My Son’s Endless Silly Antics Are Making Me Extremely Grumpy

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.

Dear Care and Feeding,

I am a mom of two. I have a daughter who is 11 and, despite going through some dark early years getting therapies for her disabilities, she has flourished and is thriving. Her little brother is 6, and with him I got to experience much smoother baby and toddler years. He and his sister give me so much joy, except for something that once gave me the most joy about him—the silly, funny part of his personality—is becoming the thing that makes me extremely frustrated and most recently, angry enough to yell, which I try to never do.

My son just can’t seem to turn the silliness off. I was surprised when his teacher said he does great in school and did not mention off-task or any other negative behavior. She said he does a great job and is advanced for his age in all areas. Wonderful. I am very silly as well, and we have a blast together at home and out of the house, but there are times when I need him to tone it down. Soccer practice is a total nightmare. T-Ball was the same. I want him to have fun, but he is literally rolling around in the grass, dancing instead of running, wrestling, messing with equipment. The trainers who are paid professionals have their hands full; each one has about 20 kids to wrangle on a soccer field. I feel like he is being so disrespectful of their time and effort when he disregards their rules, which aren’t even that strict. They encourage fun, but the antics my son does are past that. He distracts the other players too. At games, he gets upset and frustrated because he never gets the ball but guess why? He isn’t playing well because he isn’t paying attention or trying at practice.

At home it’s an issue too. Dinner is not enjoyable for me, and I don’t eat most nights because I spend the entirety getting him to eat. He just won’t stop fooling around. He did this at lunch at school and wasn’t finishing his food, until I started taking privileges away at home if he didn’t do better. He got a handle on it at school. I just wish he would for that one hour of practice twice a week. That’s it! I don’t overload my kids’ schedules. I let them choose their activity. He does not have an iPad. TV is limited to rainy days and weekends. But this kid is driving me up a wall with this behavior. I have tried taking him to the park to burn off energy and get his sillies out before soccer and other stuff, but nope, he is still silly on the max level. What can I do?

—Frustrated Soccer Mom

Dear Frustrated,

As the fellow mom of a 6-year-old, I am fully aware of how annoying this can get. Trying to get a child who has decided to act like a dancing cat from outer space—and never, ever break character!—through toothbrushing and into bed is an endeavor I find myself unequal to on the best of days.

But I’ve noticed something, which is that she gets this way when, as a younger child, she would have been having a tantrum or a meltdown. It happens when she’s tired, when the day has tested her, when she is simply done with being responsible. Her behavior slips out of bounds, and it stays there until she has a reset: going outside, being allowed to just open-endedly mess around with Calico Critters, listening to an audiobook, sleeping. Like your son, she is fine at school; great, even. It’s just that this year, the year that her school has really ramped it up with the rules and the charts and the “sit in your place,” she gets after-school restraint collapse like nobody’s business—and she gets it on the weekends, too.

I know a lot of parents of kids this age have them in organized after-school or weekend activities, and I see that you are familiar with the (very good, from my perspective) argument that too many activities equals stress for families. I think it may be the case that even though it’s “only one” activity, your kid just can’t do soccer right now. He may have “chosen” it, but he’s only 6; he’s telling you with his sillies that he’s not capable. It doesn’t matter what the other kids are doing or what he’s able to do at school—he can’t do it! That’s no judgement on him, or on your family. You’ll both be happier if he can have that time to do absolutely nothing. Maybe you’ll even be able to eat dinner in semi-peace. Soccer will still be there when the sillies eventually subside.

Submit your questions to Care and Feeding here. It’s anonymous! (Questions may be edited for publication.)

Dear Care and Feeding,

My 3-year-old son has been a great sleeper since we did sleep training using a modified Ferber method at 6 months old. By 1-year he was sleeping through the night and has been pretty consistently—only waking with a call for me (his mom) maybe once every six months in the middle of the night. But in the last few weeks he has been waking up and calling for me in the middle of the night every night.  I then go in, tuck him in, and say good night again. It is a brief reassurance for him, but I am worried that this encourages him to keep calling for me, and he’ll have trouble getting himself back to sleep without me. I do tend to wait a few minutes before going in and sometimes he will go back to sleep on his own.

Last night at 3 a.m. he called for me, then demanded I find two small toys he had been playing with earlier that day. He was pretty much inconsolable until I finally found the two toys (after searching the car, living room, kitchen). Once I found these he went right back to sleep. Only to call me back in for another tuck in at 4:30 a.m. I feel like I should have said no to hunting down the toys. He sleeps with two stuffed animals who he loves and are tucked in with him, so he is not lacking for the security lovey. But he was so upset—I would have felt terrible walking away at that point and letting him cry alone.

What is the best thing to do in the future? Also this seems like one aspect of my larger parenting struggle: when to put my foot down and when to accommodate.

