Kids These Days

I have thusfar found blogging to be more therapeutic then I first assumed. It has an almost cathartic satisfaction in jotting something down, and then being done with it. The only trouble so far is trying to decide what it is I wish to write about because I still have yet to decide which direction I'm going to take this.

However that being said, for today I think I'll focus on current events. My daughter is going to be the end of me. I realize that now she is in school and spends hours being influenced by other five year olds, she has taken on the assumption that I am an idiot. This is a child who has been carefully taught the rules and values of our household, and has overall exceeded my expectations in terms of behaving accordingly. Now it seems that all of a sudden she has concluded her friends in all of five years of existence, have infinitely more wisdom than I, her mother in all of.....however many years I have been around.

She has since picked up some very negative habits and behaviours. For example, some of her friends have trouble remembering to wash their hands after using the restroom. Which has rubbed off on my daughter and I am now left to clothesline her in the hallway before she can touch anything. Some have issues with nervous behaviour such as consistantly having their hands in their mouths. Mine now models that same behaviour which is driving me to madness, but Freud would be thrilled. One of the major issues she has picked up though is having an affect on her speech. She has always spoken beautifully as she is advanced in terms of her language skills. However she is now regressed to mimicking their one word speech patterns. Wonderful. I'd tell her she sounds retarded but even Rainman articulated well by comparison. What I cannot handle is the lack of patience, as in demanding for immediate gratification. More than that are the smarty-pants comments when addressing me. She would have never dared do something that life-threatening before we moved here. Now because she sees them do it with little or no consequence she tries to bring it home, where she gets blasted for it. But still it continues to be a problem.

I am hopeful that this is just going to be a phase she goes through. I certainly do not want to have to resort to altering her relationships when she has had difficulty making the adjustment to moving here. She values her new friendships and I know that I will not be able to keep her from being influenced by outside sources to some degree. But surely I imagined she'd have more of a backbone with regards to not allowing others to affect her so drastically. I also don't want to continually be getting into altercations with her over correcting one thing after another, after another. Something has to happen soon though because either she's lost her mind, or I'm about to lose mine.