Parenthood! The most difficult task in the world!

Not all my post have to be by crypto, sports or faucet related. Or do they!

Let's talk about parenthood today. Being a parent is a great thing. In general your kids do bring you love, joy and stuff like that. You do love them unconditionally. But sometimes it does feel like they are just kicking you in the head. Not once, twice but sometimes constantly.

My kids

First things first. As you could have assumed the cats aren't our kids. Just our cats.
We do have 2 sons. One is 12, turning 13 in August, the other is 9.
The oldest one thinks that he is already 16 and the youngest does have the impression that everything what his older brother can/may do is also valid for him. (Spoiler alert: he is wrong).

The youngest one got sick on Sunday and while we were hoping that he would be able to return back to school today, we were wrong. The fever is mostly gone, but he is still coughing a lot. We did a Covid self test which was negative, phew, and did consult a doctor. He thinks that he has some kind of viral infection. So basically a cold. But he also does suffer from hey fever. And this time of the year it is the worst.
His sleeping isn't what it supposed to be, so in the middle of the night he sneaks into our bed. So you can imagine that our sleep is heavily disrupted!
This alone does give a parent enough stress.

The oldest one is close to his final exams in the first year of high school. He decided to follow a challenging direction. STEM. When we were kids, many many moons ago, STEM didn't even exist. The top brainers would do Classic Languages (Latin and Greek), the other just the regular direction. After 3 years we could specialize a bit. For me it was math, while my wife just stayed on the Latin track. I do have to admit that the math he is getting, is very theoretical already. It took me some time to get into this again.

It appears that puberty does start earlier each generation. And well I do hope that he is in the middle of it and not only at the start, because this is already tough enough!

While he should be an A-grade student, he did slip into a B-grade student. This has nothing to do with his intellect but with everything else.
The kids these days do have an attention span, which is shorter than a gold fish. Besides football they do think that social media, playing games (no not the board games we used to play) does rule the world. So he just isn't interested in studying.
We do try everything to motivate him, but we also do have a limit. His math grades did drop to C-level during his last tests. So 2 weeks ago, I asked him to prepare his exams of next week. Of course not a lot has been done.
So I decided to spend 4 days in a row 1 hour with him looking into his math problems. I didn't had that luxury back in my days.
So while I am thinking that I was trying to help and support him. The only thing I got in return are growls. The first day was pretty okay, but yesterday he didn't even know anything about the topic we were discussing.
This did break me more or less. The stress level was already high enough with the youngest one, add to that the lack of sleep and you can understand that this was the drop which to make the bucket to overflow!

Pffff. This morning again it was no sound at all. Getting used to that!

covid

We don't expect much from our kids. The only thing we do ask is that they take their school serious. It is more or less their job. Both are clever enough so they should get the grades they do deserve.

Also we do understand that Covid also had a major impact on their lives. We always being at home. Sometimes we also choice the wrong option due to working from home and let then game during the lockdown and stuff like that.

The oldest one is getting an age where he has to discover the world with his friends.

We do try to be open minded and are willing to discuss everything with them. But we are still the parents.

The wife and I did decided to let him run into the wall. He knows what grades we do expect and does know the consequences. He does think that we aren't ready to take all digital equipment away from him during the summer vacation, which does lasts 9 weeks here in Belgium.

Well there are 2 possible outcomes. 1 he will surprise us, 2 we will surprise him!

Feeling a little bit better after writing this down!

Cheers,
Peter