Lately, Nathan has been acting up. I really was not sure why. I kept asking him, but again if you have a five year old you know how that usually goes. “Why did you do that?”…”I don’t know.” I was getting to the point of being at my wits end. Nathan has always been my sweet, sensitive, relatively easy boy. He ate like a horse when he was born, he slept twelve hours a night at ten weeks old and never looked back, his teachers adore him. He is just my little sweet pea. But, all of a sudden, his teachers were telling me he was giving them a hard time. He wasn’t being very nice to his younger brother. He kept stealing his older brother’s Game Boy to play it. I had tried everything I could to get him back on the right path.

Saturday morning, daddy was at work, mommy had to get in the shower and grandma was there to hang out with them until mom was ready for the day. I found out Nathan had stolen Derek’s Game Boy again. I sent him to his room and told him he would be there all morning. When I went to talk to him about what happened I was so upset. I came down hard on him telling him the more he pushes, the more I am going to have to push back. Santa might be getting a call from me, etc.

All of a sudden, I felt my mommy instinct kick in. I relaxed, I felt my shoulders slump and I asked him in complete despair, “Nathan, what is going on? This is not like you. If you can talk to mommy, we can work through this together. If you don’t, I have to keep pushing back.” He was sitting on a chair across the room from me. He was looking down at his hands. He lifted those big, beautiful blue eyes and set them right on mine and told me what was truly happening. It was from the deepest depths of his heart and he was shaking because he did not know how I was going to react. He told me that Shawn always comes into his room and takes his things. So, I countered with the fact he has to tell me these things. He came back with a shaky voice and says, “But mommy, when I do, I get in trouble for tattle tailing.”

My heart sank. I cannot tell you how many times I have yelled at my children to not tattle tail. Shawn is contsantly getting into the other two’s things. He is three, that is what they do. But poor Nathan was getting it from both ends. He was getting in trouble for “stealing” his brother’s Game Boy, when in reality he wasn’t doing anything worse than what Shawn was doing. But, Nathan was getting in a whole bunch of trouble and Shawn wasn’t. What an injustice this poor little guy was having to watch and didn’t feel like he could do anything about. No wonder he was acting out!

We have now set up some ground rules and some work arounds. I still don’t like tattle tailing, but he knows he can come up and talk to me. Sometimes we just need to slow down and let the kids know it is okay to talk to us. And, when they talk, we need to really listen. Sometimes they don’t say exactly what they are trying to get across, we have to read between the lines.

I now have my little sweet pea back, just in time for Christmas!