Sometime you just have to laugh: How to deal with a mouthy kid
Laughter really is the best medicine for just about everything. I’m the mother of a very mouthy little eight year old. He truly has no respect of person when it comes to voicing his thoughts. He voices his opinion about anything to anyone. Teacher, preacher, grandma, step-dad, and yes, even to me. Sometimes some of the things he says, I just want to snatch him up, take him home and send him to his room to never come out until its time for him to go to college.
When I had my last child, I was at home in bed, trying to get some rest, when my mom, very upset, came in my room. Waking me out of my sleep, she told me “Just for your information, if it gets back to you, Johnnie told me that I wasn’t a Christian because I tattle-tell too much, and I told him if that was the case then a lot of people aren’t Christians.” As soon as my mom walks out my room I hear Johnnie in the background “ See grandma, you still tattle-telling.” That turned into a short visit from my mom. Just when I was getting a little break from the kids. Johnnie always seem to run my mom away. A couple siblings in my family have told me on the hush-hush that momma said the Johnnie had the devil in him and she always has to pray before and after she leaves my house.
He told me one day when I was still pregnant , “Mommy what’s going to happen to you when you have the baby?” I was so touched by him showing concern about me. I asked him “ why, are you worried about me having the baby?” He said “No I’m worried about you getting back to your normal weight.”
He also asked a lady at my church “Are you pregnant, or are you just fat?” Thank heaven she was pregnant.
One night , at my daughter’s rehearsal , a friend of mine knowing how honestly he gave out his opinion, asked him what he thought about different people at our church. I could have sunk through the floor. He went down the line naming every imperfection he could find in each one. She asked him why he didn’t want her daughter to be his girlfriend and he went down the line of all three of them. He looked at one and said “ your nose is too big, your eyes,” and to then he told the oldest one and said “ you’re a little too fat.”
Then he started on the youth leader, saying she was “ too loud, she yells too much, and is that a baby in her stomach or is she just fat?” People were falling out laughing, I wanted to fall through the floor.
People have told me he’s going to get beat up when he gets older. I’ve rescued him a couple of times on the church ground while he was getting hemmed up by a group of teenagers because he just goes up to them and tell them “ you know you all are really so stupid” and “you really need a hair cut.” I mean kids twice his height. He kind of got banned from the girls rehearsal because he goes up to the girls practicing and tell them “ you all need to gain some weight” and as I tried to drag him out he still screams “They do, look at them, all skinny around the middle.”
He has stood right in front of our pastor and said “ Ha, I’m not giving my money to the church” and have questioned their authority and asked “did God tell you that we had to fast?” I’ve prayed for, fasted, punished, and just pulled my hair out about what to do with him. And one day when I was very stressed already by a day of him misbehaving, he came to my room and said “ Mom, pretend you are my girlfriend(He never liked telling me anything directly in fear of getting punished). Just pretend. Okay. I don’t love you anymore, this relationship is over, I am tearing up our contract.” I couldn’t do anything but laugh. And after I finished laughing I realized that I wasn’t stressed anymore.
So sometimes, when you have a unruly kid, it’s okay to laugh. But you can still pray that he out grows it.
