Should you discipline other people’s kids???

The other day my mom visited me and brought along my nephew, age 4. Since my son is 3 we thought it would be great for them to visit, play and start building a relationship with each other. I have a cousin who is my best friend and has been all my life, so I would love to give that to my son. The visit went well with the boys, they were calling each other best friends and had a blast.

I on the other hand had a harder time...

Now keep in mind a few things, my sister and I had a hard time growing up. Our childhood was less then constructive with a verbally and sometimes physically abusive step father. So we are uber sensitive to discipline. With my son I use timeouts. I don’t use them as punishment but as a true “time out” to gather, reset, and sometimes calm down. Spankings are reserved for serious items that need some immediate reinforcement, things like running out into the street.

My nephew is a well behaved child, knows the rules and is mild mannered. This was his first trip away from Mom and visiting us in Denver. So he had some stressors, add the Halloween candy and over stimulation and now we have a time bomb. He got wound up and started yelling at my mom, she tried to deal with it but he was telling her “it is all your fault” and crying uncontrollably.

Time for my conundrum, do I interfere or do I let it go? Well I interfered, assuming (wrongly) that my sister would use the same techniques I used on my son. I thought to myself, he needs to reset and regroup, so I put him in timeout. WOW was that not the right thing to do. He exploded.

I am talking about this not to admonish my sister and her discipline strategies but to show what happens when we assume. It was wrong of me to assume that what I do with my son would work for my nephew, because we don’t have that history or relationship.

Disciplining other people’s kids is a slippery slope that I prefer to stay off of, but what do you do when you have kids at your house and something comes up? How do you deal with it?