—Finding the Balance

Dear Balance,

Ah, the joys of toddler re-sleep-training! I swear, if I had known that you have to keep going with this stuff as they get bigger and more passionate and more like people, I’d … no, I’d still have sleep-trained my baby, but just so you know, you have my deepest sympathies.

How hardline you want to be about this depends on how much the middle-of-the-night calls are disturbing your life. If you decide you can’t be doing this, I wouldn’t blame you, and you should indeed probably not be popping up and down at night to be with him. In compensation, you could consider making a few transitions toward allowing him to control more of the environment in his room, like letting him keep more toys and activities in there, or getting him a fun nightlight to sleep with, or even just allowing him keep a lamp on if he wants. (Some may find this horrifying! As a former “afraid of the dark” kid, I’m permissive in this department.) But if, on the other hand, it bothers you too much to imagine him crying, then you may have to keep on doing what you’re doing.

About the toy hunt: Around this age we began to do a pre-bedtime “last call” for gathering toys from around the house. We also started a family tradition of not going out to the car at a child’s behest, after we come in from the outside world for the night—a rule you may benefit from instituting. That way, if you do end up responding to middle-of-the-night calls, you can at least hold the line at searching hither and yon for that specific plastic spider trinket ring—no, not the purple one! The glow-in the-dark one! It only took a couple denied requests before our child got the picture on this. I hope it works for you, too.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

I just moved into a duplex, and I am already regretting it. My next-door neighbor is the neighbor from hell. She is a single mom with four kids that, apparently, she wants nothing to do with raising. The kids are outside screaming until 10 p.m.-, even on school nights. Otherwise they are inside screaming and blasting video games and mom is screaming at them. I had to move to the smaller bedroom in my unit just not to be woken up by the noise through the shared wall. I left a few notes asking them to keep the volume down and was ignored.

My side has the carport and paved driveway while hers has gravel. Well, her younger kids went out and made chalk art on the day I decided to wash my car. Naturally, the water went down the driveway and washed a lot of the chalk drawings away. This apparently pissed off my neighbor because she came out like a bat out of hell and pounded on door so hard I was afraid she would leave a dent. She was ranting and raving about what an a-hole I was and how upset her kids were. I told her to get the hell away from my door or I was calling the cops. I already have cameras set up in my carport and front and back door just in case. I can’t afford another move and have another 10 months on my lease. What the hell do I do in the meantime?

—Ten More Months

Dear Ten More,

I’m sorry. You have lost the shared-wall lottery. I would try to reframe your thoughts, to push back on the idea that this mom “wants nothing to do” with parenting, to point out that she seems like she is horribly overwhelmed, to suggest that when she came over to yell at you about the chalk drawings, that was probably a time she felt like she could actually do something for her kids, and the rage she directed toward you was likely a mixed-up manifestation of her general feeling of helplessness…

But none of that is really going to help you! I know this because I once lived across a row house wall from a sleep-training baby, and though I believe in the general concept of children being allowed to exist in the world and therefore living in families that need affordable housing and to create sleep schedules for those children, that certainly didn’t help much at 2 a.m.

You mention having a lease. That means you have a landlord, or a property management company. Have you tried yet to get them to intervene? Check in the lease for language covering your right to quiet on the property that you could invoke. In the meantime, do everything you can in your house to dampen noise. (Rugs, heavy curtains or wall hangings, sound machines, ear plugs.) Keep to yourself, document times and dates of negative interactions, and channel your frustration into saving up to leave when your lease is up.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My 13-year-old son attends a progressive independent school in the suburbs of a major city. It has recently come to my attention from other mothers that my kid is being left out (plans are made that he is not included in; apparently, he has been the target of unkindness from the group). The weird thing is, my kid isn’t complaining at all! I’m not sure if he doesn’t feel it or isn’t aware of it or is just choosing to not discuss it with me. How concerned should I be? This came to my attention through two mothers, one called me to disclose that her child and others were being nasty to mine in front of her and one who called me to tell me that her kid and mine were not included in Halloween plans. To my eyes my kid is a conventional kid, decent at sports, reasonably main stream and has never struggled socially.

—Sad and Mad

Dear Mad,

I sense you are not a mom who wants to be this involved in your kid’s social life, and I think that’s a good thing. Just because these moms are doing it, either out of some weird impulse to stir up drama (the first person, whose kid was doing the excluding), or out of their own vicarious sadness for their children (the second, whose kid was co-excluded), doesn’t mean you have to! Be present and attentive around your child, as it sounds like you already are. Wait until his behavior, or words, or some other sign shows you that something is wrong—and keep in mind that nothing, from his perspective, may be! Then go from there.

—Rebecca

Today, I was included in a group text with my in-laws’ family. The thread showed my teenaged niece’s email, which contains a racial slur. My niece is white. Apparently the word was an affectionate pet name for her when she was an infant that she’s grown up with in the house. My in-laws are from a different country, where there are not many people of this ethnicity, but here in the U.S. it is an exclusively pejorative term, with no other uses.