Читать книгу The Complete Parenting Collection - Steve Biddulph, Steve Biddulph - Страница 70

If you’ve ever wrestled with a little boy, say a three- or four-year-old, it always starts out happily enough. But often, after a minute or two, he ‘loses it’. He gets angry. His little jaw starts to jut out! He knits his eyebrows together and (if you haven’t spotted the warning signs yet) starts to get serious and hit out with knees and elbows. Ouch!

A dad who knows what he’s doing stops the action right there. ‘Hoooooold it! Stop!’ Then a little lecture takes place – not yelling, just calmly explaining. ‘Your body is precious [pointing at boy], and my body is precious too. We can’t play this game if somebody might get hurt. So we need a few rules – like, no elbowing and no kneeing or punching! Do you understand? Can you handle it?’ (Here’s a tip: always say ‘Can you handle it?’ rather than ‘Will you keep to the rules?’, which sounds kind of wimpish. No boy is going to say ‘No’ to a question like ‘Can you handle it?’.)

Then you re-commence. The boy is learning a most important life skill – self-control. He’s learning that he can be strong and excited, but can also choose where and when to back off. For males, this is very important. In adult life, a man will usually be stronger than his wife or partner. He must know how to not ‘lose it’, especially when he is angry, tired and frustrated.

For a marriage to survive, it is sometimes necessary for partners to stand nose to nose, while saying some really honest stuff. This is called ‘truth time’ – the time when disputes that have been building up get aired and cleared up. (We wrote a book about this called The Making of Love.)

A woman can’t have this kind of honest and intense discussion with a man unless she feels absolutely safe with him. She needs to know she will never be hit, and he needs to know in himself that he won’t hit. (In some marriages, it’s the woman who is the violent one, the woman who needs to make this commitment.)

A real man is one who is in charge of himself and his behaviour. A real man can be furiously angry, and yet you feel utterly safe standing right next to him. That’s a tough call. But it begins in this small way, play-wrestling on the back lawn.

Dads can do this, uncles, friends, even mums (though mums don’t enjoy it quite as much).