Let’s start with the bright side, shall we?
It’s the New Yorker.
And it’s the only thing on the floor.
It is even possible that the object of my son’s attention was the article and not the cartoon. What?!!? I didn’t say it was “likely.”
And even if it was the cartoon, it’s still a step up from reading the same Calvin & Hobbes for the three hundred and twenty-sixth time. Am I right?
Now for the, uh, less bright, side.
It is, yes, on the floor.
I picked it up and threw it away.
I do hope he wasn’t in the middle of that article.
About Day 4:
cce wrote:
And always, I turn to him and say, "Then what's your excuse?"
I just love this story. First, because it is makes me laugh every time I read it and second, because it's actually very important. To wit: how do you figure out what your child is ready to take on in the way of responsibilities? And if we always give them the benefit of the "Aw, they're just kids" argument, when exactly are they going to show up and act like the adults we want them to eventually be?
We all want to be Goldilocks and get it just right, but if I had it all to do over again, I think I would err on the side of expecting too much of my children rather than expecting too little. Maybe I say this because the grass is always greener on the other side and in my case the other side would have been expecting my children to chew with their mouths closed, clean up after themselves and be considerate well before, well, now.
I think, particularly with my Oldest, my anxiety about mothering the first time around - coupled with a personal history of having felt shoved out of the nest at a very early age - led me to be too tentative in this regard . I was always waiting for him to make the move, take the chance, say “Yes!” (We were also kinda traumatized by an ill-fated foray into AYSO soccer in Kindergarten. We forced him to finish the season even though he LOATHED it. Big. Mistake. Deserves its own post, that one.)
Anyway, I rationalized my own reluctance to push him with a pretty solid argument. I told myself that I wanted his developmental steps to come from him, to be internally motivated and not an effort to please me or anyone else. I still believe this and if I had to pick a baseline to work from, I’d take this over its opposite. I have seen waaaay too many parents who push their children hard, not in the service of the child, but because the parent is narcissistically gratified by having a child who behaves a certain way at the table, gets a certain grade in a class, scores a certain number of goals in soccer. Bleh.
But the problem with my approach, and what I didn’t see until I had spent an embarrassingly long time being a parent, is that a huge part of the job is simply believing in your child - in his capabilities, her possibilities, his fundamental all-rightness, her capacity for growth - both in the present moment and in the far-off imagined day of adulthood. I now think that if at every step of the way we believe in our children’s inherent capabilities, they will show us what they are capable of.
Obviously, if you ask too much of a child, you are setting her up for failure. But asking too little is just the flip side of that same mistake. The real parenting challenge is believing in their capabilities just a shade more than they do. When you do that, sometimes they surprise you, and even better, sometimes they surprise themselves.
Also in regards to Day 4, magpie wondered:
It’s definitely not a standoff - thus far they are not paying enough attention to make it a standoff. And when you are as removed from the process as I have been, there is very little personal charge to the whole endeavor. I am being patient in this experiment (that in itself is an experiment, but that’s another story), because I don’t actually want them to pick up their sh*t in a communal room because they are paying attention to me, but because it is the right thing to do.
Thoughts, gentle readers?
