to make mistakes for themselves in the first place.