Bad Karma

My older son has developed this annoying habit of contradicting me-not some of the time but pretty much all the time.I could say something as innocuous as,"It is sunny today!" and he would go,"Nope,its gray outside!"This,even if the sun is blazing down and the temperature is close to the annual high for that year.The younger one thankfully is not into that stage yet and can still be stared into submission,so for now, it is just one kid to tackle.
This is not a sporadic occurance-it is constant,continuous,confusing and contentious and makes me crazy.
Patience not being one of my virtues,I lash out at him and put him in his place.But after this going on for a while,I have really stopped and thought about what is going on.
I picked up this book called"Far from the Tree" by Andrew Solomon.I am still on the first chapter and came across an interesting sentence.He says that we are proud of how different we are from our parents,but cannot stomach our children being too very different from how we are.
My sister and I do tell our parents that they need to consider the fact that we are adults now and we do know more than our parents do(at least on some things!).This is usually in response to my dad saying,"Oh,you don't know what you are talking about!"We jump him and go,"Dad,we do!We are older now and have travelled more than you have,lived in more places than you have done and of course met far more varied kinds of people than you have.So yes,we do know more than you do!"
But my sister and I are in our,ahem,early,really really early forties(sob!sob!!) and we talk back at our parents.Such thoughts wouldn't have even occurred to us in our younger days,and even if they did,we would have maniacally tamped them down because talking like that to our parents is(was?) considered sacrilegious !!
But the nouveau parenting model encourages discourse where parents and children have equal parity as regards the value of one's opinion and view point and preferences.So the whole idea of insisting that they just listen to you because you know more than they do,and because you are the MOM is apparently debilitating to the child's growth and development.
So I am at the receiving end of bad karma-all those times in the past that I have contradicted my dad?Am I paying for it now?
But in my case,it seems like I am the brunt of such statements and therefore I need to worry about my self esteem issues and take care that I do not become a psychological basket case!!
In the meanwhile,taking into consideration that I happen to live in a country where raising your voice to control your kid is considered a form of child abuse,I will stick to sticking it to him every time he puts his foot in his mouth in his haste to contradict Mommie Dearest!!