Reflecting today on an intense lsd trip from last night. It was long, and rough, but I took some good things away from it.

It started at about 730. I had taken 3 tabs. The wife and I tucked in our kids and then I popped them. She was standing guard for the night, while I was mostly just doing this to stay up all night as I’m switching to 3rd shift in a few days. So I was trying to get my sleep schedule adjusted. Well about 45 minutes into it, as the come up is getting intense, my 5 year old got up. He decided that he didn’t want to be in bed, he wanted to watch cartoons, a snack, basically anything to be up. He was very grumpy, so my wife’s attempts to get him back in bed only pissed him off more, to the point of a full blown 5 year old tantrum. This caused an immense amount of anxiety in me. I could feel HIS anxiety. I had to go outside for 20 minutes while my wife tended to my son to try and work myself down. (I thought a lot about frans post about breathing and being still to push through this anxiety, thanks Fran). After I felt a little better, I went back in. My son was back in bed and quiet, but it’s like the anxiety was stuck to the walls. As soon as I got back in I was submerged in anxiety again. I just wanted this to level out. I grabbed some pastels and drew for a while. This worked wonders. After an hour or so of drawing I felt much more leveled out.
Later, I’m still not sure what triggered it, but some underlying issues between my wife and I came up which caused her to storm off to bed. This cranked the level on the anxiety back up, and left me several hours to ponder the situation. Without going into to much, I realized one of our big issues is enabling. I enable my son to act out the way he did to often, by catering to the tantrum. I’ve enabled my wife to not see our relationship as an equal partnership by catering to her “tantrums”. Not sticking by what I feel and compromising my emotions. But I left the trip with a solid desire to change this behavior in me.
This was the longest, most uncomfortable trip I’ve had. It was riddled with an anxious yucky feeling through my whole body that seemed deafening. But I’m hear today, and I have some new perspective. Whew! That felt good just writing it out.

That sounds like a terrible trip. I don't think you had your set and setting anywhere near up to par in this instance.

Parenting is tough. It took me some time to realize I do much better parenting as a parent than a friend. There is a time and place for friendship with your kids. I wish it could be that way all the time but it cannot. To have discipline you must be taken seriously and sometimes that requires being seen as a bad guy from your kids. They will get over it and over the long haul you all will be better off for it. Spoiled kids suck! They do.. flat out! It helps if both parents are on board, otherwise one parent looks like an asshole and the other get a free pass to be the fun parent.

A lot of tantrums and crap like that can be solved by simply ignoring the behavior. I have also resorted to throwing a fake tantrum of my own which usually ended up with everyone laughing. Sometimes they just want some attention, be it negative or positive.

Overall I would say that tripping with kids sucks donkey balls so best to avoid that at all cost and wait til the little hellions are off at grandmas or something.

Yep, I definitely regretted not waiting another hour or 2. But My patience today for the negative attention thing has been infinitely better. I had a lot of insight last night on the same thing you said. My daughter who is 3 1/2 years older than my son, was a whole different creature. She never had these kind of behaviors, and she seems to strive to be happy. So we had a lot of time to form that “friend” relationship with her that trickled into our parenting with our son. And he has taken that and run with it. But this is coming to a stop. Thanks for the reinforcing and encouraging words alienRx.