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Loida Casares Ruiz

Wife, Mother, Writer, Advertising Manager

Loida Casares Ruiz grew up in Northeast Houston. She graduated from the University of Houston with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Minor in English. She received a Master of Arts in Communication in 2001. She works in advertising by day and is a mother, wife, and writer by night. She has al...

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Strong Willed Children

I just cleaned up vomit a few minutes ago.  Chinese food vomit, from a four year old little boy.  The kind of vomit that you think is never going to stop coming.  I filled a towel with it before yelling for my husband to come and help.  He came running and promptly grabbed our trash can and came to our son’s side while I rinsed out the towel.  The smell still haunts me.  I don’t do well with vomit.

Sometimes it amazes me that I’m a mother at all.  I don’t think I’m the best mother, although I try. My children are fiercely strong.  Sometimes stronger than me I fear.  I remember what it was like before I was a mother when I said that no child of mine would do this or that.  Yeah, that was before I was a mother. Now I have these two incredibly strong children with huge personalities. I didn’t count on that. I guess I hadn’t given it much thought.

How do you as a parent raise strong personality types with a strong hand without hurting their development?  I promise it is a very fine balance.

My sister told me yesterday that children with my kids’ personalities would be praised and appreciated in Europe.  She experienced this when she was in the Navy and did two tours in Sicily. The Italians loved my nephew.  When they moved back to the States when he was in fourth grade it was a culture shock for him.  Adults here treated him like he was obnoxious.  It goes back to the old adage, “Children should be seen and not heard.” Americans really believe this and children are not celebrated like they are in other countries.

If that’s the case my children should have been born in Europe.  They are not shy. They are talkative and passionate. They cry when they are frustrated and they laugh loud when they are happy. They show all the emotions that we could only wish we could show.  And I love them for it.  Yes, I do get frustrated sometimes, and I tell my daughter to talk to her therapist about it when she’s grown, but for the most part I laugh with them and at them.  We laugh a lot in my house.

I want for them to grow up strong and passionate, but I also want for them to learn boundaries and limits. I want them to learn self-control.

Brad Pitt was on Oprah a week or so ago and he was talking about his little girl Shiloh. One of the things he said was that when they ask her if she wants juice she screams, “No!” and he scrunched up his face to show us how she did it.  Then he said something really funny.  He said that she’s doing things that parents find very funny and other people find obnoxious.  That summed it up perfectly.

Of course we as parents think our children are hilarious. I know I do, except for at 11 p.m. when they are throwing up dinner in bed.

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