One of the comments from Amber on the Success of Smacking to me to thinking about being soft spoken.
My mother was always soft-spoken, and I have always been that way as well. She never really raised her voice to us when we were little. She’s told me a couple of times that she almost wondered at the wisdom of it, given that she thought we were hyper-sensitive to arguments as a result.
Riley seems to be heading that way, even her ‘No! No! No!’ protests are soft. And I don’t think it’s just because she’s finding language now. But the downside seems to be that if she hears an aggressive tone of voice, or a raised voice, she becomes easily upset. And while I wouldn’t want her to become aclimatised to aggressive tones, I do wonder if her hyper-sensitivity to raised voices is a good plan.
I noticed the affect me raising my voice could have when I was in High School. I noticed that because I was generally soft spoken, people would often be intimidated if I raised it. But really, in High School, that was a good thing. I didn’t have many friends, and it kept the bullies at bay. But in my actual life, the one that’s not determined by forced enclosure with an arbitrary group of people, it’s not a great thing. And it’s probably not just about raising my voice. In all honesty, it’s possible that I bottle things up and when I raise my voice I kind of explode – and that’s why it’s intimidating.
I’m left with a dilemma – be soft spoken/occasionally explosive or be loud, don’t hold anything in and know that Riley will get used to it. Of course, those aren’t the only two options. They are just the easiest ones, requiring the least amount of work from me. And we all know that I enjoy a bit of lazy parenting from time to time.
Ideally, I’d like more of one of these, and a little bit less of the other:
I know, I am captain obvious.
I suppose the only real choice is that I become an actual healthy person, who is emotionally sound, doesn’t bottle things up and deals with frustration and anger in a constructive way.
Bollocks. Anything, but that!
My name is Zoey. 
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