How to Avoid the Matilda Effect

It's hard raising a human. That's as best as I can put it. While I am fortunate to be co-parenting with my husband, the times when Zay and I are alone can be very overwhelming...Zay is a newly 2 year-old who is in full-blown "ME" mode. Everything is "HIS," and if that's not enough, his answer for everything is "NO."

Working a full-time job is a blessing, but after a long day, coming home to parent is a struggle. I've been around kids for eight hours or more, giving them my best self that most days, by the time I get to Zay my patience and energy are depleted. He deserves my patience and energy at their best, but I fall short in offering it to him.

What I am working on with Zay is communicating better with him, and learning to respect his choices. In essence, I am learning how to avoid the Matilda Effect.

The Matilda effect is a bias against acknowledging the achievements of those women scientists whose work is attributed to their male colleagues. This effect was first described by suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and the phrase was coined by science historian, Margaret W. Rossiter in the 90s, per Wikipedia.

While the aforementioned Matilda Effect is related to science, my Matilda Effect comes directly from the movie, Matilda based on Roald Dahl's book of the same title, and deals more with how parents can have biases towards their children. 

In the movie there's a scene with Matilda and her father played by Danny DeVito. Matilda learns that her father is a crook who is selling people bad cars. Never one to back down from confrontation, she calls him out on his poor business practices. Unnerved, he wastes no time chomping his bold daughter back down to size. In his rant, he tells her:

"Listen you little wiseacre,
I'm smart, you're dumb.
I'm big, you're little.
I'm right, you're wrong,
And there's nothing you can do about it!'

It got me thinking...how am I speaking to Zay? Am I putting him down when I believe him to be wrong? Will I be the parent who uses ego and intimidation tactics to manipulate him into following the rules? Or will I come to respect his choices, and discipline him peacefully, and as needed?

What I have come to learn is that disciplining Zay works best when I try to make it a teachable moment. A teachable moment requires that I put my pride, frustrations, and emotions aside to try and teach him why hitting is not okay or why it's important to clean up. My goal is not to bully him into doing these things. Though he is a child, he's still a person, who will lordwilling grow up to have his own family someday.

I don't want to destroy his self-esteem for the sake of being bigger, smarter, or right. I want his feelings to be validated while also establishing healthy and safe boundaries that are not fear based. 

"Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity." (1 Timothy 4:12)

This verse starts with us as parents. We are the example to our children. What example are we setting?