No matter what anyone tells you, parenting is all about trial-and-error. You can read all the books you want, ask doctors and friends all the questions you want, and even have past experience with children, but, when all is said and done, nothing is ever surefire when kids are involved. We're all just making it up as we go. Winging it. Improvising. Flying by the seat of our pants. Anyone who says differently is either lying or in denial.
Well, maybe not completely. We all start out with ideals: things we want and things we don't want for our children. Some of us *ahem* maybe created a wonderful utopia in our heads in which we envision our extremely well-behaved pre-school children sitting quietly at their miniature table, perhaps wearing a button-down shirt with a sweater vest and some penny loafers, writing profound works of literature or scribbling away at an extremely important, as-yet unsolved math theorem, or, dare I say, composing a breathtaking opera for their mommy to sing.....? In reality, however--and I do mean this quite literally, since I'm actually watching one of my offspring do this very thing--they are sitting at this exact same miniature table, having just appeared from a seemingly clandestine meal of dried play-doh from underneath said table, attempting to draw on themselves with three different highlighters simultaneously. The fact is, you cannot control how your child acts or reacts to any situation, nor can you determine their personality beforehand. They will simply be who they are, and the only thing you can do is gently direct them in a preferred direction, not dissimilar from navigating a small rowboat in a wild, untamed river with a single paddle as your only tool.
One thing you do have control of, however, is how YOU react to the challenges you face daily as a parent. You draw from your own childhood experiences as well as from friends and family around you. One rule I have devised as a result is that I try never to lie to my children. Sometimes it may seem easier to tell a little white lie to your child to avoid a sticky situation (and I am not denying the fact that sometimes this may be necessary) but my experience with a rather unfortunate childhood haircut has lead me to try to be as truthful as I can with my boys.
This applies to difficult subjects as well. One such subject has arisen a few times with the death of fish from our aquarium. One day, when Jakub was about three years old, noticed that one of our fish had, um, shall we say, "passed its expiration date," and said, "Look mommy, the fish is sleeping on its back." In my blundering naivete, I thought I would make this a learning opportunity about the cycle of life and death and proceeded to tell him that it wasn't sleeping, but, in fact, dead. I explained that it wasn't going to get any better, and that we need to remove it from the aquarium. We made a big ceremony about taking it into the bathroom and flushing down the toilet, waving bye-bye, saying a few good words about the fish, and all the rest. Jakub didn't seem to care one way or another about the experience, which was a shame because I had all sorts of insightful answers for any questions he might have about the subject, so I thought nothing more about it.
Soon, however, I noticed he was having potty accidents, and would only use his stand-alone potty, which I hated because what goes in must come out, and I'm a little freaky about germs. When I asked him why, he said it was because he was afraid of the fish. For about a week I became increasingly more exasperated until I finally made the connection to the dead fish we flushed the previous week. Thankfully, he was perfectly happy to use the toilet again, once I explained that when you flush the toilet, whatever is in there goes away forever (an important lesson, since it applies not only to things that normally go in the toilet as well as dead fish, but also to various things you might not want to flush down the toilet, such as, say, various cosmetics, for example). However, it is quite obvious that my wonderfully devised teaching moment, as well as the poignant ceremony, was unequivocally a bust.
No comments:
Post a Comment